Virtually every review I’ve read that is less than positive toward Elysium laments the fact that the world of Elysium, the space station inhabited by the socioeconomic elites of the future, is gorgeously imagined and designed, but remains elusive to the audience. They wanted to know more about this world, what its people were like, what they do all day, what the rest of their homes are like outside of the Med-Pods, what their political and social infrastructure is, and probably whether they poo or not. There is truth to this criticism. We don’t know much at all about what life on Elysium is like, and are left wanting to know more. It seems too good to be true.
This is the most common complaint I’ve heard from writers and is also the most flimsy. In fact, I would tout this as one of Elysium’s strengths: it remains consistent in its solidarity with the perspective of those on Earth. It’s this perspective that seems to have left a lot of people cold and disappointed, and indeed one of the least appreciated tactics of modern film, and I don’t entirely understand why. It would seem many viewers want to see a movie as an objective take on its story. But in the same way The Great Gatsby inhabited the character of Gatsby and Man of Steel took on the character of Superman, like really embodied the subjective attributes of these characters, Elysium takes on the perspective of the Max character played by Damon, or at the very least the perspective of the Earth-dwellers as a whole. So Elysium is appropriately out of our reach, just as it is for those on Earth. We don’t get to know much about it, other than the fact that it houses the wealthiest of the wealthy and it has these magic healing pods, because that’s exactly what those still on Earth learn about it from a young age. I know it would have been nice to experience this alternate world more, but that yearning puts us squarely in the shoes of the underdogs of this movie.
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