Symptom 104: Elysium - The Good Side of Town
We continue or exploration of the works of Neil Blomkamp with Elysium. You know, the movie that put a very fine point on the class struggle between the poor and ultra rich. The movie that came out when the term “the 1%” was just gaining steam. That movie. Well, while we all thought it would be a progressive left power fest, it was really just an action film. Yep. Just Matt Damon punching things into submission.
Oh wait, sarcasm font doesn’t exist. Yes, this is exactly what we thought it was. It is a progressive left tale of the woefully unbalanced distribution of wealth and power. How the rich can’t be arrested, have access to all the best health care while the poor are shuffled off to die or arrested on their way to work. There is an immigration commentary as well as a labor rights discussion. Unfortunately the movie is a shallow as a a puddle in a pothole and once you dive in your find the substance of a good, balanced discussion is missing. Unlike District 9 this one lacks depth of any kind. Maybe Chappie will be a little deeper?
For record, one of us really didn’t like this movie and might be writing the show notes. The other two felt it was ok/average and might not be writing the show notes.
****I apologize for the delay and for the audio issues this week. The delay was due to attempting to clean up the audio as much as possible. There is some distortion all throughout this recording due to latency. I recently purchased a new computer and the pairing with the interface wasn’t correctly done and it resulted in a latency/lag that i did not catch until after editing was being done and it could not be corrected. This will be fixed for Symptom 105***