Nytmare
David Jose
I've started this post at least a half dozen ways so far, and I think that that's indicative of the mixed feelings I have about this movie.
I did not like this movie.
At the same time, I can not wait to watch it again.
The movie looked AWESOME. The technological aspects of the science fiction seemed really well thought out and smart. The details were, across the board, engrossing and thought provoking. The acting was magnificent. The action sequences were exciting and fun.
And then the entire thing fell apart when they tried to tie it into a story.
First and foremost, the story is very blatantly (oh my god so blatantly) a series of possible mirrors of a handful of real world political arguments regarding health care, distribution of wealth, and illegal immigration. Unfortunately, when they try to incorporate these arguments into the beautiful, well acted, smart, technologically accurate(?), and detail heavy world, things start making a whole heck of a lot less sense.
This is the spot where the spoilers start.
So it's a hundred and fifty some odd years in the future. Rich people have retreated to a geosynchronous satellite colony called Elysium that floats over Los Angeles where they can spend all day swimming and having parties. Poor people live on Earth (or at least in LA) where they can be sick and miserable and build robots that will eventually pick on them.
Every Elysiumian has a magic machine in their house that makes you young and beautiful and live almost forever and cures every disease. Poor people on Earth (or at least in LA) spend a good chunk of their free time trying to sneak past the border guards and land on Elysium so that you can jump into a magic machine and be healed and beautiful again before the robots show up to tase you send you back to Los Angeles.
As far as I can tell, the rich people are only doing this because they are mean, jerk-faces.
The rich people are using the poor people to work in their robot factories to make surly/grumpy soldier and police officer and probation officer and doctor robots. They never really touch on why they're bothering to keep all these people around instead of replacing them with robots. One can only assume that it's because it's no fun to dock robot's pay and extra difficult to give them lethal doses of radiation poisoning.
Elysiumians (and their robot bullies) are themselves slaves to a codified set of laws that exists as a computer program and must, even when it's obvious that the program has been hacked and hijacked, begrudgingly follow it without question.
It's against the law to arrest a citizen of Elysium, although the penalty for a citizen committing treason is hanging?
The mean, jerk-faces planned ahead far enough that they made an armada of EMS relief ships, on the off chance that they were going to want to start being nice to the 99%.
At the same time they couldn't come up with a better defense plan to stop gate crashers than hiding crazy people on the planet with rocket launchers, and having a giant arsenal on the satellite without soldiers.
The encryption program kills you after you upload the program? How was Carlyle planning to survive?
A grenade to the face won't kill you as long as your brain is still intact and people can meander around and eventually stuff you into a magic box. Why were all those other people with intact brains still dead?
I don't know. I guess that overall, I am bothered most by the lost opportunity of this film. I think that Blomkamp is a freaking GENIUS director; I'd just love to see him paired up with a story he didn't write.
I did not like this movie.
At the same time, I can not wait to watch it again.
The movie looked AWESOME. The technological aspects of the science fiction seemed really well thought out and smart. The details were, across the board, engrossing and thought provoking. The acting was magnificent. The action sequences were exciting and fun.
And then the entire thing fell apart when they tried to tie it into a story.
First and foremost, the story is very blatantly (oh my god so blatantly) a series of possible mirrors of a handful of real world political arguments regarding health care, distribution of wealth, and illegal immigration. Unfortunately, when they try to incorporate these arguments into the beautiful, well acted, smart, technologically accurate(?), and detail heavy world, things start making a whole heck of a lot less sense.
This is the spot where the spoilers start.
So it's a hundred and fifty some odd years in the future. Rich people have retreated to a geosynchronous satellite colony called Elysium that floats over Los Angeles where they can spend all day swimming and having parties. Poor people live on Earth (or at least in LA) where they can be sick and miserable and build robots that will eventually pick on them.
Every Elysiumian has a magic machine in their house that makes you young and beautiful and live almost forever and cures every disease. Poor people on Earth (or at least in LA) spend a good chunk of their free time trying to sneak past the border guards and land on Elysium so that you can jump into a magic machine and be healed and beautiful again before the robots show up to tase you send you back to Los Angeles.
As far as I can tell, the rich people are only doing this because they are mean, jerk-faces.
The rich people are using the poor people to work in their robot factories to make surly/grumpy soldier and police officer and probation officer and doctor robots. They never really touch on why they're bothering to keep all these people around instead of replacing them with robots. One can only assume that it's because it's no fun to dock robot's pay and extra difficult to give them lethal doses of radiation poisoning.
Elysiumians (and their robot bullies) are themselves slaves to a codified set of laws that exists as a computer program and must, even when it's obvious that the program has been hacked and hijacked, begrudgingly follow it without question.
It's against the law to arrest a citizen of Elysium, although the penalty for a citizen committing treason is hanging?
The mean, jerk-faces planned ahead far enough that they made an armada of EMS relief ships, on the off chance that they were going to want to start being nice to the 99%.
At the same time they couldn't come up with a better defense plan to stop gate crashers than hiding crazy people on the planet with rocket launchers, and having a giant arsenal on the satellite without soldiers.
The encryption program kills you after you upload the program? How was Carlyle planning to survive?
A grenade to the face won't kill you as long as your brain is still intact and people can meander around and eventually stuff you into a magic box. Why were all those other people with intact brains still dead?
I don't know. I guess that overall, I am bothered most by the lost opportunity of this film. I think that Blomkamp is a freaking GENIUS director; I'd just love to see him paired up with a story he didn't write.