Elysium Shrugged

I just got back from a showing of Elysium, the new Neill Blomkamp film, he did District 9 for those who don't recall. I don't know what it is about this director but whenever he releases a film I have a bad day. I watched District 9 on a day that had so many things go wrong I went to the theater as a refuge more than a source of entertainment. Today wasn't a particularly good day either, but it's more that my mood is sour and has been for about a week, I can't really tell why, and that's not the point.

When watching Elysium I couldn't help thinking of Atlas Shrugged, a story that shares the exact same plot but from the other angle. The smart and rich people of the world, the 1%, decide they are sick of dealing with all of the people they don't like, they don't like being told what to do by governments or rules who they think they know better than and so they leave. They find a place where nobody can bug them and they go away and the rest of the world suffers for it. Sort of like a kid running away from home, you'll be sorry when I'm gone and then you'll respect me type of thing. So the world falls apart, just barely able to keep everyone from killing everyone else, it's sort of a society but one in which everything is terrible, meanwhile the rich are all enjoying themselves in there little valley.

I've always thought it was a dumb idea.

If the rich were to do this than other smart people would make there way into those places of power which had been vacated, if the king decides to leave his kingdom others will rule instead and he will lose his kingdom. The whole idea also seems to discount that there are smart people with good ideas in the lower classes of society, who just don't have the resources of the rich to get noticed, sure a bunch of rich people could do that, and for the sake of the story lets say they all do, at most the chaos would last a generation before new people would rise and start doing things that would threaten the rich, and eventually remove them.  It doesn't take a super rich person to make a government run, which this world seems to lack. You can tell that the director hates the ideas of Atlas Shrugged but at the same time he does buy into it's premise that if the rich just up and left, everything would suck and there is no way that the poor could or would ever pick up the pieces and find a way to make it work instead of just settling for living in a terrible world of near anarchy and chaos. It makes no sense and it admits the central point which the movie is against, that the rich are amazing people who deserve everything they have, and that the poor are less than they are and also deserve what little they get because they are incapable of doing anything good.

The problem I have with Elysium is that the main point of the film is that the rich are just dicks. They have this tech that can cure anything, but they don't share that tech with the rest of the world....why? I have no idea. They even have ships, multiple ships full of these things, but they have no intention of ever using it to help the people they seem to be designed to help. Elysium isn't just a gated community in the sky, it's a gated community that is withholding the cure for cancer from the rest of the world, and shooting down those who would reach for it. Makes no sense, for one thing there is a lot of money to be made in a machine that can cure anything, why would they not want to make that money? Also what are they doing up there the whole time, we see the same Asian woman sunbathing a couple of times and there is a cocktail party at one point, but what is the point of these peoples lives? Elysium itself is underdeveloped as a place and the people who live there are never given a chance to be people, they are just mannequins wearing sweater vests holding cocktails, surely these people have lives and opinions on things which are worth exploring, but we never get to know any of it.

 Can the rich be dicks? Yeah, I work for them, they live in a different world most of the time, their expectations are way different from those of the rest of the world because for some of them it's rare to be told no or want something they can't have, there are also some of them who are very nice and normal. Are the Rich dickish enough to willingly let people die from cancer and every other malady? I don't know any group of people who is willingly that dickish.