BY JEREMY HAAS
The art of using entertainment as an outlet to comment on real world issues is timeless. Bands write entire concept albums about holocausts, poverty, and screwed up government policies. Sci-fi movies and TV shows, like The Twilight Zone, have been huge on metaphorically addressing serious social problems. In fact, a lot of science fiction is made solely to reflect on these troubles. Even Adventure Time, which is marketed as a children’s show, is an allegorical story of the last living human in a world destroyed by nuclear war. It’s amazing that these TV shows, movies, and music not only entertain, but also deliver substantial messages.
When I first saw the trailer for Elysium, I wasn’t really thinking about all that. My first instinct was to watch it because…well, it’s got Matt Damon and explosions. What else does a movie need? It was only after I stepped into the theater, and the film began, that I realized what I had gotten myself into.
Elysium opens with an emotional flashback on Matt Damon’s character as a child. It subtly reflected what Earth was like in this not-so-distant future; a ruined planet, overpopulated, poor, and lacking resources, where all the rich, white folk (yes, there are sly racial implications in this film) have moved on to a luxurious, utopian space station called “Elysium.” After the opening scene, the film breaks into action, and introduces Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster), Elysium’s Secretary of Defense. Elysium portrays her as a stern, almost heartless woman, who will do anything to maintain the space station’s exclusivity, even if it means shooting down ships filled with innocent refugees from Earth. Basically, she has no remorse for killing immigrants if it means keeping her homeland “safe.”
Now Delacourt, to the rest of Elysium’s government, is seen as a bit of an extremist. Still, they do little to stop her. This clearly comments on many Americans’ view of immigration from third world countries. Sure, we all consider these poor immigrants to be innocent and deserving of a certain quality of life, but much like the characters in Elysium, we want as little to do with them as possible. If that means basically turning the other cheek while blameless victims are abused, well then, so be it. If we don’t have to physically witness it, then we subconsciously assume it’s just not our problem.
Elysium also says a lot about the obvious class differences in society. As far as the culture on Elysium, they are all rich, predominantly white, English/French speaking citizens, with identical looking mansions to live in. Earth, on the other hand, as portrayed in the movie, is basically limited to Los Angeles as far as what the audience can see. Still, that future LA is made up of mostly Latinos with Matt Damon as one of the few token white guys. Citizens dress in a “ghetto” fashion, and are often covered with tattoos. Forced to work slave-labor jobs, or turn to a life of crime, the people of Earth don’t have much to strive toward. So, yes, the class difference is certainly exaggerated, but they are still representative of many societies today. America is known to have one of the largest “middle-classes” in the world, and even now, that class is suffering to stay afloat. Elysium shows what the world might look like if we continue to separate based on wealth.
More powerful than anything, Elysium showed an abundant lack of culture, humanity, and individuality among the privileged. I think that says a lot about where our “culture” is going today. With every channel on TV showing the same show in a different package, and every commercial selling the same proper image, we to tend buy in. Elysium, in a way, shows the result of all that buying in. We follow the trends set for us, act in a socially respectable manner, then bam, we become wealthy, proper, Americanized drones. We become fearful of anything raw, anything we aren’t accustomed to. It’s all too familiar. That feeling that the citizens of Elysium treat the poor Earth dwellers with, not only indifference, but also fear. Maybe they’re afraid of the poor because they’ve been raised in such shelter, that anything new, anything that threatens their apt, upper class ways of life is seen as a threat.
Another thing that brought out Elysium’s gravity was that much of it was filmed in real life Mexico City. I know, obviously, a lot was done to amplify the setting, but the sad truth is this; there are people in the world today leading worse lives than Matt Damon’s character in Elysium. There are people starving to death every day, dying from diseases that may be curable, but that they can’t afford to treat. Elysium shows Earth as one big, third world planet, but, even now, many Americans live in one big, sheltered world, neglecting the sad, poor regions of other countries, and even the sad, poor regions of our own.
So, yes, Elysium was wicked awesome and equipped with enough explosions, violence, and action sequences to kill Bruce Willis. But, even with all its sci-fi/action movie attention grabbers, it still portrayed a real message and confronted a legitimate social issue. Elysium was not only interesting to watch, but was one of the most powerful films of the summer, and possibly the most powerful sci-fi movie of the year.
