I personally find the dumbest political thing from the movie is that Matt Damon, after going on and on about gun control and media for months, is now paying the bills with a movie that seems to love gun imagery.Steve the Pocket said:You know -- and this is just based on the information presented in the review -- if "the one percent" can just up and move to a space colony removed from the rest of humanity where they never have to work again, and the result is that everything goes to hell down below... doesn't that kind of validate the ideas presented in, of all things, Atlas Shrugged? You know, where all the rich people pack up and move toRaptureGalt's Gulch and everyone else is like "Oh noes, the people who actually knew how to run things are all gone, whatever shall we do?" because apparently "the 99 percent" are all idiots who need to be led by the hand by their, ahem, intellectual superiors.
What I'm getting is that this is a really obnoxious viewpoint no matter whose "side" of the conflict you claim to be on.
I think that presenting Elysium as 'meaningful' in any way is really an insult to your intelligence. The entire movie runs on Hollywood Economics, that is to say:
1. It makes zero sense.
2. Corporate people are greedy, except when greed or profit margins would actually stop them from just being cartoonishly evil (i.e. "Hey, we have super cheap medical technology that could ensure our workforce is always healthy and productive! ....No, we need to keep it to ourselves even though it's cheap and we could make them pay massively for it. So, you know, it can be a commentary on public healthcare, which is NOT the same thing as a magic medicine machine.")
3. Wealth is a finite resource that can't be created, only shifted around society (central to the 'rich stealing from everyone else' narrative).
4. Paul Ehrlich, rather then being completely discredited, was totally right. Overpopulation and resource depletion will occur before the 23rd century (and of course the movie ignores the fact that they have the space technology to mine the solar system).
5. Despite the fact that they have the technology to mechanize almost all manual labour cheaply they don't and just keep using third-world class workers (in reality this is actually happening, the rising middle classes in India and China are beginning to force companies to stop investing in sweatshops and start investing in more mechanized operations with less, but better paid workers).
This is the 'Bioshock is a good criticism of Objectivism' nonsense all over again. The writers don't have a solid grasp of economics and can't write them into the script effectively. When I got out of the early screening I thought it was a mess. The technology designs were solid though.