Elysium isn't science fiction, it's all around us right now

In the fifth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in The Bible, it reads, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

‘Meek’ describes the powerless and in director Neill Blomkamp’s new film, Elysium, this is literally the case. Set in 2154, the film presents a vision of Earth as home of the powerless, impoverished and diseased. For the rich, there’s Elysium, a state-of-the-art space station that hovers above the planet and is endowed with all sorts of advanced technology.

Starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, Elysium is an action thriller. An ex-con named Max (Damon) tries to make an honest living, but when the callousness of his surpervisor results in him being irradiated, Max gets angry and desperate.

With the help of a new exoskeleton and a brain reboot (sort of), he becomes one helluva fighting machine and he’s determined to break into Elysium and get cured in the med-pods that keep its residents healthy.

This story seems like the stuff of science fiction and it is, but some of the ideas in the film are rooted in the present and the real. Elysium’s Earth sequences were filmed outside Mexico City, at one of the world’s largest garbage dumps. The space station playground for the rich and healthy is, of course, computer-generated, but much of it was modelled upon Malibu.

“People have asked me if I think this is what will happen in 140 years, but this isn’t science fiction. This is today. This is now,” said Blomkamp in an interview to the British newspaper The Telegraph . He got the idea while on holiday at Tijuana in Mexico, where Blomkamp and a friend were arrested by the Mexican police (for drinking beer on a stretch where it’s not allowed).

The director and his friend were dropped off in the middle of nowhere after they bribed the Mexican police. “It took us about three hours to walk back and that was really the genesis of Elysium because I could see floodlights from the US border and there were Black Hawk helicopters flying up and down and we were in this poverty stricken area with fires and feral dogs and it was the most insane feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” said Blomkamp.

The idea of separating the rich from the poor isn’t a new idea — it’s the basis of most urban planning — but in contrast to feudal and rural spaces, cities have had the facade of being more democratic. In fact, the more democratic it appears to be, the more thriving a city seems to be. For decades, the cheerful observation about Mumbai was that the auto rickshaw could score over expensive cars in traffic jams and potholed roads. If you were travelling by road, regardless of how famous you are, you’d be stuck in a traffic jam and for those unmoving minutes, the celebrity and the humble, salaried chap in the taxi beside the BMW, were the same.

Mumbai, though, is changing. There are roads that are meant for the moneyed (like the Bandra-Worli Sealink, which demands a minimum fee of Rs 55 in exchange for a pretty view and smooth roads that don’t have plebeian vehicles like trucks and autos plying them). Residential complexes enclose areas for their residents, creating an artificial world made up of pools, gyms and landscaped gardens within its boundaries.

This is true of much of India, not just Mumbai. It just seems more pronounced here because the city has for so long had a reputation of being open to people with dreams, rather than healthy bank balances. In India, if you’re rich, you create a personal Elysium and distance yourself as far as possible from the unwashed masses that make up the rest of the country. As more and more cities and small towns look to create these artificial realities, there are now different worlds that Indians inhabit depending upon their buying power.

Look at the advertisements for new real estate projects, and all of them promise the buyer a contained world of artificial luxury, modelled upon a foreign ideal. Some residential complexes seek to recreate the Hollywood version of American suburbia. Apartment building promise an “attached lifestyle”, designer interiors and surroundings that are as neat and perfect as only computer-generated imagery can be. Office complexes are replicas of metal and glass spaces that are considered standard abroad. The architecture of those buildings responded to certain ideas and requirements that were local. Ours are certified copies, often terribly unsuited our local context.

But the unsuitability doesn’t bother us. The foreignness of the design, instead of being a problem, is what makes these homes and offices desirable. They emphasise a sense of distance between those within from those without. Walk in through the secure doors and step into the lift, and the building is intended to be a cocoon that drowns out the sounds from outside. Inside, there is the space that you don’t see outside. Here, there’s someone keeping everything clean and shiny, in contrast to the dusty jaggedness outside. From the colour palette to the very air you breathe, everything is not just different inside modern office and residential complexes; more often than not, they’re markedly alien to an Indian aesthetic, traditional, vintage or contemporary.

In the 2000s, we’re doing precisely what Blomkamp has imagined for the 22nd century in Elysium. The technology to set up a space station that would be as physically comfortable as life on earth is presently beyond us, so we’re working as hard as we can to establish that kind of metaphorical distance between the wretched and the successful. Our skyscrapers are much further away from ground reality than the number of floors that they comprise. Blomkamp’s Elysium isn’t really in the future. It’s all around us right now.