Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium isn’t as interesting as his history of fooling the critics:
I’ve read over a hundred reviews of Blomkamp’s two movies, and virtually no critic has noticed that he does not share their worldview.
Not at all.
Blomkamp’s 2009 Best Picture-nominated District 9, in which the black residents of his native Johannesburg demand that their black-run government clear out millions of feckless illegal space aliens, was universally praised by American critics as an apartheid allegory. Yet Blomkamp has relentlessly insisted in interviews that it’s really about “the collapse of Zimbabwe and the flood of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you have impoverished black South Africans in conflict with the immigrants.”
Similarly, Elysium is another Malthusian tale about open borders, set in a dystopian 2154. By then, Los Angeles has been completely overrun by Mexicans, who have turned it into an endless, dusty slum that looks remarkably like urban Mexico today. (Blomkamp filmed for four months in Mexico City.)
[...]
Blomkamp, a gun-loving Afrikaner whose movies are based around his fear that the rapid breeding of Third Worlders threatens to bring down civilization, says Elysium originated in a disastrous visit to Mexico in 2005. While shooting a Nike commercial in lovely San Diego, the Boer crossed the border one evening to see Tijuana, where he was abducted by corrupt Mexican cops who shook him down for $900 in return for not killing him.
Despite the obviousness of Blomkamp’s parable about Mexican immigration’s catastrophic effects, Elysium has been universally interpreted as preaching the need for amnesty, open borders, and Obamacare.
Sailer also mentions John Milius and Christopher Nolan.
If I were 33, in possession of some measure of vision and clear story and directorial skills, and I wanted an enormous technical movie budget, and further, if I could trust that (a) my side of the story (as you describe) would be ‘gotten’ by the cognoscenti and that (b) I could successfully pitch it as a “progressive” anthem (as the critics perceive), I would definitely do it.
There’s plenty of time down the road for Blomkamp to de-cloak.
It doesn’t matter what the message is Progs/Libs/Commies see only what they want to see.
“Rose colored glasses” is the best you can hope for.
While watching the film, I was struck by two main thoughts. The first was “I wonder if the rest of the world thinks that the US has magical tech that heals everything, but doesn’t share it because they are elitist jerks?”
The second thing was “I wonder how many Americans think that the US has magical healing tech that fixes everything?”
Re: the first thought: I wondered what it would be like if, instead of opening new bases to rain bombs down on civilian populations, the US opened new hospitals all over the world, and helped what people they could? (I’m the last person to be suggesting that holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” is the way to fix the world’s problems, btw. I’m just asking the question.)
Re: the second thought: I wonder how much of the endless consumption of food and beverage in the US is enabled by the belief that any illness can be fixed? Because in fact, the efficacy of healing technology in the US is WAY lower than most people believe.