ELYSIUM (2013)

ELYSIUM (2013). Neill Blomkamp, dir., script. Simon Kinberg, producer. Philip Ivey, prod. design. USA: "TriStar Pictures Presents," Simon Kinberg Productions, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Media Rights Capital (prod.) / TriStar and Sony Pictures Entertainment/Releasing (dist.), 2013.

Earth ca. 2154 is polluted, overpopulated, and desperately poor: one vast favela, with the superrich having fled to an implausibly low-orbit space station, Elysium, built and apparently run by the Armadyne Corporation (most of the film's politics are not subtle). See for the promise and threat of high-tech, starting with the opulence of Elysium as a very large construct and working down to spacecraft that are also hovercraft and a variety of airplanes, to military robots, robotic bureaucratic manikins (with pun on "robotic"), near-magical healing couches (for the rich), combat exoskeletons that are in themselves ethically neutral — cf. and contrast such devices in ALIENS and AVATAR) — and down to smaller devices that are cybernetically and physically invasive of the human body. The visual and possibly aural design on Elysium is toward clean-line Modernist (and just generally clean), while what we see of Earth is almost entirely po-mo-Industrial funky: both impoverished economically and visually rich. As in THX-1138, the hero works making robots that appear to be police/military robots — and is threatened even more than THX by an industrial accident. Comparing and contrasting the cybernetic cops in THX-1138 and ELYSIUM can give a good introduction to the differences between Modernist design and the dystopic vision ca. 1971 and literally post-Modern(ist) visions. CAUTION: Consult your local Marxist and expert opinion on population issues before accepting the relatively happy ending of the film as anything more than a tiny first step toward a better world. Those near-magical healing of technologies of Elysium are brought to Earth and promise health and long life to a human population that may already be way over the carrying capacity for the planet; what they will eat and where they'll get fresh water and what jobs will be available if Armadyne is no longer producing crowd-control (or slaughter) devices — these are issues not addressed.

5. DRAMA, RDE, 09/VIII/13