And make no mistake—this is a morality tale about immigration policy. Thus the desperate Third World masses occasionally try to fly to Elysium in crude spacecraft. These are referred to as “undocumented” ships.
Los Angeles is an overpopulated Third World wasteland, where swelling masses of non-whites scramble through the ruins of a once-great city. The rich and powerful live figuratively and literally above the ruins, experiencing luxuries and pleasures that most Angelenos can only dream of.
Also Matt Damon stars in a new movie set there. The only difference is that, in his futuristic version, the rich live in space.
Elysium is in its own way a masterpiece. It’s a dystopian morality play oblivious to its own absurdity, earnest to the point of kitsch, equally self-righteous and sentimental. In the world of the future, the middle class is a thing of the past, and so, apparently, is irony.
Yet despite it all, Damon and writer-director Neill Blomkamp give us something timeless. They have achieved artistic immortality in capturing the premises, the delusions, and the peculiarly poisonous moral idealism behind the ideology we call “Open Borders.” Elysium succeeds because it shows us what it is to believe that “citizenship” itself is the root cause of oppression.
Ironically, Elysium inadvertently concedes that today’s “nativists” are right. The futuristic Los Angeles is a decrepit, overcrowded ruin. The English conversations of the main characters are simply for the American audience—all the casual encounters in the film are in Spanish. Matt Damon’s character, “Max,” is the fulfillment of VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s projected but unwritten concluding Alien Nation chapter about the last white family in Los Angeles, except that “Max” was raised by (Spanish-speaking) nuns.
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