Science Fiction Tricked Hollywood Into Making the Year's Most Radical Film (Spoiler Alert!)

[n2doc]

By Brian Merchant

Elysium, Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi thriller, is expected to be the highest grossing film this weekend. It lacks the nuance of Blomkamp's great District 9, but it's still exponentially more radical than your average Hollywood fare. It's all but an open cry for universal health care, redistributive tax policies, and immigration policy reform. And it delivers all of the above with a CGI cyborg fist to the face.

Much has already been made of the theme already (io9 called it a "futuristic verision of Occupy Wall Street), but it's worth exploring how such a leftist film received $100 million in funding in the first place. For the uninitiated, Elysium depicts our world a hundred or so years down the line. The poor live on Earth, where it's hot, polluted, diseased, sweaty, and slummy. The rich live on a rotating orbital space station (that looks a lot like NASA's 1970s proposal for an off-world colony) and have perfect health care, thanks to access to miraculous cancer-erasing machines. The heroes, in dire need of those machines, must make their way to Elysium.

This is part of what makes science fiction so valuable; a film set in the present about a sick minority and an ex-con suffering from radiation poisoning illegally crossing the border to forcibly obtain better health care wouldn't have a snowball's chance in future-hell-Earth of getting produced in Hollywood. But that's basically the plot of this film; since it's transported into the future, its futuristic sheen and eye-popping robo-visuals obscure the fact that the film is an epic, prolonged quest for social justice.

Though the story itself (frustratingly) barely touches on the issues, they're implicit in the setup, and the plot points. Here's a quick list of why Elysium's the most radical film Hollywood is likely to produce this year. (Oh, and some spoilers follow, so be forewarned.)



Read more: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/elysium-science-fiction-tricked-hollywood-into-making-the-years-most-radical-film

[Abukhatar]

1. hardly radical

More a formulaic action film where Jodie Foster`s talent was wasted on a cardboard character. Film was great to look at and had excellent action but the plot had a lot of logic holes . does not come close to district 9`s subtlety

[Egnever]

3. any time Matt Damon is the lead in an action film

You can pretty much assume it is going to suck. He does other things well but a believable action hero he is not.

[NuclearDem]

2. Sci-fi as a genre has a habit of doing this sort of thing

See Star Trek, BSG, Firefly, etc.

[Motown_Johnny]

4. .

[eggplant]

6. Firefly immediately came to mind for me as well.

That, and the ST:TNG two-parter where Picard and the gang go back to 19th century America and meet Mark Twain, and his subsequent commentary on the state of the future.

[BumRushDaShow]

9. Exactly - TOS "The Cloud Minders", "Blade Runner"

Probably one of the oldest themes in the book - class warfare a la dystopian Earth.

[DirkGently]

12. Genre fiction is never about the genre tropes.

It always amazes me that Trek fans get hung up on pointy ears or types of phasers, when all that show's punch, and all that of the various sequels and spinoffs, derives from social commentary.

Good horror isn't about supernatural monsters or buckets of blood. Good sci-fi isn't about spaceships and laser beams.

Elysium clearly gets that, just District 9 did.

[NuclearDem]

14. That's why The Thing will remain my favorite sci-fi/horror movie of all time

And why I was so disappointed in the prequel. Fairly original concept mixed with an underlying jab at Cold War anti-communist paranoia makes for a good movie.

[DirkGently]

15. Good one! Hadn't thought of that one in a Cold-War light. But it works.

The recent zombie obsession seems to reflect a fear of vast, shambling hordes of ... one's neighbors. Might be so popular because it reflects a lot of possible fears. Everyone has a vision of "them" coming for us all, whoever "they" may be.

[navarth]

5. sounds great, looking forward to checking it out. nt

[mick063]

7. There is a reason that Joseph McCarthy went after Hollywood

Last edited Sat Aug 10, 2013, 11:28 PM - Edit history (1)

And part two is coming soon.

Different players, same reasons.

[DirkGently]

8. Just saw it. The nods to Homeland Security & access

to healthcare were striking.

[nashville_brook]

10. an excellent movie. everything you could possibly want science fiction to do.

it was just stunning.

working in factories building your own robot oppressors. who doesn't feel like that?

[edbermac]

11. Radical? Metropolis was made in 1927

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. The return of "Morality Plays".

[shenmue]

16. I saw it yesterday

Awesome movie.