There was a lot of Western response assuming that the director was trying to label the rich as evil and the poor as good.
In that scenario, it seemed like an apt criticism. After all, the rich oppressed the poor who fought for a more humane politico-economic regime. There was an implicit argument that the poor were doing good and the rich were doing evil, but there was no argument that the two socio-economic classes could not have switched roles as that was simply outside of the purview of the plot.
So what makes you think that the director was being neutral,
We could say that he was being neutral in the sense that he made a defensible judgment that in this given situation, the poor were fighting for justice. It would have been obvious that he was not neutral if the director clearly implied that the poor were by their nature incapable of doing evil and the rich were incapable of doing good. The producer also implied that scenarios similar to Elysium occurred in countless countries of the developing world and that again, can be interpreted as an objective observation of the politico-economic realities of the modern world.
actually painting a pretty stark picture against the rich?
I don't think he was painting a picture of the characters of the rich as much as their actions in a specific situation that is quite pertinent to the plight of the enormous wealth disparities plaguing the modern world.
I have trouble remembering a situation where the poor were seen as villains per se.
Would it make any sense to portray them as villains when the rich were perpetrating the majority of the severest atrocities in the plot? I am going with Blackmail on this one, the theme had little to do with good vs evil and everything to do with two socio-economic classes acting in their political self-interest by attempting to undermine their nemesis class. This takes us back to my earlier analysis that the opposition between the prosperous and the indigent is immitigable and when given the opportunity, both classes will oppress their opponent. In the Elysium scenario and in most developing and the severely underdeveloped countries, that is also the case.
In fact, they seemed to be highlighted as heroes (even including the "noble death" of Max's friend Julio (?)),
Perhaps the rich would have been highlighted as heroes if a sequel to the Elysium was released. In such a scenario, we'd probably see the rich as the peaceful residents of a society dominated by populist rabblerousers and chaotic mobs of formerly penurious citizens who loot, pilfer and deprive the formerly privileged members of society of not only their legitimately acquired property, but also of their inalienable individual rights. You're making a fundamental attribution error by assuming that because the poor were acting virtuously and the rich behaved in a morally deplorable fashion, it must be because the former are by their "morally heroic" and the latter are are deserving of our most vigorous moral condemnations. In a lot of cases, people do things because of their circumstances and not because of the integrity of their character or a lack thereof.
and pretty much every time there was a rich person, they were treated at best as oblivious and self-absorbed, and at worst as pathetically selfish and oppressive.
Isn't that a fairly accurate picture of most members of today's ruling class, especially those of the severely underdeveloped countries? We have a ruling class in the U.S too, but their freedoms to oppress the underprivileged are much more limited than they are in the "Bottom Billion" countries, to borrow Paul Collier's term.
The psycho mercenaries were perhaps amoral in presentation.
The role of the mercenaries in the plot should be interpreted literally, they represented themselves and not the elites. It is also rather typical for the ruling class to employ the services of mercenaries and such mercenaries often display distinctive psychopathic traits.
They just worked for whoever paid them but killed indiscriminately.
How is this element of the plot misleading about today's politico-economic realities? Do you expect the mercenaries to have a different attitude?
