Movie Review: Elysium (2013)

This review contains what would ordinarily be called “spoilers,” but Elysium is so awful that I find it difficult to say that it could be spoiled. At any rate, I highly recommend that you avoid this movie anyway.

Nothing in Elysium  makes any sense whatsoever. I am not exaggerating when I say that it seems like a twelve-year-old wrote it. Though the sci-fi and fantasy genres often require some charity from the audience in terms of suspending disbelief, Elysium goes too far and becomes cartoonish. It is set a hundred or so years in the future, where Earth is a terrible place to live and the wealthy live in a space colony called Elysium, where “med-bays,” which automatically heal all infirmities of Elysiumites, are main furniture fixtures in every home. Let's break down what makes this movie so terrible.

Medical Implausibility

The characters in this movie recover from injuries in a way that is truly video game-like, where one only need to not sustain damage for a bit in order to heal back to perfect health, or it just completely disregards injuries later in the movie.

Near the beginning of the story, Matt Damon takes a large dose of radiation and is told that he will live for five more days. He staggers his way home, only barely making it with the help of a friend. However, after putting on an exo-suit that increases his strength, he is not healthy enough to fight robots and multiple heavily-trained commandos, even though we are given no reason to believe that Matt Damon has the martial ability to do such a thing. Furthermore, after being stabbed in the belly with a knife, an injury which likely cut his intestines and bowels, he is healed by a gauze pad and a nap and the wound is never referenced in the film afterward. This makes the film cartoonish and difficult to take seriously.

The Flat, Two-Dimensional Characters

In my review of Atlas Shrugged: Part One, I mentioned that one of the greatest of its shortcomings was the black-and-white portrayal of its characters: the protagonists are nearly perfectly virtuous and the bad guys have no redeeming personality traits. Elysium suffers from the same problem.

At Matt Damon's factory job, a door gets stuck because of a shifted pallet and the foreman tells Matt Damon to get in there and fix it or he'll lose his job. This is when Matt Damon gets hit with radiation. To add insult to injury, as Matt Damon is being treated by robots, the CEO of the company expresses his desire to get Matt Damon out of there so he won't have to go through the expense of replacing the sheets on the treatment table.

Even if we accept the idea that the foreman and CEO can lack compassion to a hyper-sociopathic level, this behavior isn't consistent with the movie's own internal logic; if all they cared about were productivity and making money, forcing workers to do unnecessarily unsafe things (seriously, all they had to do was find something to prop the door open to make sure it didn't close or even could have moved the pallet with a stick) is not in their own interests. Even if the possibility that Matt Damon could file a major lawsuit against this company (since this is a dystopian story) is taken away, the factory was closed for the day because of the accident. It is as if the foreman is too stupid to know that increasing the likelihood of an accident will decrease productivity or is so sadistic that he doesn't even care.  Either option makes the foreman seem cartoonish and makes for bad story-telling.

Elysium also presents the cliché narrative of the evil rich keeping the virtuous poor down and is extremely lazy in doing so. It appears that the audience is expected to simply accept the idea that the rich citizens of Elysium (who are really never shown in the film except for a backyard barbecue) somehow are wealthy (presumably at the expense of the poor, though how this is the case is never shown nor explained) and are, at best, absolutely indifferent to the plight of the poor citizens of Earth (and, yet again, this conflicts with the internal logic of the story, for reasons I will explain later).

It's almost comedic how the irony of this narrative seems to be completely lost on the creators of Elysium. Matt Damon is one of the most highly paid actors in the world and is probably acquainted with many wealthy people. Are all, or even most, of them evil people who care nothing about others? I also imagine great caution was taken to ensure the safety of the cast and crew during filming, even ones portraying workplace accidents. Did no one pause to think how the story they were telling directly contradicted their own personal experiences?

Major Plot Elements are Either Left Unexplained or Don't Make Sense

The most major plot element that makes no sense is the motivations of the citizens of Elysium. The only desire that the film explicitly shows them as having is to keep Earth citizens out of Elysium. But what's curious is that the “illegals” who try to make it to Elysium are not trying to immigrate; they just want to use those med-bays that completely heal people, as these devices are apparently unavailable on Earth. Thus, it would seem that the only thing required to keep the Earth people from making the trip to Elysium is to send some med-bays to Earth.

Indeed, it doesn't even have to be a donation; the rich people could make profits off of these medical devices by charging only small fees to use them as they appear essentially costless to use. So, once again, the characterization of the rich people on Elysium is cartoonish and incoherent. Since they don't use their med-bays to heal Earth people, even though they would gain by taking away the incentive to trespass in their houses to use med-bays and would make make profits, we can only conclude that they hate the Earth people so much that they make themselves worse off just so they can make things worse for Earth citizens.

Another unanswered question is why the Earth residents are poor and those of Elysium are rich. It's strange that a society with robots that have the sophistication of being able to diagnose and treat illness, perform policing and parole functions, and be personal servants would not also have previously unattained levels of material abundance. Inexplicably, the only legitimate occupation for humans shown in the movie is...manufacturing robots. [Colin Farrell's job in the remake of Total Recall was also assembling robots. Does nobody see the laughable and blatantly obvious misallocation of human capital when they clearly could just have robots make other robots?] Transportation is also quite advanced, as trips to Elysium can be made in less than 20 minutes (thus even further cementing the case that a small number of med-bays on Earth would incentivize medical tourists to stay away from Elysium). With such technological adcances, it's hard to imagine how such widespread poverty would exist.

Also unclear is the system of governance, which seems to be controlled by a central computer program. Elysium's Secretary of Homeland Security, Jodie Foster, and the CEO of the robot company hatch a plan to perform a coup, making Jodie the president and giving her the ability to extend a very long contract with the CEO's company. The program for the coup is placed in the CEO's brain, but is stolen and put into Matt Damon's noggin, which then allows Matt Damon and friends to make all Earthlings citizens of Elysium and send med-bays to Earth (resulting in a poorly thought-out scene, where ships of robots and med-bays land in impoverished areas with children excitedly awaiting. Did those kids read the script? How could they possibly know that ships were coming to heal them?). It seems incredibly short-sighted and frankly stupid of the government to allow its whole apparatus of power to be vulnerable to highjacking with a single program. But if the government is controlled by computer programs, what's the purpose of having a president?

The Idiotic Social Commentary

I've already covered some of the silliness of the class-conflict narrative in Elysium, but there are other social issues that I perceive it to attempt to comment upon: immigration, the provision of medical care, and wealth redistribution. Of these, immigration is its strongest point – as far as having relation to reality -  as what it presents does have some remote relevance to the real world. That is, for example, there are some life-threatening diseases in the developing world that are either non-existent or mere inconveniences in the industrialized world, such as malaria or diarrhea. If individuals were free to move about the world, productivity and human well-being would undoubtedly increase (some economists estimate that open borders would lead the gross world product to double).

However, the package deal themes of medical care and wealth redistribution in the movie have no relevance to reality. In the world of Elysium, medical care is nearly a non-scarce good, only limited by the number of med-bays that can be used at one time. Once one uses it, she is completely healed, and the next person may use it without any resource but time being expended. These med-bays seem to be available in every home on Elysium (strangely residing right by sliding glass doors of homes, as if they are used quite often or are there to be used as displays of wealth, even though everyone seems to have one), but apparently there are none on Earth. As mentioned before, one can only conclude that the wealthy in Elysium are so absolutely heartless that there is not a single philanthropist among them willing to give away or rent out an essentially non-scarce resource, even if it would benefit themselves. The narrative tells us that the only way the poor can access this resource is to take control of the state and force people to share it. The idea that people can only “share” resources with others is such an absurd and low view of humanity that it almost seems contradictory that one could simultaneously hold it and want to save such a race.

Unfortunately, in our world medical care is a scarce good. Elysium would appear to advocate a single-payer medical care system (or at least that's how many reviewers interpret it. To me, that seems like a difficult label to apply. How can one pay for medical care when it is a non-scarce good?). But, if anything, Elysium's commentary on the subject amounts to “We think everyone should have access to the best medical care available,” a vacuous statement if there ever was one. Everybody wants that. How to best allocate scarce resources is the real question, and Elysium essentially dodges the question by making medical care a non-scarce resource. Such a commentary could make sense for something such as intellectual property, which is essentially costless to reproduce in many cases, but is made artificially scarce by law. Though medical care is made more scarce by intervention, it is not the case that it is non-scarce, and therefore Elysium's presentation of it has no bearing on reality.

What is also interesting is Elysium's presentation of the state, as something that simply needs to be commandeered and it will all of a sudden produce bountiful goodness for mankind. We only need a political messiah, as presented in the following image.

In sum, Elysiumis a hyper-violent action film containing no logic or relevance to our actual world. Its plot might be convincing to an eight-year-old, who is far too young for its dystopian creepiness. In the end, then, it ends up appealing to no one.