Elysium

By Heordredenn:

Film Review: Elysium, written, directed and co-produced by Neill Blomkamp, released August 2013.

It is 2154. The Earth is an overpopulated, impoverished, environmentally degraded ruin, with civilization falling apart. But high above a vast, silver-white wheel structure hangs in the sky, the last island of peace, order and civilization, the great orbital habitat Elysium, now home to the global elite of the cosmopolitan super-rich.

That is the premise of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s latest film, which. like his previous offering District 9, he also wrote himself as well as directing and in this case co-producing.  Also as with District 9, Blomkamp uses science-fiction to comment on modern society.

However, Elysium is both a better movie and one – whether Blomkamp consciously intended it or not – far more relevant to those of us interested in the survival and advancement of our Race than District 9. The latter used the arrival of a stranded shipload of aliens, the “prawns”, in 1982 South Africa to sermonise Politically Correctly about apartheid. No doubt liberals would indeed fawn on loads of extra-terrestrial crustacean  immigrants should they turn up in our midst, welcoming them as asylum seekers, passing laws against saying rude things about them and in the case of the female of the liberal species no doubt  going to bed with them. Personally this reviewer would welcome such arrivals boiled, shells off with a dash of black pepper…

Elysium is sterner and far more credible stuff. The ruined world of the future it depicts, very effectively and graphically, is horribly credible, with great Western cities reduced to squalid half-starved slums, Third World both physically and demographically. Blomkamp vividly and believably portrays Los Angeles as a Spanish-speaking favela shanty town, indistinguishable from the slum outskirts of Caracas, run by greasy gangsters, with public services such as hospitals in a state of overcrowded collapse.  On present trends this is not so much science fiction as grimly accurate prophecy. Only the timescale is wrong – this is LA 2054, not 2154. By the latter date in that scenario the city is a ruin, within which bands of starveling dusky neosavages hunt each other and the rats.  In the end, the rats win…

In one chilling throwaway shot as a backdrop to shuttles en route to Elysium we are shown the ruined Earth, its land masses no longer green but brown, as soil exhaustion and desertification at the hands of swarming peasant hordes have done everywhere what they did to the formerly Fertile Crescent of Syria and Iraq, the Thar Desert of NW India and the erstwhile breadbasket of Rome, Libya.

Blomkamp contrasts this nightmare of chaotic social and – all credit to him for not ducking this issue – racial collapse with a vision of almost platonic perfection hanging in the sky above. The Elysium space habitat. A vast, wheel-shaped structure rotating to give the appearance of gravity on the inside of the wheel, able to house up to a million people, based on the 1970’s Stanford Torus designed by engineers at Stanford University, and something we could, if we chose, actually build.

Albeit Blomkamp’s one doesn’t quite hold water – or, more precisely, air: it is shown as being open on the inside edge of the wheel so shuttles from Earth can simply land on the inside surface.  To stop the air leaking away at a simulated gravity similar to that on the Earth’s surface would of course require the walls either side (think something like a bicycle tyre with a wider flatter tread) to be high enough to rise above most of the atmosphere, i.e. at least 10 miles high. This makes a much bigger structure than the one in this film – the original Stanford design had a transparent roof over the inhabited surface to keep the air in. However the message of the movie is unaffected by that and other technological quibbles (basically the various bits of future tech we are shown don’t all reflect the same level of technology, and some of them would have wider effects we are not shown).

Elysium is depicted very well as the awesome, magnificent and indeed beautiful accomplishment it would indeed be, a pinnacle of Western White science, technology and design, a monument to all we were and might have been, a Parthenon in the sky.

It would also serve, in the far from implausible scenario depicted in this film, in effect the Fall of Western Civilization, as the nucleus of a Plan B for racial survival, an escape strategy. In effect abandoning Earth, at least for a while, leaving the mud people to inherit the mud whilst our Race sets its course toward the stars.  This in turn requires that our nucleus of ethnic and cultural survival off Earth be self-sustaining, independent of the home world. Given the fact that simply building a refuge on that scale requires significant space industrial capability (the materials would have to be mined in space – from the Moon or asteroids – as well as assembled there) successful construction of one rather implies the achievement of the other.

Again by 2154 this is credible.

The way in which Blomkamp depicts this all going wrong is also, sadly, credible. For the majestic new hope in the sky has been suborned by global greed, and taken over as a haven by the elite of the cosmopolitan super-rich, the 22^nd Century equivalent of Roman Abramovitch, Leonard Blavatnik, the Hindujas, Lakshmi Mittal,  Li Kashing,  Ratan Tata and the Reuben Brothers. They have proceeded to plaster it with tasteless Hollywood Hills style mansions and divert it to serve their idle parasitic pleasures. Nevertheless it remains an idyll of peace, order and civilization in comparison with the deracinated chaos below.

An idyll which, as the film opens, Elysium’s Security Director Betancourt, an impeccably-attired, elegant and coolly Nordic portrayal by Jodie Foster, is determined to defend against repeated incursions by swarms of illegal would be Immigrants of sundry varieties of non-Whiteness arriving in cybernetically hijacked shuttles, As well as the higher standard of living such types think will miraculously be conferred on them if they can but set foot on First World soil, they seek in particular the (somewhat implausible) instant cure for all ills provided by the Med-bay modules every Elysium resident appears to have in their mansions.

Proving that she is what we need running Britain’s Border Force or the US Immigration service, Director Betancourt has two of these shuttles packed with illegals  en route to Elysium blown out of the sky, in the process mildly alleviating what we are told – and shown – is Earth’s serious overpopulation problem.   For this she is hauled over the coals by her boss, Elysium’s President Patel – himself the embodiment of Elysium’s diversion from what should have been its purpose of ensuring racial survival – who gives her a lecture on human rights. Mr Patel, no doubt frustrated at the trading opportunities lost to him and his ilk on a round habitat bereft of corners to put shops on,  is clearly determined that civilization will collapse in a Politically Correct non-racist manner.  La Betancourt responds by pointing out that what is at stake is the survival of the Elysians and their families and descendants. To no avail as she is ordered in future  to respect the “rights” of those who want to invade her home. Showing more of the Right Stuff, she then determines to depose this collection of liberal corpocrat garbage and put the habitat under her own control (she’d get my vote there!). So she commences high-tech plotting to that end, and gets an override program for Elysium’s control systems and robot guards created on Earth and uploaded into the brain of one of her allies, who is to deliver this to her.

Enter Our Hero, Max (Matt Damon), apparently the Last White Man in Los Angeles. He desperately needs to get to Elysium and its super-technology medical facilities because he sustained a lethal dose of radiation at work. His employers are portrayed as brutal Victorian-style exploiters of abundant cheap labour to gladden Maggie Thatcher’s heart, and those of her UKIP fanboys and – girls. Again Blomkamp gives a chillingly plausible portrayal of the future of global Capltalism if it has one  – it has  ruined the planet, destroyed racial identities, degraded its workforce into little better than serfs, and elevated a small minority of cosmopolitan super-rich corpocrat bosses to lord it over (literally in this case!) the rest of us in pampered luxury. This is indeed exactly where we are going and Blomkamp is spot-on in depicting what it will be like when we get there (and from there it’s downhill all the way to ultimate total collapse)

Max gets to Elysium by conspiring with a Hispanic people-trafficker and ganglord to hijack the access codes from the brain of an Elysian citizen (storing data on human brains as if they were computer hard discs is a more plausible technology than it might appear). He picks the CEO of his employer and the gangsters duly shoot down his shuttle taking off for Elysium and … er … pick his brains, in the course of which he gets shot dead –  always nice to see a corporate Suit get his desserts! They then find they get more than they bargained for as they chose Security Director Betancourt’s ally whose cerebral storage included not only the code to access Elysium they expected, but more code to take it over they didn’t. Worse Director Betancourt knows they have it, and specifically that it is in Max’s head.

Despatched to hunt him down and secure the data in his brain – a corporate head-hunter with a vengeance – is The Villain, Kruger (Sharlto Copley), portrayed as a snarling Afrikaaner (what else? No doubt he also makes irreverent remarks about St Nelson Mandela) with a bushy black beard. An over the top performance which reminded this reviewer irresistibly of a binocular version of Cut-Throat Jake, the villainous pirate in Captain Pugwash (a children’s TV cartoon show from Very Long Ago).

Much shooting, fighting and chasing ensue, ending in what most viewers no doubt imagine is a Happy Ending.   Betancourt and Kruger die, and Max the Hero nobly sacrifices his life to hand the magic code, and thus control of Elysium, to a Hispanic ganglord. All immigration restrictions are promptly lifted and the Elysian magic healing Med-Bays dished out to the population down on Earth, no doubt greatly assisting in the resolution of what the intro to the movie points out is an acute overpopulation problem. Cut to closing shots of happy Third Worlders being miraculously cured, and presumably fed, etc etc.

Whether Blomkamp himself believed this was really a happy ending, or whether it was a wryly cynical denouement he provided to satisfy the movie distributors whilst leaving the important questions his film raises to haunt the more perceptive viewer, we of course don’t know.

But regardless of the writer/director’s intention, the film leaves said more perceptive viewer in no doubt that things have not turned out well. It is of course implausible that the high-tech miracle-working Med-Bays provided to cater for at most a million people on Elysium would exist, or could even be manufactured, in sufficient quantity to serve the billions on Earth, thousands of times more users. Or that were this possible the resulting drastic drop in mortality would not spark a population explosion further unsustainably loading an already visibly – even from Space! – struggling biosphere, resulting in more deaths, from famine mostly, down the line than were averted by dishing out the Med-Bays. One is reminded of St Bob Geldof’s intervention when 40 million Ethiopians were living on the edge of famine in 1984. As a result, today 94 million Ethiopians are living on the edge of famine. The land is even nearer total exhaustion and when the population collapses back to the long-term carrying capacity of their territory, as is sooner or later inevitable, more than twice as many people will die as a result of Band Aid and similar futile if well-meaning interventions. A disaster that as Elysium ends is about to be repeated on a global scale.

Worse, as a result of the last island of civilization falling to what are in effect barbarians, there will be no more high tech fixes of this sort. Blomkamp stopped the story in time to avoid the clearly impending next scene, in which millions of starveling mestizos and the like swarmed aboard Elysium, trashing everything and overloading its life-support systems, a sort of extra-terrestrial Camp of the Saints. They will not mean to wreck it. Any more than the barbarians who poured across the frozen Rhine on New Year’s Eve 406AD meant to wreck the Roman Empire, or the millions who hover around the southern borders of Europe and North America desperately seeking people-traffickers to get them across the US or EU borders mean to wreck the West, In all cases they are desperate and, as their own homelands collapse around them in famine and chaos, they are trying to enter and enjoy becoming part of the last islands of peace, order and civilization they know. But in doing so, they destroy the thing they are trying to join, and bring their swarming darkness to swamp the last glimmers of falling light…

As would happen to Elysium. There would be a brief phase where the once magnificent space habitat was turned into a squalid favela in the sky, full of filth, fires and graffiti, just as Blomkamp depicts the LA they came from. Then the systems would fail and darkness would fall, dooming the lot of them to an unpleasant death.  Above the failing ruins of Earth, a slowly disintegrating Elysium would hang in the sky, a silent reproach to the corruption and contingent failure of the West, a memorial to a Race that is no more, and a fading light reflecting what might have been, and what those who built it might have become.

Whether he meant to say all that his movie does say, Neill Blomkamp has shown us a future that failed.  Whether it is our future…is up to us.

By Heordredenn © 2014

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