For all you suburbanite Republicans who feel powerless against the tide of socialism sweeping the nation, could you maybe for once NOT see a movie that is so blatantly criminalizing and hating you? No, no, I know. That would "hurt movie night" in the blissfully ignorant suburbs.
Some movies, like Whitehouse Down and After Earth, are not even worth pirating. The time spent downloading them is better spent taking a dump, which is basically the same thing.
ReplyDeleteWhat if I go to watch Elysium for physics porn? I want to estimate the diameter and angular velocity of the space station to calculate an approximate value for the gravity on Elysium.
ReplyDeleteI'll also be on the lookout for other violations of Newtonian physics.
The political messages will fall on deaf ears because of robots and explosions.
I'm very interested in seeing this movie. It should be very reactionary like Blomkamp's earlier District 9.
ReplyDeletefor more on this see: http://blog.jim.com/culture/the-ideological-cause-of-the-benghazi-bungles.html/comment-page-1#comment-285048
One possibility is that Elysium is the enclave where the liberal elite goes after they ruin earth with diversity (Elysium==Martha's Vineyard)
Another is that Elysium==Galt's Gulch.
I, of course, have no intention of seeing that film, or Whitehouse Down for that matter.
ReplyDeleteAfter Earth wasn't so bad, but I could not understand why they did not use guns on those creatures. If knives and spears worked, obviously a firearm would. Or a plasma rifle.
District 9 was a work of pure genius, a true original that could only have been made away from Hollywood. Elysium appears to be using the Hollywood playbook. I hope that it does poorly at the box office.
ReplyDeleteI had the exact same reaction to this movie when I watched the trailer, but there have been some rumors going around the manosphere that Neill Blomkamp is a neo-reactionary.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't matter much. I'm way, way too cheap to see this thing in the theater.
I have no intention of watching it, but I'm a libertarian rather than a Conservative.
ReplyDeleteI checked out of "movie night" years ago. Why should I pay them $10 or more to sit in a crowded room and watch commercials? I thought the point to movie theaters was no commercials. If I wanted to see commercials I'd watch it at home.
Captain - with respect - I think you are perhaps looking at this the wrong way.
ReplyDeleteGood stories are good stories regardless of their politics. The reason for that is that they make us think and talk about them afterward. Regardless of the pasty faced authors and producers, we can ask the pertinent questions and use their authors' incorrect answers as learning tools.
Elysium illustrates some things lefties would rather deny: that slavery and serfdom are choices that you are always free to either accept or reject. Another is that not all men are born equal. Elysium is an excellent work of leftist propaganda - can the youngsters explain why this is? Can they read between the lines and see what is NOT being said as you did?
There IS value in some of these movies PROVIDED that they are followed by a thoughtful critique afterward. Yes, Matt Damon is a ball gargler and Sean Penn should be fired out of a cannon...but they CAN serve as useful fools for us too if they are properly exploited to educate our young rather than deceive them.
I agree that most lefty dreck is pedantic, boring and insulting to the intelligence...but, occasionally...they can produce work with merit.
Nothing gets more hateful than Avatar. but yeah, I won't go see this. maybe ill watch it on cable. I won't be brainwashed and ill use it as a training video. would rather go see enders game.
ReplyDeleteThe irony of movies like Elysium is that they far more resemble the dynamic of trendy, white, liberal, elite enclaves side by side with impoverished ethic ghettos found blue state urban areas than anything else. The progressive creative mindset is a case study in Freudian psychological projection.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to see the movie, but I think there's one credible aspect to it: that if you remove the knowledgeable people (not the "elite" or the "1%" but rather the people who actually make things work, which aren't that many), no matter how much labor and resources you have left, wealth will quickly decrease and societal collapse will follow.
ReplyDelete(I'm given to understand that this is the idea behind "Atlas Shrugged" but quite a few other people had said the same, including David Ricardo and Adam Smith, not that most edumacated people in the US/EU would know their works...)
Just consider how few people actually know the details of antenna design for cellular communications (When I taught that in the last century, about 1% of the students who passed the class would be able to repair one, let alone redesign a tower array). If a lightning strikes a tower, and there are no spares left, oops no more cell communications. (It's not like people who don't understand antenna design can just build one from blueprints, too much implicit knowledge shared by the engineers in the profession.)
Managers get a bad rep, I know (deservedly so in many cases), but without someone who knows how to organize logistics and production, say buh-bye to mass production of many goods.
I guess the point the movie makes (from your video, since I don't watch these movies) is that most people are really leeches on the creativity and knowledge of a few, and if the few decide to Go Galt (to a satellite, say), the leeches will starve for lack of a body.
That's not unlikely. That's extremely likely. That's why so many people in the "elites" (with their double masters in Lesbian Eskimo Poetry from Harvard and a job in a nonprofit funded by a long-dead millionaire) are so worried about people disconnecting from society.
JCS
Dave --
ReplyDeleteFuture Los Angeles = hyper-dystopian Johannesburg
Elysium orbital city = upper-class Sandton / Bryanston in space
"Director of 'homeland security'" = post-nationalist head country club cop
"No-fly zone" = Kafkaesque cage goes looking for a bird
Even some of the CG vehicles have RSA flags on them ...
I was mildly interested by the special effects, but the story (politics aside) actually made it less appealing. It might have been more interesting if it was a distant relative down there that needed help and they had to hire hoodlums to smuggle them from an earth that has gone Detroit.
ReplyDelete