The film Elysium portrays a dystopian future in which more than 90% of humanity lives on Earth in a situation of extreme misery, while a wealthy minority lives in a space station named after the film and resembles a pentagram inscribed in a circle.

The film represents a transhumanist version of the life of Jesus of Nazareth with the difference that the Messiah does not rise and the Kingdom of Heaven is achieved through science and technology.

At the beginning of the movie we see a short account of the earth that in 2154 became very polluted and with an overpopulation of humans that left civilization in ruins. Faced with such a catastrophe, the richest people on the planet have decided to create a space station in Earth’s orbit called Elysium from which the Earth could be ruled smoothly. The station is a true paradise, but is enjoyed only by the rich. In the space station there are no crimes, poverty or disease, and most humans don’t work, because there are robots that do most of the work except command posts.

In the space station there is a computer that controls the central system of Elysium and medical machines that cure any disease can even reconstruct amputated parts of the body. Thus, such machines prolong human life by several decades. Terrans live without the benefits of technology, and technology only affects their lives when the robot cops appear to intimidate them. Thus the technology that generates Eden for a rich minority is the technology that creates an oppressive system for Earth’s inhabitants. In this, more specifically in the ruins of Los Angeles, there are no more paved streets and gangs fighting to control areas not patrolled by the Elysium government and it is in this scenario of chaos and hopelessness that Max, the transhuman messiah is born.

During childhood Max lived in a camp run by nuns and one of them told him that he was born to do something wonderful, that is, since childhood Max was destined to change the world. At camp Max fell in love with a girl named Frey, but the vicissitudes of fate caused them to take different paths in life. As an adult Max comes out of his car theft prison and goes to work at a Armadyne factory that produces police robots, meaning Max and thousands of other workers build the instruments that overwhelm him. Earthlings are viewed by the Elysium government as disposable labor. Max just senses this reality in the skin not only metaphorically, because on a certain day of work he gets trapped in a room where a lot of radiation is released which gives him only a few days to live. At the hospital where he receives news that he will soon die, he meets Frey again. Having nothing left to lose, he talks to the hacker Spider who is known for having the means to send people from Earth to Elysium in a clandestine manner.

Max makes a deal with Spider: Spider will put him on a ship that will head straight for the space station and he will steal the code that restarts Elysium, as the computer will become a blank book and Spider wants his name removed from the list. wanted. Upon discovering the plan Frey asks him to take her daughter who has leukemia. However, the code lies within the brain of John Carlyle, CEO of Armadyne, which can only be stolen if the burglar has a brain-machine interface. So the journey to the Kingdom of Heaven can only be accomplished if Max joins a machine, that is, if he becomes a transhuman. Max accepts his only way to stay alive and undergoes surgery that connects an exoskeleton and a computer to his body. After surgery Max is reborn improved and with superhuman strength. After a few action scenes Max becomes the bearer of the code that was once in John’s head who dies in a gunfire. Max arrives at Spider’s hideout and Spider reveals that the code is capable of turning all inhabitants of Earth into citizens of Elysium. In this way, Frey’s daughter’s quest for her own cure and agreement with Spider are encompassed by a larger goal: to make technological bliss a right of all, not just a small elite.

Max discovers that Frey and her daughter have been kidnapped by mercenary Kruger, who orders her from Jessica Delacourt, Elysium’s chief of defense, to retrieve the code now in the protagonist’s head to restart the space station and turn Jessica into president of the transhuman paradise. Kruger tells Max that he will only let them go if he surrenders what actually happens. Already in the mercenary’s ship the hero begins to fight against the henchmen of that one causing the destabilization of the ship that falls in a residential area of ​​the space station.

Knowing that the code carried by Max can make anyone Elysium citizen perhaps president, Kruger changes plans, he kills Jessica and decides to seize power. The mercenary wears a more advanced exoskeleton than Max’s, so the two are transhumanists and want to put a new order in place of the old one. However, the former acts in the name of petty interests and the will to institute a new oppression, while the latter is selfless and wants to use technology to free humanity from the oppression it is subjected to and create a new society in which everyone is Really happy. So evil is not found in technology itself, but in how people use it to change people’s reality and life. After a few action scenes Max arrives in the room where the station’s central computer is located, but before that must fight Kruger who wants to use the code to establish a reign of terror.

The fight between Max and Kruger is fierce, but the protagonist defeats the opponent. The hero walks with Spider, who arrived at the space station shortly before, to the computer and the two discover that if the station is restarted the code bearer will die because it is not John Carlyle. Max decides to sacrifice his own life to transform all mankind into citizens of Elysium, so he dies and the names of all earthlings begin to appear on the computer screen as if this were the book of life. His sacrifice, as Christ’s, makes the Kingdom of Heaven transhuman into something available to all mankind. A kingdom whose pentagram form serves as a reminder that the future paradise will be created entirely by the human species. Max fulfills his destiny by establishing a new earth and a new heaven, finally ships with robots and medical machines descend to the planet in order to end the suffering of humanity that now begins an era of peace, equality and bliss.

The Elysium film shows that technology can serve to both subdue and improve human living conditions, the effect will depend only on who makes use of scientific and technological advances. Transhumanism is portrayed in the film as the fulfillment of the Christian religious promise by showing the symbiosis between machine and man as a vehicle for achieving the longed-for eternal life.