Elysium

[Water Bob]

It's a decent science fiction film. I enjoyed it. The beginning is better than the film's ending if only because I thought the plot a bit predictable (you can see it coming a mile away).

Where District 9 was Blomkamp's thinly veiled comment on Apartheid, Elysium is his thinly veiled comment on immigration--so much so that Spanish seems to be the dominate language spoken among the mostly latin people of Los Angeles, all wishing to be considered citizens of Elysium--the orbiting space station where all illnesses can be cured in a matter of seconds but is only available to the rich and privileged.

Worth watching? Yes, if you're in the mood for this type of film. But, don't expect it to change your religion.

The special effects are top notch and realistic. The action is well done. And, there is a real story there--with real characters. It covers some of the same ground as the recent remake of Total Recall, and, in my opinion, does it better. This would be a great double feature with Blomkamp's earlier film, District 9.

[warty goblin]

I liked it, didn't love it, but was certainly one of the better sci-fi/genre bits to come out last year. Had some good action, an actual honest-to-gods progression - which feels increasingly rare in the modern action movie - and a rather heavy handed and somewhat bungled go at having actual content. I'll take a bit of a failure to have a point over the willfully pointless any day. Not as good as Ender's Game, or Europa Report (my personal favorite sci-fi movie from last year), but a good way to spend a coupla hours.

[Water Bob]

I've never heard of Europa Report. I see that it's on Netflix streaming, though.

[warty goblin]

I've never heard of Europa Report. I see that it's on Netflix streaming, though.

It's well worth watching, although is so far from what science fiction generally means in regards to movies it's almost in an entirely different genre. Mostly because it is fiction about science, and about science as a worthwhile and valuable pursuit in its own right, instead of fiction about action heroes that involves rayguns. There's some bits where the plot doesn't entirely work, but I found it to be a genuinely inspirational sort of movie.

[Water Bob]

Thanks. I'll check it out.

[polity4life]

I would say the film is more about the inequities of healthcare provision across vertical social strata; the rich get magic beds and everyone who isn't in the rich group dies from things the magic beds could cure. I think it's a pretty blunt but effective commentary on healthcare access in America and it came out at the right time to jump on the NHA discussion wagon.

One thing I didn't expect from the movie, but I suppose makes sense in hindsight due to the existence of magic beds, is the level of gore in the film. There were some pretty grizzly scenes with even more grizzly shots in the middle moving towards the end.

All told, this film is worth watching for sure and I would argue worth owning. It's pretty gritty sci-fi with social commentary that goes a level below skin-deep.

[Talakeal]

I honestly didn't care for the film. To me it seemed to be a very heavy handed political argument that bordered on a straw man, reducing complex social and medical issues to the rich people have plentiful magic beds that heal everyone but won't let poor people use them because greedy capitalist. I will be brief to avoid RL politics, but even though I agree with the movies' argument I found the way it was presented to be insultingly simple and the allegory too blatant to enjoy the film as anything but propaganda.

[warty goblin]

Subtlety is not an allegation I think anybody can lay on Elysium, and the ending was a bit of a letdown. On the other hand the action was extremely well directed, and like District 9 it occupied the interesting position of being an action movie in which nobody ever got exactly what they wanted through violence, and once things became violent nobody was able to predict the outcome. That's a space I could do with a lot more action movies filling, instead of the usual guns solve all your problems malarkey.

If I had to stack it up against the other sci fi movies that came out last year which I got to see, the list would go something like this:


Europa Report (Science fiction about science! Courage and heroism without any violence!)

Ender's Game (A touch by the numbers as adaptions go, but it's still a hella good story. And they managed to make a giant mute insect beautiful and tragic)

Elysium (Already talked about non-parenthetically.)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (On the one hand it's well made. On the other, there's something so goofy about the entire set-up; Theseus by way of Gladiator in the most boring post apocalyptic future ever seen. Not goofier than Elysium mind, but Elysium's got way better action. Also, when it comes to movies about teenage girls surviving in woods full of hostile killers, How I Live Now is about 300% more effective in all possible ways.)

Oblivion (Nothing wrong with it, nothing particularly right about it either. At least it had a twisty enough plot to keep a person interested, the art was solid, and it managed to avoid doing anything really stupid with clones. Plus there's overtones of some actually classic sci-fi in there, and that's a plus.)

Gravity (Really pretty, but every smidgeon of content beyond the tedious rebirth visual metaphor it had, Europa Report did ten times as well on probably a tenth the budget.)

Star Trek: Into Darkness (I ended up watching it three times (don't ask), and still can't tell you anything that happened. I recall being mostly entertained while doing so, but would not go further than that.)

Pacific Rim (If it hadn't been so loud, I would have fallen asleep. The phrase that kept drifting across my mind was 'Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' If I'm quoting Shakespeare to myself during an action movie, something has probably gone really, really wrong.)

[Thiel]

If I had to stack it up against the other sci fi movies that came out last year which I got to see, the list would go something like this:

Europa Report (Science fiction about science! Courage and heroism without any violence!)
I haven't seen it, but I've heard some very positive things about it so I'll check it out.


Ender's Game (A touch by the numbers as adaptions go, but it's still a hella good story. And they managed to make a giant mute insect beautiful and tragic)
I haven't seen it and I doubt I will. I liked the books, but I really don't agree with Card's views on a lot of things, so I'm not going to put my money his way.


Elysium (Already talked about non-parenthetically.)
Elysium kept breaking my immersion so I really couldn't get into it. Take the industrial accident the main character gets himself into. Leaving aside the inherent issues of using unskilled labour to manufacture hightech robot soldiers, the decision to send him into the oven without shutting it down makes no sense from a managerial sense. If they shut it down they loose a little time. If they don't they loose a lot of time and risk damaging the product.

Then of course there's the man portable surface to space missiles. Leaving aside the question of how you cram enough dV to reach the station into a package that can be handled by one man, even if he is augmented the question remains why, if Elysium is so deadly afraid of a groundsider uprising why would they ever put such a weapon on the earth. And in a random car wreck no less. (Fancy locks or no, someone is going to break in eventually)

There's more, but those are the first that springs to mind.


The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (On the one hand it's well made. On the other, there's something so goofy about the entire set-up; Theseus by way of Gladiator in the most boring post apocalyptic future ever seen. Not goofier than Elysium mind, but Elysium's got way better action. Also, when it comes to movies about teenage girls surviving in woods full of hostile killers, How I Live Now is about 300% more effective in all possible ways.)
I tried watching it but gave up before they got to the tournament itself. It was simply too corny for me.


Oblivion (Nothing wrong with it, nothing particularly right about it either. At least it had a twisty enough plot to keep a person interested, the art was solid, and it managed to avoid doing anything really stupid with clones. Plus there's overtones of some actually classic sci-fi in there, and that's a plus.)
I didn't like it, because it gave away the big plot twist in the opening scene and the rest of it was too mediocre to make up for it.


Gravity (Really pretty, but every smidgeon of content beyond the tedious rebirth visual metaphor it had, Europa Report did ten times as well on probably a tenth the budget.)
I watched it in IMax3D and my brain was completely overloaded with shiny. I had a few moments were I went: "That's clearly not right" but aforesaid shiny more than mitigated it. I doubt it would work on the small screen.


Star Trek: Into Darkness (I ended up watching it three times (don't ask), and still can't tell you anything that happened. I recall being mostly entertained while doing so, but would not go further than that.)
I had much the same experience. It did confirm that if Cumberbach ever gets tired of playing Sherlock, he'd make an awesome Moriarty.


Pacific Rim (If it hadn't been so loud, I would have fallen asleep. The phrase that kept drifting across my mind was 'Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' If I'm quoting Shakespeare to myself during an action movie, something has probably gone really, really wrong.)

It was somewhat entertaining, but I believe it would have been much better if they didn't explain anything, since every time they did they made it worse.

[Jayngfet]

Elysium kept breaking my immersion so I really couldn't get into it. Take the industrial accident the main character gets himself into. Leaving aside the inherent issues of using unskilled labour to manufacture hightech robot soldiers, the decision to send him into the oven without shutting it down makes no sense from a managerial sense. If they shut it down they loose a little time. If they don't they loose a lot of time and risk damaging the product.

I think that's more a comment on the nature of the buisness itself, and that's kind of the point.

A logical buisness would give him shielding and install a machine that'd cure his issue instantly so he could keep working in like an hour. Heck, they'd at least give their workers a couple of days training extra to make absolutely sure problems don't occur ahead of time.

But most businesses aren't logical, because they're run by humans running humans. Our hero is ordered in by his boss, unshielded, and pressured, because there's an arbitrary deadline that must be met. But he's only doing this because he's being pressured by his boss, a man with entirely different priorities who doesn't really have a ground view of things and is more concerned with cutting immediate costs and his own sense of cleanliness. He in turn is being pressured by his stockholders to turn a profit, so they can make money. They don't care about worker safety or efficiency so long as they make a quick buck or two.

So like most corporations, efficiently producing the merchandise in a safe manner kinda becomes secondary to immediate pressures that have nothing to do with the product they even sell, and things naturally became this byzantine labyrinth where Max is sacrificed, not so the robots can be made, but so some random guy he's never met can feel slightly better for a bit.

This is probably the most relevant piece of the film, for me. I mean we should all remember a few years ago when EA was making stupid, boneheaded moves at every level and everyone there sweat themselves through whenever they went on camera, then had to explain a bunch of numbers to some guy from Goldman-Sachs to stop a number on a computer from going down. Or more recently when Disney let a bunch of their animators go after Frozen, then gave a bunch of other guys a bonus from the profits, then said the money was from the movie but somehow not due to it.

[Thiel]

I think that's more a comment on the nature of the buisness itself, and that's kind of the point.

A logical buisness would give him shielding and install a machine that'd cure his issue instantly so he could keep working in like an hour. Heck, they'd at least give their workers a couple of days training extra to make absolutely sure problems don't occur ahead of time.

But most businesses aren't logical, because they're run by humans running humans. Our hero is ordered in by his boss, unshielded, and pressured, because there's an arbitrary deadline that must be met. But he's only doing this because he's being pressured by his boss, a man with entirely different priorities who doesn't really have a ground view of things and is more concerned with cutting immediate costs and his own sense of cleanliness. He in turn is being pressured by his stockholders to turn a profit, so they can make money. They don't care about worker safety or efficiency so long as they make a quick buck or two.

So like most corporations, efficiently producing the merchandise in a safe manner kinda becomes secondary to immediate pressures that have nothing to do with the product they even sell, and things naturally became this byzantine labyrinth where Max is sacrificed, not so the robots can be made, but so some random guy he's never met can feel slightly better for a bit.

This is probably the most relevant piece of the film, for me. I mean we should all remember a few years ago when EA was making stupid, boneheaded moves at every level and everyone there sweat themselves through whenever they went on camera, then had to explain a bunch of numbers to some guy from Goldman-Sachs to stop a number on a computer from going down. Or more recently when Disney let a bunch of their animators go after Frozen, then gave a bunch of other guys a bonus from the profits, then said the money was from the movie but somehow not due to it.

My point is that it would have been even faster to have a modicum of safeties. The entire factory is needlessly dangerous and even if the workers are completely expendable they still have to stop the assembly line every time someone gets caught in the gears so they can clean them out. And judging from what we see of the factory I doubt he's the first one to get hurt that day.

[Eldan]

Exactly, yeah. They could at least have thought of a logical accident instead of a totally stupid one. Allegory is no excuse for being illogical.

[Water Bob]

A logical buisness would give him shielding and install a machine that'd cure his issue instantly so he could keep working in like an hour. Heck, they'd at least give their workers a couple of days training extra to make absolutely sure problems don't occur ahead of time.

Ever been to Mexico? Work places like that exist. I imagine, deeper into the Third World, it's more common (because not all of Mexico is like that).

[Closet_Skeleton]

entire factory is needlessly dangerous and even if the workers are completely expendable they still have to stop the assembly line every time someone gets caught in the gears so they can clean them out.

Except that's exactly how things did work in the 19th century.

In modern America you're more likely to slowly die of poisonous compounds you work with, but that's just not dramatic is it?

(bear in mind though that the film is not American)


Allegory is no excuse for being illogical.

Realism is though.

The world is not logical. Especially not the world of business. There have been and still are plenty of business practices that are not only illogical from the perspective of strategic efficiency are down right evil by any logical system of morality.

[Thiel]

Except that's exactly how things did work in the 19th century.
Actually it wasn't. Sure, life was cheap and their idea of safety and the means they had to put it in place were vastly different than they are today, but they still knew that a dead worker means closed production lines and lost time. Not to mention that an experienced worker is more productive than a new one. Heck, even Malaysian sweatshops are waking up to the fact.



The world is not logical. Especially not the world of business. There have been and still are plenty of business practices that are not only illogical from the perspective of strategic efficiency are down right evil by any logical system of morality.
And how many of them produce key military hardware involving the very latest in state of the art robotics?
Because that's what we're looking at. It's not a Malaysian sweat shop or a plastic factory in Mexico or China.

[Ranxerox]

My point is that it would have been even faster to have a modicum of safeties. The entire factory is needlessly dangerous and even if the workers are completely expendable they still have to stop the assembly line every time someone gets caught in the gears so they can clean them out. And judging from what we see of the factory I doubt he's the first one to get hurt that day.

True and fine, except, the guy who ordered Max to get into the oven wasn't following procedures. He was just some schmuck who doing only slightly better than Max, and John Carlyle, the germophobic guy up in the control room, wasn't his boss; he was his boss's boss's boss's boss. So the floor supervisor decided to break safety procedure this one time hoping he could get away with it. He did this because he knew that if he didn't do it that the line would have to stop, and if the line stopped John Carlyle was likely to frown, and if John Carlyle frowned the bosses underneath John Carlyle but still many levels above the floor supervisor would start quake, and that if the bosses started to quack someone would be told to find out why the line stopped, and that if that happened even though he was just following safety protocols the floor supervisor could forget every receiving another promotion.

So the floor supervisor, hoping he could get away with it this one time, ordered his worker to break safety protocols, but things didn't work out as he hoped and in addition to never getting another promotion he probably eventually lost his his job over the whole incident. However, when the guy who is hired to replace him finds himself in a similar situation, he will probably do the same thing, because that is the sort of pressure these guys are working under.

[warty goblin]

I haven't seen it, but I've heard some very positive things about it so I'll check it out.
It also has the advantage of being short, whole thing's like 90 minutes but it never feels rushed. It's simply the leanest version of itself it can be while taking the time necessary to tell its story.



I haven't seen it and I doubt I will. I liked the books, but I really don't agree with Card's views on a lot of things, so I'm not going to put my money his way.
That's a fair reason to give the movie a miss. It is a pretty decent movie though.


Elysium kept breaking my immersion so I really couldn't get into it. Take the industrial accident the main character gets himself into. Leaving aside the inherent issues of using unskilled labour to manufacture hightech robot soldiers, the decision to send him into the oven without shutting it down makes no sense from a managerial sense. If they shut it down they loose a little time. If they don't they loose a lot of time and risk damaging the product.

Then of course there's the man portable surface to space missiles. Leaving aside the question of how you cram enough dV to reach the station into a package that can be handled by one man, even if he is augmented the question remains why, if Elysium is so deadly afraid of a groundsider uprising why would they ever put such a weapon on the earth. And in a random car wreck no less. (Fancy locks or no, someone is going to break in eventually)

There's more, but those are the first that springs to mind.

Elysium was the sort of sci-fi that I saw as less a plausible take on the future as the present futurized and extremified. It's an approach that leads to some weirdness, but also is well in keeping with the metaphor-made-reality tradition of the genre.


I tried watching it but gave up before they got to the tournament itself. It was simply too corny for me.
I thought honestly the pre-tournament was the best part. The tourney itself just ended feeling way too low-impact for what it was trying to accomplish. It ended up feeling like a movie that's supposed to be About Something, but never quite has the guts or the structure to be about that in anything more than a notational way. It's supposed to be About Inequality, but the main characters have this huge house and ridiculously pretty clothes. It's supposed to be About How Bad Violence is, but the bad guys have sharpened teeth for tearing out throats, and most of the time they're just fighting freakazoid baboons anyway. Elysium at least exaggerated the things it was supposed to be about in the right directions. And then I watched How I Live Now, which was kinda the Hunger Games with the safety off, and realized that if you want to make a movie about how bad war is, having the main character methodically search through a pile of executed prisoners of war looking for her friends is probably a punchier way to go.



I didn't like it, because it gave away the big plot twist in the opening scene and the rest of it was too mediocre to make up for it.
Wasn't great, but was solidly entertaining for a couple of hours.



I watched it in IMax3D and my brain was completely overloaded with shiny. I had a few moments were I went: "That's clearly not right" but aforesaid shiny more than mitigated it. I doubt it would work on the small screen.
I saw it in 3D on the big screen, and it certainly was pretty. But also really, really shallow. It was pretty enough I didn't notice it so much when watching, but on the three mile trudge home oh boy did I notice that. Mind, the three mile trudge home is something that a lot of movies don't come out of looking very good.



I had much the same experience. It did confirm that if Cumberbach ever gets tired of playing Sherlock, he'd make an awesome Moriarty.
My takeaway was that giving Abrams Star Wars was completely pointless, since he's pretty much been making Star Wars for two movies now anyway. And really kinda crappy Star Wars at that - this coming from somebody who does not actually like Star Wars in the first place.



It was somewhat entertaining, but I believe it would have been much better if they didn't explain anything, since every time they did they made it worse.
The aggressive weapons-grade refined stupid didn't bother me very much. I went to a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters, which kinda suggests I had to make my peace with the stupid when I bought the ticket. I got bored because it had exactly one action sequence, which it then proceeded to repeat blow-for-blow for the entire second act, and a good chunk of the third. And dear lord was the dialog horrible. Not quite George Lucas Episode III Romance bad, but pretty close*. Now I know the usual defense is that Pacific Rim had all these subtle physical bits and color schemes and so forth to express character. This is rather like saying the dog turd sandwich came on really good bread.


Oh, I forgot I also watched Riddick last year. Let's put that one just above Oblivion. I'm in favor of action movies where the action scenes evolve over the course of the film as the story evolves, and also have a fondness for oldschool sword & planet style stuff. As probably as close to a Eric John Stark movie as I'm ever going to see, I'll give it some props.


*Though in the final analysis I'll give Episode III the edge over Pacific Rim any day. At least Ep. III tried to do something interesting, and delivered some varied action scenes with actual stakes.

[Jayngfet]

And how many of them produce key military hardware involving the very latest in state of the art robotics?
Because that's what we're looking at. It's not a Malaysian sweat shop or a plastic factory in Mexico or China.

Two things.

One, it wasn't military hardware, they were building cops and security guards. Given the reputation those have and how the bots performed I'd say they certainly cut corners all around. Hell, state of the art would probably have less humans, but upgrading would have been expensive.
'
Two, it's exactly like a plastic factory in Mexico or China. That's the point. It's that the culture that lets those things exists has only gotten more dramatic, to the point where the bosses live in space and even in LA horrible abuses of human rights become commonplace. Max as a factory worker isn't the iconic middle class working man with a wife and two kids, he's a man in a hovel being paid minimum wage with no real hope of improvement.

[Tyndmyr]

I honestly didn't care for the film. To me it seemed to be a very heavy handed political argument that bordered on a straw man, reducing complex social and medical issues to magic beds to the rich people have plentiful magic beds that heal everyone but won't let poor people use them because greedy capitalist. I will be brief to avoid RL politics, but even though I agree with the movies' argument I found the way it was presented to be insultingly simple and the allegory too blatant to enjoy the film as anything but propaganda.

Excellent! I hated the movie...and for this reason. The villains were cartoonishly evil, I usually prefer that people have better motivations than "because crazy".

**mild spoilers follow. I'd spoiler them, but really, if you've seen the trailer, you already know how the movie goes**

The actions of all the villains, really, were pretty self-destructive, and could not be even marginally justified. All the bad people had to be entirely bad, while all the good people had to be entirely good. Sketchy crime boss he works for? Purely magnanimous, willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

The tossing air to space missiles on earth was pretty ridiculous, yeah. The overthrow in general was pretty ham-fisted. The economy doesn't really make any kind of sense. The ending is ludicrous. Wait, the people that hate the poor earth-folks have an entire fleet of ships waiting to save earth, and not using them because evuls? You can just press a button, and all problems are solved, with no tradeoffs?

Even as a metaphor, it's terrible.

[Closet_Skeleton]

Actually it wasn't. Sure, life was cheap and their idea of safety and the means they had to put it in place were vastly different than they are today, but they still knew that a dead worker means closed production lines and lost time.

Knowing about it and actually doing anything about it are very different things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule_scavenger

A highly dangerous and completely pointless job that only existed because factory owners preferred the possibility of having to turn off a spinning mule to extract a dead child to periodically turning the machines off while scrap material was collected.

a 5% boost every day of the year is worth the possibility of occasionally loosing half a day or two. If the machines are powerful enough that they'll just crush any body parts in them you don't even need to turn them off after an accident.


Not to mention that an experienced worker is more productive than a new one. Heck, even Malaysian sweatshops are waking up to the fact.

An experienced worker is also more expensive. Some businesses will fire you if you work there too long because training your replacement is cheaper than giving you a pay rise.

If you want experienced workers you don't automate your production in the first place. At the start of the industrial revolution mechanised production was actually less efficient than artisan work, it was just cheaper because you could use unskilled labour.


The villains were cartoonishly evil, I usually prefer that people have better motivations than "because crazy".

The actions of all the villains, really, were pretty self-destructive, and could not be even marginally justified.

Sounds pretty much like real economics. There are real (popular in academia but ignored by most politicians) economic theories that boil down to 'everything sucks right now because everyone who has money has 'evil stupid' as an alignment.

For example, cutting wages despite the fact that people with no purchasing power are a drain on the economy as a whole and then spending all the money you would have just paid to your employees on bribing politicians to stop minimum wage laws from changing.

[Starbuck_II]

Sounds pretty much like real economics. There are real (popular in academia but ignored by most politicians) economic theories that boil down to 'everything sucks right now because everyone who has money has 'evil stupid' as an alignment.

For example, cutting wages despite the fact that people with no purchasing power are a drain on the economy as a whole and then spending all the money you would have just paid to your employees on bribing politicians to stop minimum wage laws from changing.
Sounds like the US. I kid.

But seriously, people in power do surprisingly stupid sounding stuff when you zoom out enough. It seems when you are there you are too zoomed in to notice. The phenomenon Group Think has some effect, but even then...

[Mordar]

Pacific Rim (If it hadn't been so loud, I would have fallen asleep. The phrase that kept drifting across my mind was 'Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' If I'm quoting Shakespeare to myself during an action movie, something has probably gone really, really wrong.)
[/LIST]

It is there that I think you err, Warty, for in this case, the sound and fury was the point of the exercise.

So that this is on topic, without exaggeration or sarcasm, my in-theater viewing of Elysium is certainly the best time start-to-finish I have has watching a movie in ages.

[warty goblin]

It is there that I think you err, Warty, for in this case, the sound and fury was the point of the exercise.


I don't object to sound and fury. Indeed when I go to an action movie I'm rather seeking them out. And there was a lot of sound, but the fury proved overly repetitious and kinda dull. I like my action movies to evolve a bit, so the intro fight is different from the middle fight is different from the end fight. To be fair to Pacific Rim, the first fight was pretty cool. To continue being fair, the entire middle of the movie felt like pretty much exactly the same goddamn fight two times in a row. Which I might have forgiven if it didn't take so long, or the character bits stitching it together weren't quite so horrible. Look, the first bro is going to punch the second bro, the Japanese lady is going to explain it's about respect, the extras with barely any lines are going to die like mice in lawnmower and the mentor figure's dying of cancer. All of which was utterly predictable from fifteen seconds after each character appeared on screen, and done so flat it's like the central Iowa of film scripts.

It's not that I'm being all high-minded and elitist here. I liked Riddick after all, which is so lowbrow I had to have my eyebrows surgically relocated to my ankles. Riddick at least had fun with being exactly what it was; and despite being a movie in which an alien water-scorpion eats its own guts still managed three distinct acts with their own structure, antagonists and action beats. I can't say the characters were anything more than 2D, but at least some of them got killed in creative ways, and everybody looked like they were having a good time making the movie.

[Chen]

Excellent! I hated the movie...and for this reason. The villains were cartoonishly evil, I usually prefer that people have better motivations than "because crazy".

**mild spoilers follow. I'd spoiler them, but really, if you've seen the trailer, you already know how the movie goes**

The actions of all the villains, really, were pretty self-destructive, and could not be even marginally justified. All the bad people had to be entirely bad, while all the good people had to be entirely good. Sketchy crime boss he works for? Purely magnanimous, willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

The tossing air to space missiles on earth was pretty ridiculous, yeah. The overthrow in general was pretty ham-fisted. The economy doesn't really make any kind of sense. The ending is ludicrous. Wait, the people that hate the poor earth-folks have an entire fleet of ships waiting to save earth, and not using them because evuls? You can just press a button, and all problems are solved, with no tradeoffs?

Even as a metaphor, it's terrible.

100% agree with this. The people were evil for evil's sake (with their hoarding of extra magic rejuvenation beds and all). The whole ending was absurd. What they reprogrammed the system once, but couldn't do it again? They had NO safety overrides for the protection robots? Why not make all the Elysium citizens, "super citizens" via code and basically just keep the status quo? Those cancer curing beds would be pretty damn useful in that factory too considering all the accidents. Wouldn't it just be economically sound to keep your workers up and running? You wouldn't even need a stupid doctor. Worker hurt -> send to bed -> send back to work. Done.

Terrible movie.

[Closet_Skeleton]

100% agree with this. The people were evil for evil's sake (with their hoarding of extra magic rejuvenation beds and all).


That's probably the point they were trying to make and it is a political point a lot of people agree with (it may not be right but that's not something you can discuss on this forum). Complaining that the elite are evil in a 'social inequality is bad' movie is like complaining that orcs are evil in heroic fantasy (and a movie where a hero saves the world is heroic fantasy even if the bad guys are elites with good health care rather than orcs).

Anyway, that's how economies work, you don't give stuff away to people who can't pay for it just because you have a surplus. If you walked into a super market and said 'nobody is eating these cornflakes, I don't have any money but I'm hungry so can I just take these cornflakes' does it make the super market evil if they say 'no'? Those spare beds will have cost money to make, they have no reason to give them away for free. If you steal medicine you're still a thief.

The film might make no logical sense, but the world doesn't necessarily either. Read history some time and you'll find everyone acting stupid. Realism in fiction doesn't care much about 'stupid plot points', just plausibility or direct comparison to real examples. Combining realism with what's basically (as I said above) a heroic fantasy on the other hand does cause problems.


The whole ending was absurd.


That's what you get with every overly political story. Either you have no ending with status quo maintained (1984, Brave New World), or you have some forced happy ending that would never actually work.

The book of Fahrenheit 451 probably takes a third option the best (society collapses due to military overextension and the vapid media means no one is aware until after its already happened), but suffers from the protagonist being completely irrelevant (a thematically appropriate deus ex machina is still a deus ex machina).

If you think there's no place for 'evil for evil's sake' in political allegories, think about this. In Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World, malice is more or less removed from the equation. Fahrenheit 451 has some kind of dystopic free market democracy where the media is terrible not because there's an evil government that wants all the books burnt but because the audience for fiction hates books and just wants vapid soap operas. Brave New World has a slave class of workers "because in an ideal society some people want to do manual work" and at the end the intellectual rebels are sent to a prison that's basically a paradise where they can hang out with other intellectual rebels. If you consider the three to be the main canon of English language dystopian novels, its 1984 that is the only one that really brings evil government into the situation and its arguably 1984 that is the most realistic and the most used as a reference to real world situations.


Wouldn't it just be economically sound to keep your workers up and running? You wouldn't even need a stupid doctor. Worker hurt -> send to bed -> send back to work. Done.


You haven't been paying attention to American news for the past two years have you?

[Chen]

That's probably the point they were trying to make and it is a political point a lot of people agree with (it may not be right but that's not something you can discuss on this forum). Complaining that the elite are evil in a 'social inequality is bad' movie is like complaining that orcs are evil in heroic fantasy (and a movie where a hero saves the world is heroic fantasy even if the bad guys are elites with good health care rather than orcs).

Anyway, that's how economies work, you don't give stuff away to people who can't pay for it just because you have a surplus. If you walked into a super market and said 'nobody is eating these cornflakes, I don't have any money but I'm hungry so can I just take these cornflakes' does it make the super market evil if they say 'no'? Those spare beds will have cost money to make, they have no reason to give them away for free. If you steal medicine you're still a thief.

For some reason they had a whole fleet of med bay setup ships available. It seems reasonable to have a small stock of med bays for when they break, but the fact they showed all those ones at the end (with all the robot doctors, and ships) just further makes it look absurd. With such a surplus you could make SOME money just setting up a clinic on earth. There would be economic reasons to allow people to have better health, if for nothing else that you get better workers. The resources were ALREADY spent on the bed things. Instead of having them just sitting up in Elysium doing nothing you could have been using them to make money AND help make your workforce more productive, making you even MORE money. Considering the contempt they showed towards the workers, it seems again like they were just being evil for evil's sake which was actually detrimental to their profits.



The film might make no logical sense, but the world doesn't necessarily either. Read history some time and you'll find everyone acting stupid. Realism in fiction doesn't care much about 'stupid plot points', just plausibility or direct comparison to real examples. Combining realism with what's basically (as I said above) a heroic fantasy on the other hand does cause problems.

Problem is if you drift too far from realism (or logic) you get absurd plot moments that while cool, make no sense. I can understand people not always being perfectly rational or logical. But the end of this movie makes it seem like everything is going to be fine and dandy now that everyone on earth is an Elysium citizen. It doesn't take much thinking to realize "hmm if there's ANY safeguards whatsoever in that system, this is going to be a very short lived success and it'll just go back to what it was before". Presumably that wasn't the intent of the movie since it wanted its happy ending, which implies there are NO safeguards and everyone is just suddenly going to accept the new status quo.



You haven't been paying attention to American news for the past two years have you?

As I mentioned, they already had the med bays made. They weren't spending additional resources on the health care. It would have actually made them profit to use the bays on their workforce instead of needing to have a doctor and medicine to delay radiation poisoning and the like. The real life analog isn't there because in real life those extra costs result in lost profit. It doesn't appear to be the case here. Now perhaps those machines are super resource intensive to run or build, but then why the hell would you build emergency shuttles with dozens of them in them? You'd have a couple of emergency shuttles with one or two med bays in them to save your citizens who were on earth and let the rest of the people be damned.

[Closet_Skeleton]

absurd plot moments that while cool, make no sense.

Like I said, that's basically an unavoidable problem of the genre. Either you have no ending or a stupid one.

Its a no win situation, it just comes down to which you think is more of a cop out.


As I mentioned, they already had the med bays made.

Which is basically a problem caused by machinery stock piles not working the same way as material and supply stock piles.

Sometimes it is economic to over order on things due to mass production costs. Sometimes people also deliberately over order machinery due to corruption (which is especially common in the arms industry and anything medical is also a military good by default).

But even then there's no reason for them to sell them for cheap to people who can't afford them. In theory the massive stock pile should drive the cost down but there are dastardly ways (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity) to cheat that which are also common business practice.

Then there really are goods that are literally too expensive to sell that are in theory really valuable but practically worthless and just sit around in a warehouse never being used.

But the best no-prize (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-Prize) would be the 'military stockpile' one. But a No-prize doesn't negate bad writing.

[Ranxerox]

Two things

1) Secretary of Defense Delacourt, Jody Foster's character, is over a hundred years old. Those aren't med-bays, they are immortality-bays. Please keep that in mind while doing your economic calculations.

2) These people live on orbiting space habitat. An astroid, a large piece of space junk, a docking shuttle that looses control, and every one of the healing beds in those shuttles could easily be needed to treat Elysium residents. There availibilty was probably for many people a deciding factor in their decision to immigrate to Elysium.

[VanBuren]

Exactly, yeah. They could at least have thought of a logical accident instead of a totally stupid one. Allegory is no excuse for being illogical.

I don't know. In this past week, I've read of about three different cases where industrial workers lost limbs or had their hands crushed because safety regulations were actively ignored by management and unsafe business practices were encouraged. This sort of thing does happen. It seems like it would be implausible for a business to run that way, but while fiction has to make sense, reality doesn't.

[Kitten Champion]

I have a fondness for SF like Philip K. ****'s where the protagonist goes on a meaningful journey but the world, such as it is, doesn't really change from it. That's just my preference for dystopian stories, which his bleaker works are in most respects. They're not about smashing the unjust system. The system is not the antagonist, just the way things are. While the conflicts tend to be more personal or transcendent where the character generally finds some kind of peace with his life and in most cases, accepts the system. Elysium was mostly that until the conclusion, where it relented on the dark and cynical tone for a sort-of happy ending it didn't need. The man sacrificing his life for someone after having lived a rather purposeless and by extension selfish life until then was satisfactory.

If I had to say the biggest flaw of the movie was, rather than simply leaving the injustice of the world to the realm of obvious subtext, it highlighted it in bright neon. It just needed to take that step back and rely on the audience to get what it was conveying. District 9 was obvious, Robocop was obvious, Escape from New York and Clockwork Orange were obvious, but they were at sufficient arms length for me that they actually felt like they had more to say.

That said, there was thought that went into this, which is more than I can about most SF/action blockbusters. It was well directed, the art direction was neat, and the acting for the most part was capable.