Elysium as a critical dystopia

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that Elysium communicates a ‘critical dystopia’ that illuminates and interrogates global capitalism’s worst social, political, ecological and technological conditions and shows them being resisted and changed, for the better. To this end, our article’s first section contextualizes Elysium by building upon recent studies of global Hollywood, the genre characteristics and politics of science fiction films and ‘critical dystopia’. The second section interprets Elysium’s dystopian future of society, the state, environment and technology, and argues it forwards a critique of present-day global capitalism’s class divisions and dispossessions, neo-liberal security state, ecological catastrophe and militarized technology. The third section excavates Elysium’s alternative to the fictional and actual dystopic conditions of capitalism the film critiques, thereby liberating the film’s imminent utopian content from the cage of its commodity form. The conclusion addresses some important criticisms of Elysium’s politics: its perpetuation of Hollywood’s ‘white saviour’ trope, regressive gender dynamics, and ‘single point of failure’ fantasy. Despite these problems, Elysium still has value as a critical dystopian film.