Elysium: Neill Blomkamp Fools the Critics Again

Takimag ^ | August 14, 2013 | Steve Sailer

[Zhang Fei]

The new movie Elysium, another science-fiction fable from young Boer refugee Neill Blomkamp about the horrors of mass immigration and nonwhite overpopulation, isn’t terribly amusing to watch. But at the meta level, the career of Blomkamp, whose mother dragged the family off from Johannesburg to Vancouver after a 17-year-old friend was shot dead by black carjackers, is one of the funnier pranks played on the American culturati’s hive mind in recent decades.

I’ve read over a hundred reviews of Blomkamp’s two movies, and virtually no critic has noticed that he does not share their worldview.

Not at all.

Blomkamp’s 2009 Best Picture-nominated District 9, in which the black residents of his native Johannesburg demand that their black-run government clear out millions of feckless illegal space aliens, was universally praised by American critics as an apartheid allegory. Yet Blomkamp has relentlessly insisted in interviews that it’s really about “the collapse of Zimbabwe and the flood of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you have impoverished black South Africans in conflict with the immigrants.”

Similarly, Elysium is another Malthusian tale about open borders, set in a dystopian 2154. By then, Los Angeles has been completely overrun by Mexicans, who have turned it into an endless, dusty slum that looks remarkably like urban Mexico today. (Blomkamp filmed for four months in Mexico City.)

[goat granny]

My girlfriend and I went several times to visit her daughter in San Diego...one day we took a trip to Teeawana to shop...the culture shock between Tijuana and the US was shocking to this old lady...kids 3 and 4 years old selling stuff on the streets, mom sitting on curb with a box full of stuff when the kids ran out of items. Just one of several things on the streets that shocked me...but you could buy prescription drugs if you went to the right pharmacy...they had a doctor come in at the end of the day and write prescriptions for anything sold, antibiotics, Valium etc..Donkeys on the streets so you could get your picture taken on one. But shopping was cheap..and all the vendors were up for lowering their prices if you talked to them....Usually would cost 1/2 the stated price..

[Zhang Fei]

Blomkamp isn't a rightist any more than he's a leftist. I think he doesn't want to be pigeonholed politically, and his pictures don't reduce to a one-sided political point.

I'm inclined to believe my lyin' eyes:

Blomkamp’s 2009 Best Picture-nominated District 9, in which the black residents of his native Johannesburg demand that their black-run government clear out millions of feckless illegal space aliens, was universally praised by American critics as an apartheid allegory. Yet Blomkamp has relentlessly insisted in interviews that it’s really about “the collapse of Zimbabwe and the flood of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you have impoverished black South Africans in conflict with the immigrants.”

[x]

That’s why some on the left criticized him, but I wouldn’t assume Blomkamp shares Sailer’s opinions all down the line. How long would he put up with Matt Damon if he did?

[Zhang Fei]

That’s why some on the left criticized him, but I wouldn’t assume Blomkamp shares Sailer’s opinions all down the line. How long would he put up with Matt Damon if he did?

Blomkamp is a nobody. He doesn't put up with Damon and Foster - Damon and Foster put up with him. After this movie, that may change, but I doubt it. One successful film isn't enough to make him a hot property, and this film isn't exactly a blockbuster yet.

[liberty or death]

You have to wonder if he knows what the films message is.

[BradyLS]

Wow! If you haven’t even seen the movie, you are an astute reader and observer.

That is very nearly a summary of the movie and its impression on me.