Rewatching Elysium

So I was rewatching Elysium last night. As someone acutely aware of the implications of automation, watching Elysium is pretty hard on the suspension of belief mental state that one needs to be in to take such a movie in. Some of the major problems with Elysium:

1) The driods are apparently good enough to act as police and on screen were very elegant in their movements. Since that is the case why are humans building these robots? Any robotic technology good enough to be that elegant is good enough to put a robot together without human intervention. Yes, I know that the accident needs to happen to move the plot forward but still, it may have been more interesting to see the struggling to make ends meet character try to make those ends meet while competing with robots rather than just being policed by them. This is a problem that Total Recall had as well, though there appeared to be far less automation in that particular future.

2) Speaking of accidents. What the hell was that? Again, I understand that the plot needed to be moved forward but a door that cannot be opened? Seriously? In this high tech future no designer decided on a button that re-opens a door if it is blocked? I mean c'mon now. Sunroofs, power windows and garage door openers have had this feature for decades now. They don't have this for factory equipment? Ok. You COULD assume that the business was so into being profitable that they ordered the model without the open-door-if-blocked feature. BUt if they really wanted to be profitable there would be NO HUMANS working there anyway!

Lastly how are the rich people inhabiting Elysium making money? As the US will soon find out, if you decimate the spending class (that's middle class to you) then you have no one who can buy your goods and services. No one buys your goods and services means there's no money to be made. The entire economic model (since we saw no "middle class" earthbound people) of Elysium is built on quicksand, the entire movie makes no sense.

On a side note, I'm compelled to discuss the parallels between the recent news that the Chinese have gotten into genetically engineering embryos. One of the comments I've read about it is the difference in ethics between The West and the Chinese. Generally speaking the Chinese will do it if it can be done while The West, with it's history of slavery, Final Solutions and the like, have ethical qualms with doing these things. This brings us to the new RoboCop movie in which all the work done on RoboCop was done in what is clearly China. RoboCop is heavy on ethics and is watchable for that alone.