Elysium: Hollywood's Familiar Nightmare, and the Enduring Technological Dream

Breitbart - Big Hollywood ^ | August 8, 2013 | Hamilton

[EveningStar]

The new movie Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, is more loaded with liberal politics than an Organizing For America fundraising pitch. It’s more loaded with liberalism than an Ivy League gender studies department. More loaded, even, than an MSNBC roundtable discussion.  

Still, it’s a pretty cool movie, featuring an intelligent, if scary, take on the future. And so it merits our attention, because even if one doesn’t agree with its liberal slant, one must realize that liberals have half, at least, of the marbles in American politics--that is, the White House, the Senate, and, of course, the media, of which Elysium is a part.   

So if liberals are making noise about something, then conservatives have to think about it, too--if only to react and to combat. 

[EveningStar]

ping

[Buckeye McFrog]

starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, is more loaded with liberal politics than an Organizing For America fundraising pitch

Certainly explains why John Hinckley thought that shooting Reagan would impress her.

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

Liberal politics? Matt Damoron?

WHAT a surprise!

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

lol! Hey you might be onto something there. As we have seen with John Wilkes Booth, Democrat actors have an issue with Republican Presidents.

[EQAndyBuzz]

They can fantasize all they want. As long as there is a second amendment, they are just pi$$ing into the wind.

[Fledermaus]

[JLAGRAYFOX]

Well....we shall see how Mr. Damon & company do with this flick!!! Fact is: It’s the Obamabots that are the rich & elite who are destroying our country!!! Me......not a cent for these low life hypocrites!!!!

[Williams]

I can enjoy a liberal movie if it’s good, China Syndrome is a favorite and total propaganda.

I see from the review they pegged Asians as evil too. Now Asians in America to my knowledge don’t have any great racist history, so I guess Asians are evil for being smart and successful.

And the Hispanics down on earth - they have a whole world of Hispanics and they can’t do anything unless they take over the rich people in a space station?

Isn’t this movie preaching that hispanics are inferior?

[Williams]

Oh, and the poor world is all hispanics and they need white Matt Damon to save them? Isn’t that totally racist?

[Vince Ferrer]

Liberals make a lot of movies like this, but don’t understand that they are making movies about themselves. As San Fransisco became an enclave of white liberals, blacks had to move over to Oakland.

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

LOL! That is the greatest ever made.

[Bubba_Leroy]

In this film, the rich are not only getting richer, but by the year 2154, they have gotten so rich and so high-tech that they have left the planet. They have ascended to a private wheel-shaped spacecraft orbiting the earth, where they enjoy life in a kind of extraterrestrial Beverly Hills.

Meanwhile, the teeming masses are left behind down on earth--the scenes having been filmed in the slums of Mexico City, to give you an idea of how bad it is--to work in dangerous industrial jobs or to devolve into gangsterism and “Mad Max”-like savagery.

So basically the movie is about the rich liberals living in Hollywood and their poor servants and gardeners living in South Central Los Angeles, only Hollywood liberals do not understand that they are describing themselves.

[Vince Ferrer]

The movie misses the basic point that if a bunch of rich people left Earth for a space station, they would leave all the resources behind. The people on the station would quickly become poor, and some other people on Earth would become rich.

[KrisKrinkle]

“...liberals have half, at least, of the marbles...”

One could say they’ve lost some of their own marbles.

[x]

In other words, if much of the film looks like today, why not set it in today?

Because we don't actually have substantial space colonies today ...

Or at least sooner than 2154?

Do people really pay attention to the dates in science fiction?

______________

The movie got mixed reviews -- some pretty good, some bad, most somewhere in-between. The consensus seems to be that Blomkamp didn't live up to his potential, that didn't do as well with Elysium as he did with District 9. There were plot holes, and even some liberal reviewers and bloggers objected to the simplistic politics.

But the idea of the rich space colonies and the poor home planet (or vice versa) is an established SF trope -- up there with the dying earth and the necessary escape to other planets. It's one of the things that filmmakers come back to over and over again

[gaijin]

I can’t understand how a South African could make this movie:

Does he think what SA has become is somehow BETTER than what it was before..?

Other than SA’s corrupt leaders, almost no one there would say that, certainly not anyone old enough to personally remember the old SA.

How can someone LIVE through the whole enCrapification process, but then ask that the process be REPLICATED elsewhere..?

[miss marmelstein]

Oh, Soylent Green did this years ago and I’m sure with more intelligence.

[Dallas59]

White Hispanics or plain jane brown ones?/s

[ThePatriotsFlag]

Not for me.