Yesterday, the poster for Neill Blomkamp’s latest sci-fi head-trip,Elysium arrived online with the promise that we’d get the trailer on Tuesday. Except “Tuesday” meant “Tuesday in America-land" so it's a little late. Still, it’s here, and it’s pretty darn exciting. Check it out below.
Set in the year 2154, Elysium finds a world divided into rich and poor. So far, so The Earth Today. But the wealthy, beautiful and privileged have moved into the ultimate gated community: the eponymous space station in orbit around a ruined, filthy planet.
Jodie Foster is Secretary Rhodes, overseer of Elysium’s security. She’s content to live in a place where cancer can be cured and there’s no crime, no poverty and no war. Who could blame her?
Matt Damon’s Max, on the other hand, is stuck in the worst part of Earth. With a criminal record and no chance to get ahead, he’s in a literally dead-end job because the radiation exposure he suffers at work will kill him. Though he wants to go straight and fix his life, he’ll need to dip back into his criminal tendencies to pull of an audacious heist and gain access to Elysium. But part of his plan requires hijacking a data core stored in someone’s brain (William Fichtner’s John Carlyle, to be exact). And robbing it will bring down the wrath of black ops agent Kruger (Blomkamp veteran Sharlto Copley).
As with** District 9**, an issues drama is pulsing underneath the sheen (or the grime) of solid genre stuff, and Elysium certainly looks like it has the style and the thrills to it. We’ll find out when the film arrives on September 20. For more on the movie, check out the stills that arrived last week and our report on the early footage shown at last year’s Comic-Con.