Elysium: if Tony Abbott was Jodie Foster and Australia was a satellite filled with the cartoonishly selfish

SPOILERS

So in Elysium, the poor and desperate of Earth trying to seek refuge on Elysium, the orbiting habitat where the fortunate live, are shot down or deported as “illegals” by the ruthless comfortable few.

An interesting allegory of anti-refugee rhetoric in our world today?

Well, it could have been, if the people on Elysium weren’t cartoonishly evil, if the world below made sense, and if the plot wasn’t ridiculous.

• Who governs on Earth? Elysium seems to have its own embassies, implying it’s a different regime – so why do the people on Earth and their rulers put up with being ground into the dirt by the people on Elysium?
• Why isn’t anyone on Earth using those magical medibays? Surely on a massively overpopulated planet someone would have found a way to pinch that unbelievably important tech and put it in Earth hospitals.
• And apart from being evil, why aren’t the people on Elysium willing to share the medibay tech? Apparently they have a whole bunch of them sitting in med-shuttles ready to fly down to Earth at a moment’s notice – they just refuse to. Because evil?
• If you’re going to shoot down refugee vessels on their way to Elysium, wouldn’t you do it from Elysium rather than getting someone on Earth to fire missiles in the direction of Elysium?
• Why can the Elysium security chief simply declare that a crashed shuttle is “an Act of War” (by whom?) and seize power just on her own say-so? If she had that power, why the need for the rest of her elaborate scheme?
• Why did Elysium have a magical “reboot” code that was in the hands of some random contractor? And when it was executed, why didn’t the powers that be on Elysium simply reset it? Why couldn’t they arrest “Spider” just because he was now deemed a “citizen” – was there absolute anarchy up there where citizens could commit any crime and not be arrested for it?
• Where are all the other space stations? What, they built Elysium on their first go, right after the ISS?
• If they can make droids that are basically terminators, that can fight melee with humans and manage all the complex calculations to do that – why are they still bothering with humans in factories? Wouldn’t their robots build whatever they need faster and cheaper?

And stop ending sci-fi films with fist-fights between the hero and the villain. IT’S SO VERY, VERY BORING.