In Neill Blomkamp’s version of dystopian Earth, the planet is full of badly maintained residential buildings, people that live below the poverty line, overpopulated, under-equipped hospitals and a generally spread misery along with high levels of criminality.
It makes you wonder: Why the people of Earth, living so far away from
Elysium, have not taken matters into their own hands? What this future lacks, however, is the people's aspiration for better living conditions. People have given up, and it is not because they are helpless. It is the existence
of Elysium that has turned them into pathetic creatures.
At the beginning of the film,
when Mr Damon becomes acquainted with it, he thinks of Elysium very intensely.
He persists on his desire to get him and his childhood love there. He is driven
by the desire to have a good life for him and his loved ones. He is selfish,
but of the honorable kind. The kind that wants to follow the good old - nearly kitsch now - American Dream.
Indeed, the Elysium is open to everyone. Everyone that has enough money to buy
a ticket, that is. How you are going to get the money is your business. And so,
everyone seems to spend all their energy trying to get this blissful ticket and
save their asses. Matt even goes so far as to steal for it.
But the lack of empathy and
self-empowerment should not be attributed to just the citizens of the Earth. In
this greatly unfair world, the people that get rich from draining and
destroying the Earth even more, have plenty of reasons to want to keep it that
way. These people have both the means and the incentive to instill this desire
for Elysium and to convince the poor that they can’t do anything to improve
their living conditions. (See colonialism from Sartre). However, such things
are not covered or implied in the movie. The viewer is assumed to think that it
is a fruitless exercise for the Earthlings to try since Elysium is there, but this fucking unfair
world just won’t let you have it.
In the end, everyone gets to go
to Elysium. All of a sudden we are dealing with third world countries now from
where sick people travel to Elysium just to make the viewer get that sense of
justice. But for the most people on Earth nothing really changes. It is only
super-fast health treatment that Elysium has to offer in this film. Or maybe
the whole Earth travels to Elysium and that also turns into another
over-populated, destroyed Earth.
But, in order to not give the
impression of a nihilist, I will set aside the obvious lack of perspective from
the writer’s part to talk about a second ideological proportion of the film
that I noticed. It is only when we concentrate on the medical advances in
Elysium that we realize what an important role a comparison to those of the
Earth’s plays. The people of Earth have access to non-negligible hospitalization,
however limited, but it is the comparison between that and the Elysium that
creates the feelings of injustice to the viewer. If no one in the known world
had access to that very high level of services, no one would feel mistreated.
This realization leaves us open
to the possibility that the creator did not wish to give us lessons on societal structures, but the aspect of fairness in this world. If I’m
human and you’re human, why shouldn’t we all have the same rights? And this is
what I choose to get out of the film. Sadly, it is well wrapped up in a cloak
of individualism. If only the Earthlings would realize that they had the power
to bring Elysium on Earth…
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