I will be discussing the plot of Elysium. If you haven't seen the film, well, I wouldn't particularly recommend that you do, but don't read the rest of this if you don't want it spoiled for you. I'm going to talk about elements from all parts of the film, don't say you weren't warned.
Elysium is disappointing. It takes a promising setting which raises difficult political, social, moral and logistical questions, and then almost entirely ignores it to tell the story of some guy whom we have little reason to care about trying to save his own life.
Plot summary
It's 2154 and the rich have built themselves Elysium, a habitat ring floating in orbit around Earth, to escape the nasty overpopulated and overpolluted planet below. Citizens of Elysium have access to miraculous technology that can cure any disease, citizens of Earth have primitive and thinly stretched medical services and are terrorized by unfeeling robotic police.
Max, lucky enough to actually have a job, is injured in an industrial accident and given days to live, although with potent pharmaceuticals he can remain mobile for those few days. He turns to his old criminal colleagues and agrees to pull off a daring data theft in return for getting smuggled into Elysium to access the machines that can save his life.
The heist goes badly, but Max escapes with the data stored in his brain, hunted by Kruger – a war criminal, psychopath and officially disowned agent of Elysium. Eventually Kruger kidnaps Frey, Max's childhood friend, and her daughter Matilda, who is dying of leukemia. Everyone ends up on Elysium, there's fighting and backstabbing and whoever ends up with control of the data can use it do disrupt or control all of Elysium and its amazing technology.
Max
I don't like Max as a lead character. What do we know about him? He has been a thief since childhood. He's good at stealing cars. He had a childhood friendship, but he hasn't seen her in a long time. He has somehow gone straight and gotten one of the precious few precarious jobs available working in the robot factory, despite many run-ins with the law. He has a friend who is not particularly good at being a car thief.
The thing is, there's nothing much to make you feel anything about him. He's not really an underdog – until his accident, he is actually relatively privileged compared to most of the people around him. He has no strong relationships to anyone else. He has no strong personality. He has no particular direction. So when he suffers a terrible industrial accident, I feel a bit bad for him, but I don't feel attached or invested or even particularly interested.
Kruger
While I think Sharlto Copley made a good performance of Kruger, I am really uncomfortable with the way his character is introduced and written. I don't buy that the Elysian government don't mind (1) the discreet murder of illegal immigrants, but object to both (2) their overt murder by surface-to-orbit rockets, and that (3) the guy firing the rockets is a rapist. These three positions do not give any coherent view of the Elysians' priorities and principles. As far as I can tell, the only reason they are concerned that he's a rapist and war criminal is so that viewers will know this and understand that his subsequent threats of rape are not hollow.
I really don't like the rape threats. If you're going to write rape threats into your film, you had fucking well better be making an important point. This film has nothing to say. The threats to rape and murder Frey and Matilda are there solely to build up Kruger as a bigger villain for Max to fight, and perhaps because otherwise there would be a risk the audience might actually sympathise with Kruger.
Kruger is entertaining to watch. His enthusiastic cruelty in a fight, and his nasty sense of humour do make him a good villain. I think I might have appreciated him more in another film. I just felt that the context in which he is presented made me uncomfortable, and not for any good reason.
Frey and Matilda
I didn't find Frey much more interesting than Max. She's a bit more sympathetic, but no more interesting. Her motivation is her sick daughter, but that doesn't really matter because she has almost no agency. She gets to provide healthcare, become kidnapped and carry her unconscious daughter, all with stoic resolve and all due to the actions of others. Matilda gets one good scene and spends most of the rest of the film unconscious.
I have a problem in that I have no reason to care about anything that anyone does. Even if I did care about Frey and Matilda, they are just incidental support and collateral damage through the majority of the film. Max only turns to their side near the end. Until that point, their plight only serves to disinterest me in Max's story. And really, none of their stories feel interesting in front of the backdrop of extreme inequality that the film presents.
The ending
I found the ending actually offensive. So everyone on earth is now a citizen of Elysium. Hurrah! Inequality is over! A single act of technological trickery has solved a deeply entrenched social and political problem. This ending makes no sense to me. I don't understand what we're supposed to believe:
- The Elysians have spent their vast wealth building the infrastructure and resources capable of healing not just themselves, but every sick person on earth, for no reason other than to show how rich and evil they are when they keep it to themselves. Now everyone can benefit from it and all their problems are solved. This is the everybody wins ending.
- The Elysian systems have only the resources to heal and support a tiny fraction of the people on earth, and will quickly be overwhelmed by demand. Even with their massive wealth and technologoy, the Elysians have no mechanism whatsoever to reprogram them again and so their system will inevitably collapse. This is the everbody loses ending.
- The Elysians can in fact just call tech-support to take back control of their systems and nothing much is changed, except that a lot of the Elysian government was murdered by a crazy person and for a short while a number of poor sick people were healed. This is the 'the rich people win' ending.
I don't know which they're going for. The 'everybody wins' ending is fanciful and oversimplifies the problem of inequality. The others are pretty miserable, but if that's what the film is going for I feel it is dishonest in portraying a superficially happy ending that is nothing of the sort. I would have preferred that they either blew up Elysium or were all deported. I wouldn't have liked those endings, but I've have disliked them less than what we got.
Suspension of disbelief
The following are all little things, and I think I would forgive them if the characters and plot were more engaging. But it wasn't and so these things were all the more obvious and confusing, making it hard to suspend disbelief.
- I cannot understand the status quo of illegal immigration to Elysium. Clearly enough people get into Elysium that it's a problem. But Elysium is tiny. There's nowhere to hide. Do they only go there to break in and use the medical machines? What percentage get through? If it's that easy to get there, why don't terrorists just blow it up? If the Elysians are happy enough to murder them on the way there, why not murder the detainees too? Surely that would stop desperate families from sending their sick children?
- I don't understand Spider's willingness to send Max on his data-stealing plan. Max's only apparent value to Spider at this point is that he's an expert car thief and that he is completely desperate. But he then insists on probably the single most difficult target – the man who controls the entire technological infrastructure of Elysium. From Spider's point of view, isn't this poor judgement an indictment of Max's capacity to pull off the stunt?
- I simply don't believe that the invasive exoskeleton installation surgery can possibly work without even a feeble attempt at hygiene. In another film I might be willing to credit this to some kind of invisible super medicine, but the whole point here is that people on earth don't have access to good medicine.
I will say there are a number of things I don't mind. I'm happy to ignore the lack of any apparent mechanism to generate sufficient atmospheric pressure in the habitat ring. I'm not too bothered about storing information in brains and the weird lethal decryption mechanism. I'm not even particularly bothered that the head of the robot corporation appears to write his software from scratch in assembler. These things might be funny to point out, but they don't affect your understanding of the film and the context in which characters make their decisions.
Lack of curiosity
I probably would have liked the film better if I'd been expecting just a dumb action movie. But my expectations were coloured by District 9 and the politically charged science-fiction setting. I'm frustrated because the film introduced important, intriguing ideas and systems, but showed a lack of curiosity to explore them. I'm frustrated that of all the stories you could tell in this space the one they told is old and tired. I'm angry that it looks superficially like social commentary but that in the end it doesn't really have anything to say.
