However, it was also the best movie I've seen this summer. It's not the best movie ever made, and it certainly has its flaws (some below but just one--how the hell does Max wear that rig with a t-shirt UNDER it when he was bareskinned when they drilled it into him?) but it passed my personal test of "I didn't know 75% of the details of the ending after the first ten minutes". Unlike Pacific Rim, I wasn't writhing in my seat at the gender and race stereotypes.
NOT that there aren't stereotypes. Julio, Max's best friend, is your typical Latino gangbanger, as is most of Spider's crew. Oh boy, Hispanic gang types, covered in weird facial tattoos and wifebeaters and bandanas. I have never seen this before. :|
And there's Frey, Max's love interest. Single mom in a caretaking job who would do anything to save her daughter, who plays nurturer, helper, love interest, and damsel in distress, and the Girl Back Home (the female character for whom the male exposes himself to danger and sacrifice so that she can be safe and happy).
But there's also Max himself, an Anglo guy who is bilingual, an orphan raised by nuns, criminal and tattooed, the working class stiff who gets stiffed by his uncaring corporate job and is compelled, in desperation, to allow himself to be fitted with the exo-suit (truth: I could watch him walk in that thing all day for prurient reasons hnnnnngh). Max straddles the line, then, of criminality/legality, Anglo/Hispanic (Max De Costa isn't the WASPiest name ever and even his name 'from the coast' implies a liminal status, not land or ocean, but the line between), and human/machine.
So there are stereotypes, but even the two above are complicated in interesting ways, similarly, by straddling boundaries: the thug gangbangers are in a sense the techno-elite of Earth--Spider is the one with the real power in Max's life. They have computer and surgical knowledge, as well as combat skills. And Frey? Well...she walks away in the beginning, from Max. He's bad news from her past and she wants no part of it. And there's wonderful UST between them but it is entirely chaste: Max is actually pretty upset to find out she has a daughter. She's too damn good for him, and he knows it, and it's really a nice change. (Looking at you, Pacific Rim, Iron Man, etc etc).
It's obvious that Earth is brown and Elysium is white, except for their token 'President' Patel, who accomplishes very little and is handily hamstrung by Delacourt, who is the 'ice queen' bitch stereotype (which Jodie Foster can pull off in spades).
Which leads us to the political stuff. The Right Wing has launched a virtual campaign against this movie, saying it's pro illegal immigration propaganda, and pro Obamacare propaganda, to which I say....whaaaaaaah? Yes there are themes of citizenship and exclusion and access to health care, but though the access to the medical pods is a central goal in the narrative, it's a maguffin, really, symbolizing healed humanity, instead of some sort of documentary for health care.
Yes it's certainly a metaphor: the rich white elite hogging the best for themselves and destroying anyone trying to climb the ladder to get their share. I think any American knows that--it's nothing new to see on film: we see it every damn day all around us, with the Washington plutocrats. Have some relevant reality: you guys HAVE heard that those politicians who were so gung ho about Obamacare recently passed legislation that exempts THEM and their staffs from having to abide by it themselves? Yup. There's your Two Americas right there. There's your Elysium and Earth. What's good enough for you and I, 'universal healthcare', the Washington types think is not even close to good enough for them, right now, today, 2013.
In other words, what they have on Earth in the movie IS Obamacare! Max has free healthcare, and the overcrowded waiting rooms and almost robotic by-the-book care that is substandard while the wealthy elites get 'Cadillac' health care: no waiting, perfect care, clean and fast. That's what Congress just passed before their August recess. H-how can a movie be pro-Obamacare then?
That scene where Max is talking to his 'Parole Officer' and the robot offered him a pill got an uncomfortable laugh in the theater I was in, because we have all been there: where they'd rather throw medicine at you than actually, you know, deal with you at a human level.
Elysium, with its token dark president who is shunted aside as ineffectual, could just as easily be read as a critique of President Obama and his ineffectual policies and lavish life (isn't he on vacation right now, in fact? ). So for all the Righties wailing it's evil Left Wing Hollywood Propaganda, just saying, the government of Elysium is a real critique of our own. Mind you, for the record I don't think it's the main point of the film to push either to the right or to the left, I'm just debunking the whole 'Left Wing propaganda' hysterics by pointing out it's JUST as easy to read it as Right Wing ideology.
It's also an extension of the cyberpunk tradition. Your standard cyberpunk adventure pits one guy against a dispassionate corporation, which dehumanizes its workers, viewing, really, only other executives as 'real' and caring more about profit and safety of profit than justice or fairness or compassion or...(swap in any human virtue). Cyberpunk heros are male, who straddle boundaries between the human and the technological. And they work to bring down the system from within, even though they are outsiders, working with jerryrigged equipment, triumphing by sheer will and gumption and wits in the face of vast technological superiority.
Sounds like Max, right? Except with less 'cyberspace' and more 'punching'.
There's something to be said for the fact that Max's job is making the droids, the same kind that run elite society, act as police and enforcers. The droids do work, but they don't do the really 'dirty' work (except for the orange robot who pinch and drag pulls Max out of the bay after contamination). Dirty work is for humans, while they get the clean jobs like basic enforcement (again the dirty enforcement jobs go to a human, Kruger, and boy is he unsavory), body guards, serving drinks. He makes them, he becomes half-robot and then, well, let's just say that the point of the movie is that the human part of him is what's really important. It's hard for me to admit, but I cried, honestly watching this movie. Which is something I never thought I'd say about a Matt Damon movie.
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