Review of Elysium (2013) by Joeb666 — 09 Aug 2013

Two rather large problems with the movie:

It has an anti-elitist message, but the two main actors, Jodie and Damon, graduated from Yale and Harvard, respectively. You know: the two most prestigious and elitist universities in the world. (At Harvard, for instance, the average family income of students is $150,000. And if you're parents are alumni, your chances of acceptance can be greatly enhanced.) This critically undermines any sort of message the movie has.

Another problem: the entire dystopian premise. I like dystopias, but based on history we can assume that the world of the future will be much better in the future than the past. For instance, economists predict that the average income in the first world will be about seven times what it is today, in 100 years. That's $200,000+ per adult. The developing world will fare even better. Also, every one of the last several centuries has left humanity better than than the century that preceded it, and every one of the last several decades (excluding the Great Depression WWII) left humanity **as a whole** better than the previous decade. The past cannot predict the future, but such lasting trends are difficult to ignore, and strongly suggest that the future will be better than the present.

This decade, the world has never been more democratic, nor more prosperous. And, in all likelihood (though we must not get complacent), it will continue getting better. The problem with sci-fi dystopian cinema is that it perverts the audience's perspective on the very things that are most able to lift humans out of the muck: science, technology, and social change. Such films depict these things as something to be feared, rather than embraced. This is shameful.