Love the tease. Not the videogame-ish stuff, cuz that’s never been my thing (not that it necessarily bothers me, either, though, as long as it’s not the entire point of the film). But the flipping around of a movie image that’s among the few that are nearly religious in their iconicness: the wheel in space. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick made this a symbol of hope, of the majesty of humanity’s ingenuity, of a bright shining future.
Neill Blomkamp, in an instant, has made it represent exclusion and privilege. It doesn’t say, Come join us in the future. It says, Stay away — this is not for you.
Brilliant. Well, assuming the film is able to follow though on that. After District 9, I trust that Blomkamp can pull it off.
Oh, right, I’d forgotten that he was attached to that project. It does certainly look like he was able to use some of the art resources he developed for Halo. Or maybe he just fell in love with the image, since ot probably doesn’t really matter what Elysium actually looks like.
Hee! I made a prediction several years ago that we’d work our way through a spate of Depression-era-esque “Isn’t being rich wonderful and very, very normal?” movies and be getting to the “time to take down the rich and powerful 1%” movies right about now. Of course, the rich & powerful are actually making the movie, so the hero is of course a straight white guy. You go, Matt Damon; save us all!
Well it worked for “It Happened One Night, why not now?
“straight white guy”: Oh I think we can give him a little slack after Wikus Van De Merwe
Did they have a brief spate of “Gee, sucks that the rich demolished the economy, but they’re just people with real problems who make mistakes that happen to screw you and somehow leave them still rich!” movies during the Depression, too? That was depressing.
I think the Hollywood simplification is: if there are rich and poor people in the film, the poor people are the good guys. If there are only rich people (see most romcomcs), there’s nothing wrong with being rich – unless there’s someone who’s more rich than the rest of the characters, in which case he’s the bad guy again.
Pandering to the standard American underdog mythology, in other words.
Still, Blomkamp may have been allowed to tell a more interesting story than Good Guys vs Bad Guys. As usual, hard to tell. (I don’t think a trailer ever makes me enthusiastic for a film, though it can put me off one completely.)
I’m not totally sure about the plot of the movie but I’ve had a fascination with the Stanford Torus (wheeled space station) since I first saw the concept drawing as a little kid. I’d like to see the movie just to see how that part of it is depicted on film.