Elysium

In the past few years there have been quite a few sci-fi movies that have a right-wing political subtext (see here and here). The good news is that I finally came across one that has a left-ish subtext. The bad news is that it's kind of a crap movie.

Is there anything good about this movie? Yes, the premise and the action and the effects and the acting are all decent.  So why do I think it's crap? Two reasons: unnecessary horrible violence, and terrible politics. I won't say anything more about the violence. If you like that sort of thing, good for you. I don't.

Regarding the politics of this movie, my statements so far may seem a little incoherent. On the one hand I'm glad to finally see a big-budget Hollywood movie that leans to the left, but on the other I said its politics are crap. I think both are true, and I'll explain why.

Fundamentally, the movie is an extended argument in favor of free health care and loose immigration policies, both of which I'm also in favor of (the first more than the second). The problem is that it offers no good reasons for these positions, and so it won't change anybody's mind. I hate bad arguments as much as I hate bad policies. I think there are good arguments to be made regarding these issues, but Elysium does not make them. Maybe that's inherent in the medium. Maybe I'm expecting too much substance from a mere Hollywood movie.

I dislike the message of this movie for the same reason I dislike most of Frank Capra's movies: in both cases, the message is that bad policies are caused by the bad character of certain people in power. So if we just replace those bad people, everything will be fine. This is almost never the case. Bad policies are a consequence of how power works. And there is a certain ideology that goes along with that deference to power, and that ideology is attractive to a lot of people. Like a lot of liberals, this movie does not really engage with conservatism or libertarianism, rather it tells us that those ideologies are based on the bad character of the people who hold them, and that's the end of the story. Crap! Crap I say!

What about the women in the movie? Well, there are only two: Jodie Foster and Alice Braga. I've always disliked Jodie Foster, I'm not sure why. And I though Ms. Braga was adequate in her part, but nothing more. 

Speaking of the Jodie Foster character, she seems to be following along in a recent trend of making the bad guy boss a woman. I've seen this in Divergent and the Scorch Trials, and it's getting tired.

And another thing: Jodie Foster does a speech that's a direct ripoff of Jack Nicholson's "you can't handle the truth!" speech in A Few Good Men. And just as with the Nicholson character, Foster's speech strikes a chord. It seems to me that in both these movies, they gave the villain such a good speech that it undercuts the point of the movie.