What do you think about the movie Elysium

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I was on it in the cinema, it was some time ago now, I decided to watch it again.
I mean especially the ending of the movie, when the poor took over control at Elysium, and humanitarian aid has been sent to earth by the AI.
After all Elysium resources are limited, it could be enough for a small group of the population consisting of "elite" but not for 10 billion people, I wonder if it could not only aggravate the problems?

I thought the same thing, as did other people i've talked to.

I wonder if there was a hidden agenda by the film makers to make cheap universal healthcare look like an unworkable pipe dream.

I found the movie to be pretty terrible, I could not help but notice several plot holes. And I was never sold on the idea that the people in the space station owed as much as the movie was implying, but also that if healing people was as easy as it was saying, why was it not done before? And I found the main character to be pretty boring.

I did a whole bit on that horrible movie. The first major problem was a space station you could enter via flying into where the roof should be (you'd need insane centrifugal force to keep an atmosphere from leaking out).

So many said the movie was about the 99% vs. the 1%, but the simple truth was that once the station was created, the world below largely belonged to the 99%, and it reflected what they chose (or chose not) to do with it.

Even then, if there was technology to cure everything, it comes at a cost. The idea that a lone space station could provide unlimited care to 11 billion was laughable, and even then, what would be the impact of such machines being used for anything other than treating the most acute cases of injury or disease (granted, the 1% on the station used them just to remain young).

I thought as a metaphor - that the elite abandoning the masses, till their greed and bigotry causes them to lose their privilege - worked very well.

Unless I am missing something, this movie subtly reinforces the attitude that cheap mass healthcare is an unworkable proposition, while overtly appearing to do the opposite.

It's odd that so many people across the political spectrum thought the resolution was logistically inadequate for the entire planets healthcare needs. The scenario begs the question of who will pay for their upkeep once the system that produced them no longer does so. There wasn't a revolution, the economic system wasn't changed or modified, and no contingency was set in place to pay for these things some other way. The residents of elysium have not grown consciences either, and they are still holding all the cards.

Well, I thought it showed that Robots and Computers could be better custodians of humanity, once freed of the human influence and the irrational fear of a Tsunami of poor people coming for aid.

Mostly though, I didn't feel Elysium had a strong agenda, but just held up a mirror letting us view our social dilemmas through the lens of Science Fiction.

Not bad, visual effects were good, at least.

What cost? In the movie, you lay in a tanning bed sort of thing, and it cures you. That sounds as cheap as paying the power bill - which is the only cost of the treatment.

Replacements and Repairs. What are the costs of running hospital spaceships run by robots? Something.

Last edited by Stannis on 30 Mar 2014, 1:09 am, edited 4 times in total.

But that's just upkeep. I presume such matters can be taken care of without going terribly over budget.

Nothing is that cheap.

Given the reconstruction of the guy who had his face blown off with a grenade, it's safe to say the technology is complicated and must draw on something to be able to do what it does. If it only requires energy, then you have to have abundant and cheap energy to make it work.

It's the absurdity that discredits science fiction works...lack of backstory of technology in the movie. If the technology works "just because it works," you can do anything, but there's no believability behind it. If you set rules, limits, principles of operation (even if not correct with current known rules of science), at least it seems believable...until you start ignoring the rules you put in place so you could find a quick solution to a plot.

If we were talking about the real world, you might have a point. But as I stated earlier, this movie should be taken as a metaphor, not as something grounded in fact.

IMO, Elysium was a thematic sequel {of sorts} to District 9, in which the privileged look down on the marginalized and don't do anything to help the marginalized.

Overall, it was a good movie with great acting, but it was hard to tell which accent Jodie Foster was trying to speak with. {French? British? Irish?}

I enjoyed it, although the symptoms of radiation poisoning were far from the real thing.