Elysium’s Latest Featurette Highlights The Sharp Division Between The Rich And Poor
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At the moment, we’re about halfway through the summer movie-going season. We’ve seen plenty of disappointing science fiction in the past few months, including After Earth, Oblivion, and Man of Steel. The summer season has traditionally been front-loaded with bigger blockbusters positioned early on, with relatively smaller movies being released in the back end. While movies like Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Iron Man 3 have been overwhelmingly crowd pleasing, the next half of summer will feature more thoughtful and smaller movies like Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s The World’s End and the latest film from South African director Neill Blomkamp, Elysium. Sony recently released the above featurette that highlights the class division in the science fiction allegory.
Elysium is set about 150 years in the future. There are only two social classes in the world: the ultra rich, who live on an orbiting space station called Elysium, and the working-class poor, stuck below on an overpopulated Earth. It looks like there are no longer countries in Elysium’s future, only social classes.
The featurette also centers on Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster), the hard-line government official in charge of ensuring the safety of Elysium’s citizen. As part of that duty, Delacourt is tasked with strictly enforcing Elysium’s anti-immigration laws. The featurette ends with Secretary Delacourt ordering the destruction of three undocumented spaceships that are heading for the station. If this featurette is any indication, we’re most likely going to see her do something even more evil and terrible to the people of Earth.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen some substantial new footage from Neill Blomkamp’s latest science fiction film with the release of new trailers and high-resolution images. Elysium was originally supposed to be released this past March, but its release date was pushed to August to better position it as a tent-pole summer blockbuster. (Sony also pushed the RoboCop remake’s release date from August 2013 to February 2014.) Since Elysium will have a presence at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, it’ll be interesting to see if Sony screens any new footage from the film for convention goers and genre fans. It seems like a fitting atmosphere if Sony wants to bring more awareness to Elysium.
Elysium follows Max De Costa (Matt Damon), a poor factory worker on Earth. When Max develops cancer, he has only five days to live before he dies. Max decides to take a suicide mission to the orbiting space station Elysium to hopefully find a cure. But when Secretary Delacourt learns of Max’s mission, she sends a bounty hunter named Kruger (Sharlto Copley) to track and kill Max before he makes it to Elysium.
The latest from Neill Blomkamp also features actors Wagner Moura, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, William Fichtner, and Faran Tahir as Minister Patel. Blomkamp wrote and directed the film, while Simon Kinberg (Star Wars: Episode VII) produced.
Elysium will hit theaters everywhere on August 9, in IMAX.
