Wrong: A lot of the criticism of Elysium focuses on its worldbuilding. The story takes place roughly 150 years in the future, in a world where the Earth is polluted and/or overpopulated and/or diseased and/or impoverished. Meanwhile, rich people have built themselves a space habitat called Elysium that's full of robot servants and magical health technology that can cure anything. Already, there are problems. Blomkamp has invoked too many dystopias at once. Earth suffers from too many ills, and the unequal distribution of resources is too seamless. Even in the most authoritarian regime (which we have no evidence that this is — it's more like anarcho-capitalist) you'd see some technologies trickling down to even the most impoverished classes. People living in today's slums have smart phones, for example.  As cameras sweep over Earth's surface, we see evidence of massive cities that have fallen into disrepair and given way to favelas. These cities, plus the insane levels of technology in Elysium, suggest that there was a huge economic boom, followed by a bust that is never explained. So we have stark class divisions that make no sense, and a massive economic catastrophe that's never explained.  Here's what Elysium did wrong -- and what it did rightExpand  I am all for dystopias whose origins are hazy — Looper is a great example of an excellent movie where there's been a soft apocalypse that's never explained. The problem with Elysium, however, is that the plot centers on the results of economic bust and class warfare. Our dying hero Max's entire motivation is catalyzed by the fact that people in this future have unequal access to health care technology. As Alyssa Rosenberg has already argued over at Think Progress, the health care scarcity in this future world.