I had a bunch of thoughts on these types of movies a little while ago.  Here's what I wrote:

The issue I had with this, and a lot of movies that try to advance any social agenda, is they don't really go into the reasons WHY things are as they are, they just like making parallels. The thinking that insurance companies basically get money by denying services is simple, THEY benefit by keeping medicine from YOU. And I got the feeling in Elysium they were going for the same thing, but they didn't bother explaining that. They don't show how the citizens of Elysium actually benefit from denying the health machines to the world. Even if the distinction is arbitrary, we have to know why people on both sides accept it as the way it is.

I don't know if it's just because I have less experience with social/political movies as I have with other genres, but it seems that the same sense of laziness that we see with parodies (between, say, Airplane and one of the Movie movies) infects movies that try to get a message across. They seem to say "this is wrong, but I'M right" instead of "this, and this kind of thinking, is all screwed up." It's a really tricky tightrope to walk, I'm trying to walk it right now with a project I'm writing.

The mentality that brings people to systemically deny people life-saving services, and to shoot them out of the sky for trying to get it, stems from something disturbing and creepy, it's not just viewing them as "others" but as less than human. What else could that thinking lead to? The medicine machines should have been a symptom of something far worse, a core problem that we have in our society that we're not acknowledging.

You know, the more I think about this, I think the problem with a lot of these movies that are about an issue like this is that when you boil down the big issues that these movies raise feel so obvious, when you fictionalize it, it doesn't seem remotely possible. Of course you shouldn't dump toxic waste into the ocean, of course you shouldn't cook the planet you're living on, of course you shouldn't wipe out a group of people who are slightly different than yourself. The premise is flawed, so when you create a story where you're fictionalizing that, you're basing it on a flawed premise, so of course people wouldn't "get into" the story.   2/26/14 9:14pm

I added a little more"

Some should understand, some should just go with the status quo (oh god, please don't recognize that reference), and even THEY should be affected by it, the rules should hurt them too (perhaps we see someone get evicted from Elysium and their life goes down the crapper).

Ideally, the best message movie should have YOU figure out the message instead of the movie telling you, it's more fun to discover than to listen to a lecture (which too many of these movies do), and if you don't tell the audience the solution, maybe they'll figure out a better one.   2/26/14 9:49pm