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| Matt Damon as a mythic hero in a dystopian future |
By Dan Hagen
“Elysium” takes the planet’s present plutocracy to its logical conclusion, with immortal billionaire one
percenters living in paradise on a space station and billions abandoned on the
dying hell that is Earth.
This dystopian fantasy is grafted
adroitly onto the myth of Prometheus, personified here by Matt Damon, doing his
stoical thing augmented this time by exoskeletal super strength. And if you
need to cast a flinty-eyed space vixen who has the charm of Leona Helmsley and the
ethics of Dick Cheney, you can’t do better than Jodie Foster.
I call my basic unit of movie
rating the Day Breaker. That’s a film absorbing enough that it makes a clean
break in your day, wafting away your troubles on the breeze and providing you
some points to pleasantly ponder. This film is one of them. Predictably, conservatives have gotten their panties in a twist over the clearly relevant dystopia in "Elysium." The problem for
right wingers is that they cannot suggest any possible objection or alternative
to the one percent owning all there is to own and billions of people dying in
squalor and agony ‑ unless it's a fraction
of one percent owning everything. The film's horror show is their philosophical IDEAL, and they can't stand seeing it exposed.
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