10 Movie Dystopias To Make You Feel Better About The Current Political Hellscape
4. Elysium
Elysium is a story with the classic dichotomy between paradise and purgatory, the fabled city in the sky where everything is perfect and the ravaged earth below.
It focuses on not only the environmental factors that have led to an earth that is somewhat less than hospitable to its inhabitants, but also on the type of society that would be willing to send a certain number of people (i.e. those who can pay for it) up to Elysium, a space station orbiting earth, while abandoning the rest of civilization to the planet's surface.
Fittingly for today's times, it shows what happens when health care is only available to those who are able to pay large sums of money for it. In the film, the space shuttle has medical equipment that can cure pretty much any illness known to man, but the only people who have access to it are the elites who are Elysium citizens.
(The implications of what it means to be a citizen and a non-citizen as relates to our current situation with undocumented immigrants and refugees is also fairly obvious.)