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.
