Remember the movie “Elysium”? Though the dystopian, science-fiction vision of a future Earth didn’t cause much of a stir when it was released in 2013, its premise deserves another look in 2024, when climate and environmental crises are disrupting countries across the globe. Even the average person can’t help but notice unseasonable fall weather, with T-shirts replacing puffy jackets, and deduce something is a little off.
The film’s “Elysium” was a space station floating outside the Earth’s atmosphere, a privileged habitat for the rich and powerful escaping a polluted and overpopulated world, where the poor toiled throughout shortened and diseased lifetimes unless they devised a way out and into that promised land in the sky.
Not exactly upbeat, but too close to reality in an America where residents in the majority-Black city of Flint, Mich., remain devastated from the effects of a water supply poisoned a decade ago by leaders who were supposed to be looking out for them. While officials assure them the water now meets federal standards, lead pipes still need to be replaced, and children who consumed and bathed in that water continue to suffer seizures and developmental setbacks.
