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7 Weakass Criticisms Of Elysium

A good number of people are terribly disappointed by Elysium. I feel for them, I really do. It sucks when a movie doesn’t live up to your expectations. I’m less sympathetic to weak attempts at arguments as to why a movie didn’t work for a given group of viewers, and tend to think that with the subjective nature of watching, it easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because a lot of people are making the same criticisms of a movie, then those criticisms surely must be pretty much objectively true and designate the movie as a bad one. I don’t buy it. Sometimes the standards people set for a movie are kind of bullshitty, and I think this is happening with Elysium right now.

[h2]2) The villains are too one-dimensional[/h2]

Elysium

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This might be the second most predominant criticism I’ve come across, and while I consider it to carry slightly more water than criticism number 1, I still have to return to the issue of perspective. I know it would be nice to really dig into Jodie Foster and William Fichtner’s characters, to truly understand their psyches and motivations and what their childhoods were like and what traumas or impactful moments could have led them to the people they are in the film’s present, but not only is that not this movie’s concern, it’s a necessary consequence of putting the audience, us, in the mindset of the impoverished, desperate, and justifiably resentful people of Earth.

It’s no different than a novel being told in the first person limited point of view, except that we don’t get to hear the character’s inner monologue. But we do see everything from their perspective like we would in a novel, and that means that the villains are presented as villains, without sympathy or too much exploration. Of course there are complicated factors that go into present-day real-life scenarios where the wealthy could easily use their resources to provide healthcare and assistance to underprivileged people, but ultimately, if you’re one of the people in desperate need of help and capable people are unwillingly to give it, isn’t it more like that you’ll be less concerned with their circumstances than you are with your own? It’s limited thinking that turns these others into aliens, essentially, but that’s precisely the point.

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