Marking 20 years
of bold journalism,
reader supported.
Arts and Culture
Film

'Elysium'

Earth is a dirty smudge of deep inequality and plain weirdness in this sci-fi film. Not much of a stretch.

Dorothy Woodend 9 Aug 2013TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film for The Tyee twice a month.

image atom
Exoskeletons are pretty much all that divides Elysium's future from Earth's present.

"'The point is,' said Anna, 'as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.'" -- The Golden Notebook

Heat waves, Robin Thicke, Russian state-sanctioned homophobia, trolls shitting all over Twitter, open season on young black boys, and Fukushima leaking radioactive waste-water into the Pacific Ocean. This has been a summer of extremity. But when the idea of putting Jane Austen's face on a bank note results in bomb threats, you know that it's a strange time to be alive. 

Perhaps the heat has done something to people's brains. They seem to have melted into runny dribbles that stream out of pop stars, politicians, and punters alike. Chalk it up to one crazy hot summer. Watching the parade of endless weirdness, I thought of Doris Lessing, as one naturally does. In a piece the author wrote for the Guardian about her most famous novel, the venerable Lessing said: "This is what I thought The Golden Notebook was about, as its 'structure' said. Everything was cracking up, and by now it is easily seen that we live in a fast-fragmenting culture."

Fast-fragmenting indeed. Sometimes, it feels like we are whirling to pieces. How to make sense of such explosiveness?  

Watching director Neil Blomkamps' new film Elysium, I remembered the legion of writers whose work is precise and furious in its depiction of society in flux. Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, and, of course Lessing, towering like a colossus. Many great writers have used science fiction to systematically take apart the world we live in, to examine each bit of hypocrisy, mendacity, or plain old weirdness with fresh eyes.

One of the great joys of science fiction is seeing a refraction of truth that isn't available or expressible in any other way. A new lens, if you will, with which to see the world more clearly.

Fragments are all

Unfortunately, Elysium doesn't offer much more than a dirty bit of mirrored glass. The future looks a lot like the present. In 2154, pollution, overpopulation and inequality, on a massive scale, have rendered the planet barely inhabitable. But life goes on, it seems. In the film, the difference between those that have and those that do not have, which is already pretty distinct, has widened a wee bit. The poor speak Spanish and live in a global garbage heap, while the moneyed folk have decamped off-world to a shiny new playpen called Elysium, where they speak French and swill champagne. The gap has widened so far, it's gone into orbit.

In this sad old future universal health care, unions, and the Environmental Protection Agency have vanished like the polar icecaps. The Earth is a dirty smudge of place, crawling with cockroaches and humans. One could be forgiven for taking one look at the joint, and saying, "Ick! Poor people are gross!" This seems to be the general sentiment of the citizens of Elysium, who protect their gated paradise with a bristling arsenal of guns and robot riot squads. Their space station home dangles like a Christmas Star that the poor people of Earth can look at, but not touch. Our story begins when a little orphan boy named Max loves a little orphan girl named Fray and makes her a promise that he will take her to this fabled land one day. Cue the strings and start the action.

Adorable tow-headed Max grows up. Somewhere along the line all his hair falls out, he gains about 15 tattoos, 60 pounds of muscle, and becomes Matt Damon. Big Max is a one-time car thief, trying hard to go straight. The only job he can get is factory work, making cop-bots for the man. The lovely Fray has also grown up, given birth to a little girl, and has settled into a life of quiet desperation. Luck is not on either of their sides. Exposed to a deadly dose of radiation at work, Max is given five days to live, while Fray's sweet little daughter is facing a similar death sentence with leukaemia. Their only hope is to make it to Elysium, where every single household is kitted up with a magical tanning bed that heals all disease and deformity. But in order to get to paradise, they must first go through the gatekeepers. Elysium's Homeland Security takes border patrol rather seriously. Jodie Foster puts on her mean face to play the Secretary of Defence, a sleek predator who shoots refugees out of the sky without disturbing a single blond hair on her well-coiffed head. Rather than kill women and children herself, she issues orders to a Rottweiler mercenary named Kruger (Sharlto Copley) who renders people into large splatters long before they ever reach the pristine shores of Elysium.

Herein the basic dichotomy of the film is etched in acid. If you haven't figured it out yet, it is essentially this -- rich people are assholes, and poor people are dirty but noble. Life is unfair. Meanwhile, back on skuzzy old Earth, the clock is ticking for Max. He teams up with some refugee smugglers, is bolted into a nifty exoskeleton, and drafted into a mission to kidnap the corporate tycoon whose company makes the riot squad robots. Here is where things start to go wildly off the rails in terms of the narrative. Forgive me if I have trouble sorting some of this stuff out; it gets a wee convoluted in places. The plot to kidnap the corporate bad guy centres around the idea that all of the brain information in his head must be downloaded into Max's brain. But unbeknownst to Max, a plot to overthrow the current government of Elysium and install a military junta in its place is what he accidentally puts in his head.

Whether he is saving himself, a sick little girl, or all of humanity, the reasons to reach Elysium begins to resemble a ball of snakes. Explosions, firefights, and a crash landing add noise and confusion to already overloaded story. Long before the sweeping conclusion, you may have given up trying to make sense of the thing, and resigned yourself to small pleasures. Chief amongst these is the character of Kruger, a genuine maniac, who presence charges the story with threat. Whenever he is on screen, the film has a gonzo energy that feels alive and more than a little terrifying. Matt Damon brings a nice level of conviction to his role. But for all the Sturm und Drang and whirling bits of plot and machinery, the sum of the film's many moving parts does not add up to a greater whole. To bowdlerize Lessing, fragments are all there is it seems.

There isn't much of a point in trying to assign any larger meaning to the story. Even the film's director has said as much, stating that the film is not really about the future, but the present. This is now, and Elysium is only slightly more now, only with cool exoskeletons, and neato rifles that make people go pop. The more curious thing the film brings up is the idea that reality has caught up with science fiction, and maybe even surpassed it.

Unnatural humans

Watching the film, I thought about a recent op-ed in the New York Times about living in modern-day Beijing.

The world Edward Wong describes in his article bears an uncanny resemblance to science fiction dystopias, both past and present. A place left to rot in its own garbage and filth, with poor folk scrabbling over its surface, like a swarm of roaches or some other form of pestilence and infestation. Yep, looks pretty familiar! In Elysium the scenes of future Los Angeles were shot in current day Mexico City. The real garbage in the area was so toxic that it had to be covered with a layer of fake garbage to protect the actors. The description in Wong's article of a city where children can't play outside anymore and people have forgotten what blue sky actually looks like lingered for days. But the weirdest part is the notion that people, mostly, just keep going, bringing up their kids, heading off to work, cooking dinner, living in the face of decline and simply accepting it.  

My sister is of the opinion that humans are a mutation, something fundamentally unnatural. If you spend any time on Vancouver's Granville Street, it is extremely easy to come to accept this is as truth. A recent incident brought it home to me in an new way. Coming home from dinner downtown, I took the SkyTrain. At the Granville Station, a young woman, obviously in some state of inebriation, pushed on before everyone else and sat down. Just outside the Commercial Street Station, she began to pee. And she peed and peed and peed, with absolutely no expression on her face the entire time. The people sitting on either side put their feet up so that the pee didn't soak their shoes, as it sloshed back and forth with every movement of the train. At the Commercial Drive Station, she simply got off, leaving a pool of pee behind her. I don't know why the episode stayed with me, aside from the fundamental ick factor, but I think it was the reaction of everyone else on the train, who simply carried on while the pee sloshed against their shoes. The human capacity to accept and live with grossness is something I find perpetually surprising.

If you can't take your kids outside anymore, when the air, the water and the food are all suspect, at what point does it become too much? The strange passivity of tone, of acceptance, in Wong's article is more horrifying than the environmental degradation he describes. But what does it take for revolution to begin? For a possible answer, you will have to wait for another science fiction dystopia. Bong Joon-ho's new film Snowpiercer, will take us into winter of discontent, where the poor folks are again at the back of the bus, or train, in this case. Let's hope that no one pees this time.   [Tyee]

Read more: Film

  • Share:

Facts matter. Get The Tyee's in-depth journalism delivered to your inbox for free

Tyee Commenting Guidelines

Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion.
*Please note The Tyee is not a forum for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, denying its existence or minimizing its risk to public health.

Do:

  • Be thoughtful about how your words may affect the communities you are addressing. Language matters
  • Challenge arguments, not commenters
  • Flag trolls and guideline violations
  • Treat all with respect and curiosity, learn from differences of opinion
  • Verify facts, debunk rumours, point out logical fallacies
  • Add context and background
  • Note typos and reporting blind spots
  • Stay on topic

Do not:

  • Use sexist, classist, racist, homophobic or transphobic language
  • Ridicule, misgender, bully, threaten, name call, troll or wish harm on others
  • Personally attack authors or contributors
  • Spread misinformation or perpetuate conspiracies
  • Libel, defame or publish falsehoods
  • Attempt to guess other commenters’ real-life identities
  • Post links without providing context

LATEST STORIES

The Barometer

Do You Think Naheed Nenshi Will Win the Alberta NDP Leadership Race?

Take this week's poll