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Uncle Boogeyman posted:I feel like District 9 was the big "discovery of a visionary new genre auteur" moment and Elysium was the big "whoops, just kidding" moment. I love both, the only real difference is that one focuses on race and the other on class. Which of course are connected issues. This affects the endings: the ambiguity of the first is because there will always be an racial/cultural Other, although certainly there is hope to overcome those divisions, there will always be different people who freak us out with their differences. The second is a clear victory, since universal healthcare are such unambiguously good thing, which is really easy to achieve, provided people stop doing what selfish myopic rich losers say.
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May 11, 2014 21:35
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Naw, the funniest are the complaints about "plot holes". LikeBMS posted:Concerning the plot, which is probably the biggest thing to discuss, there's plenty of holes to cover and quite a few things that feel like they should somehow relate to the story, but aren't tied in correctly, or fleshed out in anyway. Delacourt's death for instance. some leader getting offed like a bitch by their own soldiers is something that doesn't occur constantly through out history? Who knew treating people like disposable garbage would ever have consequences?? It's important to remember that the Golden Rule is not just an ideal for the good-hearted folks to aspire to. It also functions as the utter damnation of assholes - that which ye sow, so shall ye reap.
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May 11, 2014 22:21
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JonathonSpectre posted:I'd probably sit down and burn two hours watching a "Previous Adventures of Kruger" movie with no complaints. Eh, we can extrapolate from what we saw of him: a lot of blowing up poor people, abuse and rape of women, drinking with his bros, licking his wounds, etc. Pretty typical mercenary stuff, from any time period. He is an interesting villain, precisely because he was a Spider or Max who failed to make the moral choice at some point back along his hundred year career. He's of their class, but lacked the courage of solidarity. Delacourt's just a technocrat, trapped by her tools (Kruger, the computer systems) and that's why she doesn't need much screentime and dies bitter and confused.
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May 11, 2014 22:46
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BMS posted:Not the fact that her lead henchman wiped her out, but her actual death, and the fact that she didn't want any help from Ms. Nurse. Why? Character development of some sort? Who knows, because it wasn't executed properly. Everything a character does and represents is development. Including how they die. So some possible explanations: - she's a bigot, so like most elysiumites, doesn't understand that poors/browns are capable of help - she only trusts her machines, human touch freaks her out - maybe she wants to die, I imagine being a neoliberal bureaucrat is a fairly pathetic life of constant self-loathing edit: - a combo of them all! I only saw the movie once, but I think any of these could fit with what I remember of her character. edit2:  Soundtrack owns hard, kinda reminds me of Man of steel's.
Blood Boils fucked around with this message at 03:08 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 23:25
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Rosscifer posted:If they had cut out Max's childhood, the long lost love interest with a terminally ill kid, the coup on Elysium sub-plot, and the magical hospital ships saving Earth they would have had more than enough time to make a movie about a man fighting a corrupt system. That would mean cutting out the protagonist's motivation, the reason he gets access to the computer over-rides, and the victory of the good characters over the bad guys.
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May 12, 2014 03:53
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Strategic Tea posted:That assumes that the state apparatus is capable of supporting worldwide healthcare. In Elysium it can, because it's practically a post-scarcity society and because the writers said so. A real revolution isn't going to have that benefit. The sci-fi 'what if' of the film changes the playing field so radically that it undermines the political message. Though I will admit that this way lies sperging about star destroyer reactor outputs and god knows what. Universal healthcare is easily achievable through taxation. In Canada, it was a provincial government who implemented it, even when the federal government and major businesses and doctor associations tried to bankrupt Saskatchewan to prevent it from happening. But the CCF stuck to their guns, and once voters saw their grandmas receiving the comfort and dignity owed any human being, well, every other political party was forced to adopt the policy if they ever wanted to win another election. Now certainly the rich have chipped away and weakened our medical system since then, but if the people continue to elect politicians who are essentially the PR of monied interests (who use their wealth to argue against having to pay taxes) then we have only ourselves to blame. And as other posters have pointed out, the medpods don't solely represent healthcare, although that is the most obvious symbol, but general human rights like food and sovereignty. They are all aspects of the concept of equality.
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May 12, 2014 21:41
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MisterBibs posted:I'm not missing anything. The planet starts off in a lovely state whose shittiness isn't enough to stop humanity from overpopulating it all to hell. Now you've suddenly removed even that from the equation, with immortality? Are all those practically-immortal folks on the surface going to understand and accept that they all can't live on the Space Station? In what scene did they lose the technology to build more space stations? Travel further into the stars?
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May 12, 2014 22:51
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MisterBibs posted:After all the now-immortal folks get their (symbolic, perhaps literal) pound of flesh from the folks who previously owned the places to buld more space stations and travel further? Lost forever, or set back significantly. Why? How do you know they won't follow the example of the Divine Max-Machina and forgive them, while simultaneously ignoring their protests against sharing. After all, they are citizens now, with as much say into what the technology is used for as the formerly rich. quote:I mean, the first station survived because the rich folks paid money into it. Elysium was built and maintained by exploiting the labour and resources of Earth. Now that it no longer possible - all labour and resources can only be used to further the common good of all. So if overpopulation is a problem, then the development of further habitation would be the goal, either in the heavens or on earth.
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May 13, 2014 21:29
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Well, we all like penises of course, but I hope y'all don't mind if we move back to discussing the movie, yeah? So, obviously we agree that Elysium occurs at least 3 years after District 9, or are there nerds so myopic as to to distpute this? thought experiment: would Christopher agree with what the Max-Machina hath wrought, earning his human-name? Or would there be war and tragedy as the first movie hinted at? Blood Boils fucked around with this message at 11:20 on May 17, 2014 |
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May 17, 2014 10:45
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Lonos Oboe posted:District 9 is one of my all time favourite films. What is quite annoying is that Elysium is an almost, beat for beat re-make of that film down to motivations and action scenes. The difference is pretty minor; one is about race, and the other about class. I like to think they occur in the same story - Christopher never came back, the prawns died out in D-10 (or still survive in D-twentywhatever), and humans figured out how to ape some of the alien space and weapon technology. Neat way to tie Sharto's characters together: Kruger is the "what-if" Wikus is cured of his non-Otherness. He didn't get returned to his wife, but had to replace the black-op-merc guy (the price of his "cure"). Cue a hundred years of degeneracy. He becomes the darkness hinted at the end of the Robocop's, that any individual assertion of identity is meaningless if you simply rejoin or condone an unjust system. Eau de MacGowan posted:Did the Space Jesus prophecy bits get tacked on by focus groups? No, but if it did, then focus groups were right and Blomkamp was wrong.
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Jun 29, 2014 00:54
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Nerdfest X posted:Turning Matt Damon into Space Jesus. Why? They could have left out the "whoever downloads this program dies" aspect, but this was probably the one factor that the entire film was built around since day one. He's Cyborg Jesus because he quite literately does what Jesus does - Max is a criminal who willingly gives up his life in a contest with the state to save the whole world. As for the system hacking, obviously the download is permanent. The robot guards prevent the human soldiers from threatening to arrest Che, because they are all equal now, immediately and forever. I imagine that the system would reject any attempt to tamper with who is or is not a citizen. Like even if the new president is also an engineer with executive passwords and poo poo and is like "no, medical robots, stop helping others that's an order" they would just gently push him out of the way and ignore him, since medical aid is the right of all citizens. And to add to Foster's let-me-die reasons, I think she probably wanted to die by that point. All her rational justifications are for naught, her plans have failed, the poor are asserting their equality and she's got glass in her neck. edit: aw man so beaten lol
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Nov 10, 2014 17:48
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I bet Fitchner never designed the system to allow any kind of software or hardware method of erasing someone's citizenship, sort of destroying every single robot and computer. After all, he would do this because a) he would be revolted by the idea of being able to lose his social status, and b) the possibility that everyone could belong to Elysium is inconceivable to him.Snak posted:It's also kind of implied that William Fitchner's character was basically the only one in a unique position to be able to hack the system, because he had both the security clearance to access it and he was one of the people that designed it (I think). So with him dead, anyone who wanted to change it would have to pull a super-wizard class hacker out of their rear end AND be able to get them into the place guarded by robot soldiers. The Tea-Party sequel will have one of the technocrats who survived the grenade reanimate Kruger, and together they storm the mainframe to re-establish
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Nov 11, 2014 01:06
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