Film Friday: Elysium (2013)

You’ve heard the expression “a sucker punch,” right? Well, Elysium is a sucker gang rape, and it just won’t stop. This film is a nonstop blast of nasty liberalism from start to finish, and it’s very annoying. It’s also not a very good film.

Writer, director Neill Blomkamp became famous for District 9, a film that criticizes apartheid through an alien analogy. Basically, undesirable aliens land in South Africa (they are derogatorily called “prawns”), and they are put onto a reservation away from the humans, where they are kept under martial law including forced abortions and extra-judicial killings. This is a metaphor for South Africa’s homelands and shantytowns, and you are meant to leave the film feeling that the humans (read: whites) are murderous and racist.

Interestingly, like all self-righteous liberals, Blomkamp actually creates a rather racist metaphor in the process of accusing everyone else of racism. Indeed, the aliens are a metaphor for South Africa’s blacks. And how does Blomkamp present them? They are presented as murderous, violent and oversexed. They are borderline retarded, with most residing south of the border. They are lazy. They steal for a living and without compunction. They “have no concept of private property.” And most tellingly, the ultimate point to the film is that exposure to these prawns will infect the humans (read: whites) and turn them into prawns. Call me crazy, but that sounds kind of racist to me. Oh, and like all child-races, they need white liberals like him to protect them.

Well, Blomkamp has done this again in Elysium. This time, the story ostensibly involves evil rich people (read: whites) who live in a floating space station which gives them a lifestyle similar to the McMansion lifestyle so in vogue today while Hispanics fester upon the Earth in the once livable city of Los Angeles, which has now been reduced to little more than a massive shantytown. What’s more, these poor Hispanics are kept down by a robotic police force, slave labor jobs, and a total lack of healthcare. Again, you are meant to leave the film feeling that the rich (read: whites) are murderous and racists.

Once again, however, let us examine the other half of the equation. Here, Hispanics have taken over the golden city of Los Angeles and they have turned it into a shantytown. No attempt is made at running a self-sustaining economy as the only jobs anyone holds are those given to them by whites. Law and order has collapsed. No one cares for their homes or their property. Most get by engaging in criminal activity, such as stealing cars from other poor people. Essentially, they are lazy, dirty thieves who have ruined paradise. And the only person who can save them is white (Matt Damon). Call me crazy, but that sounds kind of racist to me.

Anyway, Elysium takes place in 2154 and boy is it ever full of holes. Matt Damon works in a factory and gets injured in an accident. He will die in five days from radiation exposure. Of course, he's a parolee, so he's easy to manipulate by the evil boss (a standard liberal trope) and he is forced to sign a release to get medical treatment, which release then cuts him off from medical treatment (another liberal trope). The only thing that can save him now is if he finds a way to sneak aboard the Elysium space station where every family has their own medical machine which can cure anything that is wrong with you. To do this, Damon agrees to kidnap his boss for an Hispanics gangster and retrieve information from his head. Only, it turns out that his boss is working with Elysian Secretary of Defense Delacourt (Jodie Foster) to stage a coup so she can shoot any Hispanics who try to flee the surface to the space station – when the story begins, Elysium is run by an Indian President who is soft on killing immigrants. I’ll leave the rest for you to figure out, only I will say that the story involves a corporate hit team and shaky-cam chase scenes until you’re ready to vomit.

Everything about this film stinks.

The message of this film is idiotic and offensive. The idea here is that whites don’t want to help Hispanics. In reality, the US alone gave $56 billion in foreign aid in 2013. Even worse, the film implies that the whites are maliciously denying the Hispanics medical care. Indeed, at the end of the film, medical robots race to the planet to hand out free medical care, and they do so without costing the whites anything. Hence, the message of the film isn’t that whites are cheap, it’s that they are malicious and are withholding lifesaving care even though it would cost them nothing to provide it. In real life, the West is constantly providing medical care throughout the world, even at a cost of reducing the care available here. In the US, $80 billion in free medical care is given each year to illegal aliens. So this film is slander.

Even beyond the messages however, this is just a poorly done and idiotic film. First, the film is awash in a particularly annoying shaky cam. It is as bad as Cloverfield at times. Secondly, the film is hard to understand as the sound is poor and, even worse, the accents are hard to follow. Third, the logic of this film is a joke. Consider this:

● A human race that is capable of building Elysium is more than capable of turning the planet into a paradise, so why waste billions of trillions on building the space station when it would be cheaper to clean up the planet?

● Secondly, what’s the point in denying the surface dwellers healthcare when it wouldn’t cost the Elysium dwellers anything to send down a few robot doctors.

● Third, to stage the coup, Foster gets an arms-dealer (military industrial complex) to re-write Elysium’s code to have her recognized as President. Doesn’t anyone think the people who live there will notice that their President has been deposed?

● Fourth, why have the surface dwellers given up any attempt to improve the planet themselves or run their own affairs?

The film is also deeply manipulative, only you won’t buy into their manipulations, which makes those scenes annoying rather than emotional.

In the end, this film pounds you with liberalism at every turn, and with nonsense – each scene ends with you wondering why anyone would actually act the way the people do. It presents whites, corporations and the military in the most clichéd, liberal-fabricated-negative light possible while it washes away the responsibility of these people to care for themselves. The plot is paper thin. The acting is poor. The action is entirely predictable. The fight scenes are way too long. The cinematography and sound are horrible. And you won’t care for a second about any of the characters.

Put simply, this film sucks; it’s a hacky political hit piece. You should avoid it.