Elysium Dreams Unrealised

Quick Review

The story was straight forward, vanilla but never unbearably dull. Exactly as advertised on the tin; the trailer can be taken as complete crib notes. The special reserve was Sharlto Copley's maniacal "Kruger", also the only enjoyable character, demanding stage presence.

It felt horribly under-ambitious, especially compared to the inspired District 9. I think Neil Blomkamp was aiming for the kind of perfectly well rounded movie that translates very well into international sales. Blomkamp openly admits that this film was supposed to be his great big Hollywood blockbuster, like he's collecting a set. I guess that's a little like Stross's tendency toward a different pastiche for each book, particularly in styling his Laundry novel's. In the process Blomkamp has shaved so many edges smooth that the kernel of all his ideas barely remained...

• There were zero laughs, perhaps occasional snorts of acknowledgement. The most amusing part, for me, was that the Elysium leadership seemed to be named after Harry Potter characters: (Fleur) Delacourt, (Padma and Parvati) Patil/Patel.
• It was not nearly as bloody/gory/ugly as expected; virtually sterile, even for a 15 certificate, certainly compared to some of the gut wrenching, watching-between-fingers, type scenes in which Copley previously stared. I guess I just take exploding people for granted...
• No full-on action-gasm; no pig gun equivalent. There was a bit of an OooOOoh, here we go! moment in the middle, during the (abduction) action sequence, but it felt like a bit of an aborted fumble in comparison.
• Totally non-sexual, unless you count the CGI porn of the perfectly manicured orbital habitat. Which is fine; interesting purely for *not* ticking that box. The romantic connection was underplayed too, though. Perhaps it was just a little too unsubtle. That does fit with the earthy, realistic aesthetic though; not at all the quick fling, fantasy Hollywood romance.
• The film does do pretty well (for an American blockbuster) at including an international flavour, with a Brazilian love interest, strong hispanic (Mexican) presence, and French, South African (and British?) villains. Bechdel test was "squarely fail[ed]", however, but then it wasn't exactly a very talky movie.
• Emotionally un-engaging, with no real personal journey for Max, played by Matt Damon, who I've decided I like, but here he felt like a laminated cardboard cut-out.

As Wired reported: "...Blomkamp is a longtime [Michael] Bay fanboy..." due to his "inspiring" action composition. Despite deriding contemporary sci-fi's "...exploding and spaceships and stuff", he also claims "Elysium doesn’t have a message either,". This is more that he personally has no political agenda; supposedly he just genuinely revels in the dystopian slums of present day Johannesburg and LA. They hold an enthusiastic fascination for him. Certainly it's best for sales to avoid shoving political/humanitarian agendas at potential customers, but a brutally neutral take on these topics is also going to be the best way to bypass people's mental defences and get them actually thinking about our world's flaws.

Orbital Speed?

Discussion of Topics Raised and Avoided

The Elysium space habitat seems to exist in a total vacuum, in more than the literal sense; the setting is starkly prosaic, with a straight up, straight down world. Deliberately so, I think, going for symbolism. 'Elysium' (the Greek/Roman afterlife for the relatives and friends of gods and the most virtuous) perched there above the clouds, so those below (in Hades) can look up at it's glowing halo, as one might do in prayer today. Witness, too, the religious orphanage the protagonist grows up in, etc.

My point is also that the film very carefully avoids mention of anywhere else on earth besides the LA sprawl, which seems more a quaint, contemporary, shanty-town in comparison to the Neuromancer (1984) style sprawl (seen breifly in the opening exposition: right).

The non-paradox of "The non-paradox of choice".

About this article: "More Is More: Why the Paradox of Choice Might Be a Myth" on The Atlantic.

I don't see the contradiction here between:

• Too many choices being bad - overwhelming customers.
• And too few choices being bad - choice always needs to be discernibly relative. 

Most of the time, those doing the 'choosing' are actually just searching for what they already had in mind: there's not time in the world to analyse the relative merits of each type of milk, butter, bread, jam, etc, for each range of items in your grocery shop, every time you shop (even if you could erase your memories and start from scratch each time). There seems to have been a pretty strong evolutionary bias against such strategies, hinting at the expense of this type of critical thinking.

Scheibehenne, et-al
2010

So there should be a bell curve, with an optimum number of product options peaking in the middle somewhere. Exactly where that sweet spot lies will depend on each individual: domain naive persons benefit from simplicity, while connoisseurs generally think at a finer level of specificity, dependant upon past explorations.

The meta-study (Scheibehenne, et-al - 2010), to which the article presumably refers, appears to have been rather dumb: simply averaging the outcomes of the ~60 studies done in this area, selected from the previous decade, so that the two separate effects cancel each other out. In fact, the spread of study results lean pretty equally in either direction (picture, right). So the Atlantic article misleads by pitting a single, famous (Jam) study against "...10 different experiments... finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems,..".

Of course I didn't read the whole study paper, and might well not appreciate the intricacies of statistical significance, even if I had. But then I've not read Barry Schwart's book either, so this is just the ignorant rumblings of some guy on the internet who's read an article and watched a snack-sized pop-lecture (quite a while ago):

Conclusion: there's probably no marketing research shortcut here; you need to understand your customer's motivations, and the demographics there-of, to provide the optimum dispersal of product options for their satisfaction, and your sales.

What's doesn't seem to have been studied is the cultural phenomenon of spawning entirely new product markets, by gradually expanding established ranges. I strongly suspect that new economic ecosystems will monopolise a greater percentage of customer's attention and therefore spending resources. Promoting choice inflation (via biased reporting, for example) could be seen as a kind of capitalist control conspiracy: keeping a populace busy working all hours to buy more s...stuff, they don't really need. But I'd lay the blame squarely at the door of humanities's slavery to memes.

There's No Hyperloop in HS2. [£80Bn update]

Elon Musk played the media perfectly, with coy comments about at high speed rail alternative to the proposed LA to San Francisco project, building the intrigue with hints before finally releasing a comprehensive looking 57 page PDF with design and root schematics, costings and explanations. He certainly succeeded in grabbing my attention, and I think everyone should take his proposals very serious, however amazing they may seem; i.e. "Don't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

He makes his PayPal co-founder, Peter Theil (via Confinity), look like a bit of a looser (especially after those losses at Clarium Capital the other year). Musk stuck to creating companies engineering new solutions:

Musk: robot, alien or superhero?

• SpaceX in 2002, the first private company to supply the ISS, delivering a $1.6Bn spacecraft project on time and budget. 
• Tesla in 2003, which makes all electric, domestic use cars that accelerate faster than Ferraris, now expanding rapidly into commodity price ranges.
• And SolarCity in 2006 (technically founded by his cousin from Musk's idea) which is "the largest provider of solar power systems in the United States", with Musk as the largest shareholder he stands to be an *extremely* rich person from this investment alone, given how solar PV is set continue growing exponentially in efficiency and scale over the next couple decades.

I mean, who IS this guy?! A visitor from some technologically advanced, alien civilisation? Or our future? Or JUST genius of a Tony Stark level competence?

So when musk says he can send millions of people per year, safely down partially evacuated tubes at 700mph, solar PV powered, electric turbine trains, riding only cushions of air, for far less than the expected budget of the unimaginatively planned rolling route... you'd best believe him!!

A Run of Mediocre British Sci-fi?

Did I hit a somewhat unlucky run of reading or am I just bored of sci-fi?? To get these out the way, and out of mind ASAP, I'm going to try and round all 3 up together here.

I became page-jammed, with the top two books (as pictured) over a year ago, stuck mid chapter, a few dozen pages into each. With blog posts having dried up about the same time, that may have been down to a dip in cognitive function with most remaining resources sunk into co-leading an alliance to a #2 crown on World 75 of Lord of Ultima). But with miraculously improved health (more on that later), dust was blown off and determined reading resumed... and then continued on through another novel that had been entirely self-locked for years. Since I finisihed Reynolds just this morning, I'll start with him.

House of Suns (Alastair Reynolds):

By the numbers, hard sci-fi, space-opera, second star to the right and straight on until morning. That is to say, it certainly wasn't unpleasant (in the way that Divergence had me staring at the page in aggrieved disbelief, sometimes), but there was little omph. No real surprises...
[But still, spoilers after the page-break are greyed out (please highligh to read easily).]