The Global Divide in the film Elysium

 

The film is set in a future in which the wealth gap has manifested itself in the most extreme way imaginable. The wealthy and the impoverished masses no longer dwell on the same planet. The rich have decamped for a orbital space station called Elysium while the poor dwell in decaying and overcrowded cities. There’s no middle class to speak of, of course.

The situation on earth is obviously one of severe depression. Everyone appears to be poor. Children beg for money in the street. Work is scarce. Factory conditions are deplorable, and workers are forced to take lethal risks for fear of losing their jobs. The market square is bleak, with peasants in rags bringing pigs to sell. The available health care appears to be about what you’d find in an emergency room today, which I guess is meant to seem primitive in contrast with a future that holds easy space travel and beds that provide instant cures.

Elysium’s mayor, played by a stern Jodie Foster in a sharp suit, owns a luxury apartment decked out with stone fire places, Persian rugs and oil paintings in gilt frames. Elsewhere, there are security droids, wide tracts of parkland, and medical scanners designed to rid the body of cancer.

On the other side of the social spectrum, there’s Matt Damon’s Max Da Costa, a lowly Earth dweller who becomes desperately ill following an accident at work. With time running out, he has his body augmented with an exo-suit (which, as the trailer demonstrates, gives Max the strength to take on a security droid in close-quarters combat), and embarks on a dangerous attempt to board Elysium and use one of its life-saving med-pods.