On Saturday I went to go see a movie called Elysium, directed by a guy named Neil Blomkamp. Do not ask me how to pronounce that, because I cannot. Wikipedia has a pretty good description of how the movie goes but here is the total plot summary. It is the 22nd century and the world is overcrowded and running out of resources. The sort of Malthusian nightmare that people have nightmares about.

The Plot

There is a lot of interesting world building here. Los Angeles is majority hispanic and there is a lot of language switching between English and Spanish. You get to meet a whole lot of different characters from Los Angeles, the riff raff of the world who look like ordinary folks, cuss and fight. There is a thriving “criminal” organization that tries to illegally transport people from the earth to Elysium, presumably so that they can use the medBay, some sort of MacGuffin of a device that heals people in a single instance. They set this up with a desperation run early in the movie. Three space ships make a blatant run for the Elysium border. Jodie Foster has a sleeper agent (who would later be a villain in the movie, played by the protagonist from District 9) shoot two of them down with a ground to space missile. It was played to be cruel and merciless. It definitely was, however all I could think while watching was how the missiles could have enough fuel to reach space and why they did not send said missiles from Elysium itself.

This incident causes repercussions in the system and Jodie Foster, who plays the ultra hawkish Defense Secretary, gets fed up with the system. Irritated by her reprimand, she goes and engineers a deal with the CEO of a defense contractor. The defense contractor will go and reboot the entire system of Elysium and that would make her the President. The President would then go and hire the CEO’s company for all the product that they would make in the future, guaranteeing riches and shareholder profits ad infiniteum. This is illustrative of corporate greed and the defense-commercial self-feeding beast.

At the same time, Matt Damon plays a criminal on parole. He was arrested for boosting cars. He meets the childhood friend of his, and is looking forward to a date with her when suddenly he gets caught in a radiation vault at his work. The radiation vault gives him a fatal dose and now he has 5 days to get to Elysium so that he can use a med bay. He arranges a deal with a former contact in the underworld, the same people who organized the blatant run to Elysium that we saw earlier in the movie.

This is a pretty interesting setup, and it is the first few scenes of the movie. You would think then that the rest of the movie blossoms and blooms into a deep introspection of the relevant issues. The repercussions of a secret deal between a corporation and the government organization that hires it. The morality of breaking the law to save your own life and that of those you love. The dilemma between maintaining resources for posterity and the evil morality of withholding them from people who need them. The place for the everyman in a technologically advanced where droids can do the majority of the work that humans can do.

Alas, none of this is hit upon. The movie mostly runs on these few premises to make Matt Damon run around, fight people and shoot guns. He wears a metal frame and then fights people. Then Jodie Foster is killed by her own sleeper agent employee, and decides that she would rather die than live to face the consequences of the world she created. Matt Damon gives control of Elysium to the underworld boss who shows himself to have a heart of gold by instantly making every citizen of earth a citizen of Elysium for free which causes the automated system to send med ships to the surface so that everyone can get healed.

The Issues

There are elements of the plot that very consciously make the story such that the dystopia that you see in front of you in the movie universe defies common sense. We never meet any of Elysium’s citizens or get a sense of how they act towards people. They are apparently conditioned to be like the French elite at the eve of the French Revolution. They do not care about the poor and live their own lives, presumably paid for by the income generating assets that they own.

More importantly is the metaphor of advanced health care, which is represented by the all-healing Med Bay. It is a pretty awesome device. It can heal anyone who is not dead even if they are just slivers away from it. What a product! I would love to see how it works. Presumably it goes to show the miracle of modern medicine, which can make diseases that were once fatal now curable. However, modern medicine is not like this. There are costs associated with making this product. There are tools and instruments that have to be paid for. There is expertise that costs money and investment to develop (in the form of doctors). But the med bay is automated. It presumably uses no other resource but energy. It also is instanteous. What the hell? Why haven’t the citizens and hospitals of the world simply replace all their nurses and casts with one of these bays and just cycle people in and out all day? This is a product that supposedly is owned by every rich person on Elysium. What if just one of these rich people grows a heart and decides that he would just send his own to earth once a month to heal like a million people? It would certainly satisfy someone’s ego to know that they are a sort of a savior. This seems to be common sense and perhaps such a dystopia is defined by the lack of said common sense, but it puzzled me as a viewer of the movie.

Another issue I had with the movie was its depiction of the Malthusian apocalypse. In this dystopia, the world has become such that now there are not enough resources for everyone. People have been talking about this sort of thing happening forever (it for example shows up in that new Dan Brown book Inferno). I am not sure what to think about such an event. I feel that the system that has been created and put into place today more than guarantees that are enough resources for people. There have been many times that people and analysts would put a constant growth rate on something and simply assume that in the not so distant future that the reckoning would finally come about. Disasters are rare. They are acts of God. In reality, life changes and adapts. Agriculture adapts and becomes more productive. New technologies are developed in order to create new opportunities for making more of the resources that we have or use entirely new types. Peak oil was huge. I read a book called “Twilight in the Desert” by Matthew Simmons and in it he talked about the decline of the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, which would then lead to the decline of Saudi Arabia as the provider of cheap oil, which would then cripple the economy. The book was convincing and indeed it seems like Ghawar, the biggest oil field ever found, is on its way out. However then came the rise of “Saudi America”, where fracking and other new alternative energy technologies have emerged to replace the loss of oil from Ghawar. New externalities can still occur to replace virtually anything that we have lost. For example, what happens if that hair-brained idea from the Google guys works? The one where they land a satellite on an asteroid and mine its resources? These examples are easy to rebut right here, but the point remains solid: That systems are robust and adaptable. They change in according to the forces acting on them. Life finds a way.

My Conclusion

I enjoyed the movie. The melodrama made me cry, something that a lot of movies have been doing to me lately. The action was satisfying. It needed more robot stuff to satisfy the lizard brain “smash head with rock” side of me, but I still think that it did a fine job. Not everything can be Pacific Rim.

The one thing that I did not enjoy was the world building that tried to do more than it could. The Med Bay is just one example, but it was the most glaring. What a device! It is the least plausible thing for me to swallow. That being said, it is a movie and a technically well made one.