After all, relying on the extraordinary reputation of "District Nine", Neill is now changing shotguns and can afford to hire first-line movie stars such as Matt Damon and Judy Foster, and it seems that the $100 million budget is not in vain. The special effects of the film are outstanding. In particular, the director continued the unique taste of "District Nine" and conceived many strange weapons, including exoskeleton mechas, close-fitting ammunition, automatic search for target-absorbed booby mines, etc. The visual effects are enough to return. Ticket value. However, the whole film is lacklustre from plot to ideology, and it is completely reduced to a Hollywood propaganda film that endorses the Obama administration's immigration and universal health care policies, which is disappointing.
(There are spoilers below, readers need to be cautious.) The
story takes place in 2154. At this time, the earth is no longer suitable for the elites to live due to excessive development, lack of resources, environmental pollution, and dense population. So the upper class society (the film says French as a sign) have moved to the space station Elysium in low-Earth orbit, and the wealthy and powerless civilians can only stay on the earth, either doing nothing or making machines for the ruler of Elysium in a harsh working environment. The police (wait, it sounds like the recent remake of "Total Memories"?) The residents of Elysium have a universal medical machine that can repair their bodies at the atomic level, so they can stay young and live forever, and the residents of the earth are due to the environment. Pollution, so the disease is frequent and the life span is short. (Isn't this exactly the same as "Time Planning Bureau"?) One day, the former car thief Max, who was famous in the past but now has his heart, entered the workshop due to the irregular operation of the robot factory and the pressure of the foreman, and ingested lethal radiation. Only 5 days of life are left. As a last resort, he found a snakehead specializing in smuggling, and asked to help him smuggle to Elysium based on the merits of stealing the car, and use a medical machine to repair his body.
Snakehead is also a businessman, telling Max that it was then and now is now (man, Sunk Cost cannot be included in the calculation of net present value!) To go to Elysium, you have to do another ticket sale for him: become a human brain memory , To intercept and download the bank cards, IC cards, and IQ card passwords of the rich (seems familiar with the bad movie "Defense of Secrets/Johnny Mnemonic" starring Keanu Reeves), and send him to Elysium. In desperation, Max could only accept this condition. Because his body was too weak, he had to wear an exoskeleton mecha. By mistake, they downloaded the restart code of Elysium during the crime, which can reset all citizenships in the space station. It turned out that Delacourt, the urban management captain of Elysium, used the temporary agent Kruger hidden in the earth because of brutal law enforcement (that is, the urban management captain infected by alien creatures in the "Ninth District". Greatly increased), destroying the smuggling spacecraft with the snake head, causing a large number of casualties of illegal immigrants. The president of Elysium warned Delacourt that temporary workers should no longer be used for law enforcement, and that existing temporary workers should be removed from the civil service.
The dissatisfied Delacourt intends to engage in a bloodless coup. With a 200-year exclusive contract, the arms dealer in Max’s factory was lured to provide her with the code to restart Elysium, depriving the current president of the residence rights, and she could replace it herself. . The hapless arms dealer became the target of Max's looting, not only failed to deliver the code to Delacourt, but also died. In order to retrieve the code, Delacourt recalled Kruger, who had lost his status as a civil servant, and promised that if he completes the task, he will become a regular employee of the Elysium government. Salaries, benefits, and pensions are all necessary.
It seems that even after more than a hundred years, this kind of civil servant treatment is still very tempting. Although Kruger is very dissatisfied with her "calling, come and go" attitude, he still agrees on this condition. Up. Then there are various gun battles, explosions, and fighting scenes, from the earth to the sky. Finally, with the help of the snakehead, Max kills Kruger and restarts Elysium, turning all potential illegal immigrants on the earth into legal citizens, and Elysium The medical spacecraft on board also descended from the sky and began to rescue the residents of the earth. The film came to an end in the harmonious scene of the legalization of all illegal immigration and full access to free healthcare for all, and Max also closed his eyes with satisfaction after confessing to his childhood sweetheart (this kind of Hollywood clichés and the last of Chinese movies) One-time party fee and some fight).
This kind of conflict between indigenous peoples on Earth and immigrants from outer space is not uncommon in science fiction works. In Asimov’s classic robot series ("Steel Cave", "Naked Sun", "Robot in the Dawn"), people on Earth They are often the targets of discrimination, threats, and oppression by new aliens, and robots are often the executors of such oppression. In his empire series "Stones in the Sky", the Galactic Empire directly stationed a governor on the earth to manage the affairs of the earth. At this time, the origin of mankind on the earth has become a heretical doctrine. There is a similar plot in the earlier classic science fiction novel "Time Machine" (by Herbert George Wells). A scientist came to 802701 AD through a time travel machine and discovered that humans had evolved into two types, Eloys, people who lived on the ground. They are petite and weak, dressed in gorgeous clothes, do not think about work, and pursue a comfortable life excessively. The other type is called the Morlocks, which are humans who live underground. They look like white monkeys with gray-red eyes and light yellow hair; they are accustomed to the dark, afraid of light and fire, and can only move on the ground at night. They produce various items for the Eloy by the underground machine, but their own food is the Eloy. Obviously, this bears the imprint of the theory of class struggle at the end of the 19th century.
If "Elysium" is fairly well established in the context of the era, then the plot of restarting the system and changing the president is too absurd. If everything is computerized in the United States now, then super users like Snowden only need A reboot of the system can replace Obama. Does it still need to hide? If an arms dealer can restart the entire space city, wouldn't the system administrator also be able to do it easily?
Of course, such technical details do not need to be investigated in depth, after all, this is not a film review on system security. However, the understanding of social and economic operations in the film can almost be described as mentally retarded. The movie ended just right after the system restarted, but we had to ask: What will happen then? If the inhabitants of the earth all want to immigrate to Elysium, can this fragile space city hold it? The director may say that the stowaways of the earth are to enjoy the universal medical device on Elysium, and now it is universal medical insurance, so there is no need to squeeze on Elysium. But we still have to ask: What will happen then? If the inhabitants of the earth can live forever, then there will be more and more people here and fewer resources. In the end, it is very likely that they will have to work hard to prolong their lives from the age of 25, just like in the Time Planning Bureau. Or is it more humane than normal birth, aging, sickness, and death like in "Small Stones in the Sky", where death is mandatory at the age of 60? To take a step back, even if the universal medical machine cures the disease and cannot cure the disease, should medical services be free? A very strange setting in the film is that the universal medical device is only available on Elysium, and the penetration rate is very high. There are almost one in one family, but there is no one on the earth, so patients need to spend expensive smuggling fees. , Risked his life to smuggle onto Elysium, and had to pass fake identity authentication. With such a great effort, you can smuggle a machine directly to the earth, not all problems will be solved, and the urban management team will no longer have to worry about illegal immigration. Residents on the earth may still have to pay a high price to use it, but there is no need to sneak into it at the risk of death. To cure the disease. Furthermore, in a market economy, where there is demand, there is supply. At the beginning, there may be huge profits. When competition goes up, prices will naturally come down. But no one will make a loss-making business again, so who will pay for it for free? Who will research and develop?
Free is not feasible, not to say that the higher the charge, the better. The shortage of medical machines on the earth in the film is unlikely to be the manufacturer's own sales restrictions under complete market competition: merchants are chasing profits, and who doesn't like to do profitable business? It is more likely to be caused by government regulation or monopolistic enterprises to obtain high profits. For example, some pharmaceutical manufacturers set prices in European and American markets much higher than those in Asian and African countries. In order to stop smuggling or artificially create shortages, they may completely abandon the markets of developing countries. But this is actually not in line with its commercial interests and corporate image, so almost no manufacturers do this. The worst thing is to set prices in developing countries according to developed countries, but it only reduces sales and does not allow patients to smuggle into the United States to buy medicines.
The only thing you can think of that even if you have money, you can't buy it, but the class above a certain level can enjoy it, is the so-called special offering. It seems that the universal medical device in the film is also a special offering, but be careful. If the basic necessities of life, such as food, air, and water, are specially provided, can you sleep peacefully even on the temple?
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