Elysium (2013) is a film about parolee Max Da Costa who is struggling to turn over a new leaf in a world where people on Earth are incredibly poor and disadvantaged and the rich and powerful live on a space station named Elysium orbiting Earth. Elysium has many luxuries and benefits, including most notably med-bays which are capable of healing (almost) any disease or physical damage.

During work, Max Da Costa is pressured into entering a chamber that appears to be meant for heat treating the droids that he is making, where he receives a lethal dose of radiation. He is told that he only has 5 days left to live, and decides to go back to his old ways and do a job for a criminal he is familiar with named Spider.

Spider wants him to download data from an Elysium citizen for access to passwords and data and Max chooses his former boss Carlyle as the target. Unbeknownst to them, Carlyle has also finished writing a program to reboot the computer in charge of controlling all of the droids and everything on Elysium in order to crown a new president as part of a coup.

Max ends up as the only person with this valuable program, and with it he is able to get transportation to Elysium. Here, he finds out that the program cannot be extracted from his brain without him dying from something that the med bays cannot cure and he decides to give up his life in order to give everyone on Earth Elysium citizenship with the help of Spider.

Elysium has a lot of social commentary in it, putting topics such as immigration, worker exploitation, and social class dynamics front and center in the story. However, I didn’t feel like the story really got to do much exploration of the changes in society as a result of the technological advancements shown in the story. For example, although it is mentioned that the med bays can reverse aging, we don’t get to learn of how society on Elysium is different due to the citizens effectively having immortality. We see Max building the same droids that are used to oppress him, but this also fails to become a salient point in the film. Although the details are there, I think the lack of follow-through on them causes the social commentary to fall a bit short.