Some Reviewers Turned Off by the Politics of Elysium

Elysium, the new sci-fi film starring Matt Damon, opened Thursday. Reviewers have been modestly positive overall (the film gets 67 percent at Rotten Tomatoes) but it’s clear that many reviewers were put off by the film’s heavy-handed politics. Here’s a sampling of comments.

• EA more daring film might have risked putting a human (if not
  necessarily humane) face on the promised land’s privileged populace, but
  here they remain a vague, cocktail-partying blur — and, of course, that
  much easier to despise. Easier, too, for “Elysium” to advance one of the more openly
  socialist political agendas of any Hollywood movie in memory, beating
  the drum loudly not just for universal healthcare, but for open borders,
  unconditional amnesty and the abolition of class distinctions as well.
  But Blomkamp never makes it clear how, if overpopulation and pollution
  are what got us into this mess in the first place, moving everyone up to
  Elysium would make for a sustainable solution; he just wants us to take
  it on faith that it would. – Variety
• If “Elysium” is an example of how recession-era Hollywood intends to
  dramatize the rift between the haves and the have-nots, let’s hope the
  studios don’t also bring back Smell-O-Rama. – Christian Science Monitor
• It’s like one of those bad “Star Trek” episodes, when Gene Roddenberry
  stopped everything on the bridge so he could lecture us about the Cold
  War…it still feels a little like a sermon wrapped in a story — and delivered by laser-blaster. – Newark Star Ledger
• Blomkamp, whose previous film was the dubious South African parable District 9…is clearly trying to say something here about capitalism and its discontents…One of Blomkamp’s most unlikely conceits is a machine – apparently
  standard-issue in all of Elysium’s made-to-order McMansions – that can
  heal all injuries and infections at the flick of a switch. He could have
  used one to fix Elysium‘s battered and broken screenplay. – Globe and Mail
• The action sequences are rousing, but what sets “Elysium” apart from the
  summer’s other boom-boom blockbusters is Blomkamp’s critique of a
  society riven by class and racial differences (Earth’s populace is
  multiethnic, Elysium’s is almost all white) and oppressed by an
  all-seeing surveillance state. – Seattle Times
• With Elysium, Foster joins the ranks of outspoken liberals
  (hello, Tim Robbins) who can’t manage to play their political opposites
  without turning themselves into caricatures. – New York Magazine
• The characters seem very black and white as the more unfortunate
  individuals are very hard-working and caring while the better off tend
  to look down on everyone and only care about themselves. But if you take
  a closer look, then things are a little more unusual. While there are
  still several different cultures left on Earth, Matt Damon
  seems to be the only Caucasian person who hasn’t made it to Elysium
  while it seems as though only Caucasian individuals reside on the space
  station. – Examiner
• Matt Damon plays an angry and well-armed member of the 99 percent in
  not of all time…Politically — and this movie is always political — the idea of simply
  opening the floodgates feels embarrassingly naive, a grade-schooler’s
  solution to immigration reform. Even in the context of a fanciful sci-fi
  film, this bit of wishful thinking runs smack into the wall of
  realpolitik. – Newsday
• The message Blomkamp seems to have taken from the praise for District 9 is: more politics, less narrative wallop. Elysium,
  which at least triples the first film’s budget and adds Matt Damon and
  Jodie Foster as marquee bait, spends less time appealing to the viewer’s
  What-comes-next? impulse than on elaborate social metaphors. The result
  is a grim and predictable adventure saga that is not nimble but leaden.
  Dystopia has rarely been so dysto-pointing. – Time
• Our proletarian heroes, stuck in a parched LA, gaze heavenward, shake
  their fists and even send spaceships buzzing at the orbiting Elysians.
  But not because the plebs want to destroy it: No, they want to move in.For
  a 99 percenter movie, then, “Elysium” is kind of a head-scratcher. It
  throws away its best opportunity for drama. It’s as if Han and Leia
  parked on the Death Star and started asking, “How much is a two-bedroom
  around here?” – New York Post
• Elysium is a sporadically engaging tale, as well as a potent
  commentary on immigration and health care policies…There is, however, a
  missing component: Delacourt and President Patel (Faran Tahir) are the
  only Elysium residents given names. But they, like everyone else there,
  are essentially cardboard cutouts. Foster plays Delacourt in one
  megalomaniacal note. Even some sympathetic Earth residents are not
  multi-dimensional. A sense of fully drawn contrasting lives (not just
  lifestyles) would have improved a compelling concept. – USA Today

The most crushing review in terms of Elysium’s Occupy politics has to be this one from Deadspin:

• The film’s premise feels engineered to get Maureen Dowd to write an
  op-ed about it. After ruining the planet through pollution (Think Tank
  Talking Point No. 1!), the wealthiest humans build their own private
  community (Think Tank Talking Point No. 2!) in the sky, called Elysium.
  There, they have universal health care that cures all diseases (Think
  Tank Talking Point No. 3!), while down on earth, the poverty-stricken
  working class (Think Tank Talking Point No. 4!) suffers and dies. When
  Max (Matt Damon), a reformed criminal just trying to ride the straight
  and narrow, is dosed with radiation during a workplace accident, he
  attempts to get to Elysium to cure himself, along with other “illegal
  immigrants” (Think Tank Talking Point No. 5!) who keep crashing the
  gates of privileged.

  This is all laid on as thick as it sounds. Blomkamp turns subtext into
  text into screaming red letters into massive hands that appear from the
  screen and slap you repeatedly in face. It is not enough that massive
  numbers of “illegals” attempt to enter Elysium; we actually have to see
  them through nightvision glasses, climbing over walls. It’s not enough
  that Jodie Foster plays an obviously-Bush-era Blackwater-esque militant
  isolationist monster; no, she actually has to sneer “those people”
  when she sees two swarthy Earth residents. And boy does this movie ever
  have a ton of sick kids! I’d argue that the film was a neverending
  march of straw men, but Blomkamp barely bothers to dress them up in
  straw. – Deadspin

There are of course some reviewers who completely sympathize with the film’s progressive sermonizing, but even they suggest Elysium is let down by a formulaic third act.