Poverty and Elysium

On Thursday I went to see the movie Elysium. Elysium is set in the future and is about a man, Max who has always wanted to visit the space station called Elysium. The only problem is that he doesn’t have enough money for a ticket up there, or to live on the space station because the only people who live there are wealthy enough to escape the overpopulated and polluted earth. Everyone on earth is impoverished and most have to steal what little others have to live. Max is an ex-felon who is trying to move past that, and he is making a living for himself in a plant that makes robot parts in a radioactive plant. Then he gets stuck in the chamber and is giving a lethal dose of radioactivity he only has 5 days to live and decides that he needs to do whatever he can to get to Elysium so he can use their “med bays” to completely cure him of his sickness. He takes an illegal job to steal important information to take over the space station so that everyone, even poor people, can be citizens. When he does steal the information he makes it to the space station and makes it legal for everyone, but in turn he dies in consequence. The major ethical issue that I saw in this movie was the fact that only the wealthy deserve better living conditions and the poor aren’t even treated like people by the Elysium citizens. I do realize today poor people have fewer advantages than the wealthier, but they don’t have access to a whole other world that is only for them. Elysium is run like a whole different country only for the wealthy. I think that is very unethical because the economic status of a person does not declare whether or not they deserve medical care. The movie basically asserts that impoverished people don’t deserve to live a healthy life. The second major ethical issue that I noticed is that the creators of this movie assumed that all the impoverished people where of minority groups. Everyone who was wealthy was English/White, and everyone stuck on earth was either