Elysium why

In the future Earth is over populated and so polluted that the wealthy and powerful create a new place to live. It's called Elysium and it's just within Earth's orbit. So people on Earth who want to use it try to get there. But the Secretary of Defense Delacourt uses unsanctioned operatives like a man named Kruger to keep them off Elysium.

Her latest attempt to keep people off Alysium catches the ire of the President who tells her to tone down her attitude and to stop using men like Kruger. Delacourt then approaches Carlyle, the head of Armadyne Corp, the company that built Elysium and all of what they use up there and asks him to make a program that would allow her to remove the President and put someone else in his position.

He agrees to do it. On Earth, Max a man who has dreamed of going to Elysium and taking Frey, a girl he grew up with there.

Max works for Armadyne and while at work Max is exposed to radiation and has days to live and needs to go to Elysium to use the machine. So he approaches Spider the man who gets people to Elysium for a price. But since Max can't pay him, he makes Max a proposition, he will get him there if Max gets some information out of the head of Armadyne's head.

Max agrees and is fitted with an exo-skeleton to help him. They intercept Carlyle as he was leaving for Elysium to deliver the program to Delacout and get the information out of him. Delacourt would send Kruger to save Carlyle but is killed in the crossfire. Delacourt tells Kruger to get Max because he has the program in his head.

And Kruger decides to get Max through Frey. When Spider sees the program he tells Max this could change the whole system but Max wants to help Frey first. The year is , and the division between social classes has grown wider than ever before. For a villain, it offers not only Foster's character, but Sharlto Copley as her vicious felon henchman, as volatile and cruel a presence as we've seen on screen in some time. When he interrogates Max's childhood friend, now a nurse Alice Braga with a daughter Emma Tremblay dying of leukemia, he momentarily feigns sympathy: "I don't believe in committing violent acts in front of kids," he taunts, leaving viewers bracing for the worst.

Let's start with the medical pods. The film is vague about how numerous they are, and their healing powers barely stop short of resurrection. That seems less like a plausible vision of the future and more like a screenwriter's contrivance for keeping favorite characters alive. And while it's noble for Max and black-market dealer Spider Wagner Moura to want to grant Elysian citizenship and healthcare to every person on Earth, the movie makes no attempt to address the scarcity issue that's allegedly given rise to this dystopia in the first place.

By limiting the Earth-bound action to Los Angeles, the film leaves questions dangling about the rest of the world while at the same time squandering an opportunity for imagination. Class disparity is one of the oldest archetypes in sci-fi movies, dating from "Metropolis" at least, and idea-wise, "Elysium" doesn't hold its own even by recent standards of the subgenre.

Check out on Andrew Niccol's underrated " In Time ," in which the haves and have-nots use the minutes they have to live as currency.

But as a vehicle for putting Matt Damon in a bionic getup on a messianic action quest, "Elysium" has enough grist to power through. He edited the film section of Time Out Chicago from to and served as a staff critic for the magazine beginning in Matt Damon as Max. Alice Braga as Frey. Wagner Moura as Spider. Diego Luna as Julio. Sharlto Copley as Kruger. Taken a step further: Does anyone actually live on Elysium, or are they just at pool parties all day?

During one of the home-invasion sequences, you can faintly hear an automated real estate spiel, indicating that this is some sort of open house … that just so happens to be stocked with an expensive, totally superfluous med-bed. Elysium is a place that everyone on Earth would kill to get to, so why does it feel so much like a ghost town? Would everyone on Elysium really be okay with that ending?

But also, would the rich people on Elysium really allow that to happen? Would everyone on Earth be really okay with that ending? Are we to assume that everyone will just orderly stand behind each other in line, waiting to heal their many ailments?

If there are 11 billion people on Earth which is a safe assumption based on estimates , it will take about years to heal everyone. Even if somehow there are miraculously 10, med-beds and the whole process takes just over a year, then what? And, sure, now Earthlings can travel to Elysium, but then Elysium would just get overpopulated and the rich people would simply build a second, better Elysium — one where people actually spend time inside their houses.

Who knew?