Anonymous Robot posted:If Elysium were intellectually honest, it could never have ended with a compromise, but instead- in one way or the other- a conquest. It's been a while since I've seen it, but it didn't seem like a compromise to me at all. It seemed like a pretty clear-cut conquest, actually: through becoming citizens, the proletariat have essentially dismantled the system of Elysium and used its tools to rebuild it as an egalitarian system. The citizen/non-citizen divide is the film's allegory for being one of the richest in America and being one of its proletariat, not an allegory for literal citizens and non-citizens; Max flipping the switch to make everyone a citizen is essentially the same as if America's poor rose up and took all the rich's toys for themselves.
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May 11, 2014 09:11
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:38 |
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That's not really what I'm arguing, though. You're taking issue with the concept of a populist revolution in general, I'm taking issue with the assertion that this film is portraying a center-left US-liberal fantasy of revolution through compromise.
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May 11, 2014 09:53
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Ungoal posted:Having literally everyone on Elysium be white while having 90% of the people on Earth be either brown or black was just cringeworthy. Why, too close to reality for you? Like, I don't want to be like SMG and accuse you of bias because you don't agree with me on a movie, but you're aware of how this comes off, right?
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May 11, 2014 11:01
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Strategic Tea posted:Yes, but in real revolutions it's the establishment of a new government (that functions at all, let alone delivers socialism) that is difficult. In the film this is reduced to 'press butan', and the long term challenge is to This is a valid reading of the movie, but not really what I took from it. The stuff you're talking about is well outside the scope of the movie, which is largely focused on the revolution itself; the actual bits of society getting better take up maybe the last couple minutes of the movie. It's not saying that utopia will suddenly be easy to build, just proposing that revolution is a valid first step.
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May 11, 2014 21:19
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BMS posted:Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with you here for the most part. Discussing the plot, and what it's meant to deliver is fine. However, (and this isn't just limited to this thread mind you but nearly every other discussion I've seen of this movie on the internet), I've seen discussions of that delve off into some pretty weird tangents. Eh. It really kind of comes with the territory, given that the movie is basically about a violent Marxist revolution portrayed sympathetically and was released primarily in a country that largely has no clue what Marxism even is other than "BAD THING." When you don't have the proper frame of reference to interpret a movie, you end up with some weird poo poo sometimes. e: And yeah, if you thought Elysium was Blomkamp's "whoops, just kidding" moment, I kinda wonder if we watched the same movie. It's not as deep as District 9, and it's very very unsubtle about its politics, but it's really a drat fun movie; just looking at it purely as an action movie rather than a political tract, I'd only put it a hair behind Dredd. SALT CURES HAM fucked around with this message at 21:40 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 21:34
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James Hardon posted:The "cures" meme. A penis joke.
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May 12, 2014 03:08
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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. Those places don't suddenly vanish into thin air, and a lot of the new citizens are the people who were building the space station parts (and drone parts and etc) in the first place. Really, you could come up with a decent argument for either side, the film doesn't give us enough info for a conclusive answer; we're never shown how Elysium was built or what kind of tech it uses, we just get dropped in x years later.
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May 13, 2014 23:37
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Blomkamp knows how to film a spaceship crash better than anyone I know, but the real reason I love the film is it's I-don't-give-a-gently caress attitude to its message. Like most Dystopian Fiction our hero is fighting the system - technology (or bureaucracy) has advanced to the point where it's now running human affairs. But it's primarily an action film, so instead of any politics or philosophising we get 90 minutes of him literally shooting "the system" in the face with space-guns. This is a pretty good summation of why Elysium is loving awesome. It's a leftist propaganda piece, essentially, but it doesn't get bogged down in it; instead, it has fun with the concept. It's an action movie first and LF: The Movie second.
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May 15, 2014 06:00
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James Hardon posted:The "cures" meme. Penis joke.
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May 15, 2014 20:54
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 15:38 |
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She doesn't know because she doesn't care, basically.
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Nov 17, 2014 21:38
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