Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium Takes The Occupy Wall Street Movement And Puts It In Space

Perhaps echoing our modern era’s dire collective anxiety in the wake of natural disasters, lingering Mayan prophecies and the fact that ferrets are now being plied with steroids and sold as pretend poodles, the upcoming months see a whole bunch of post-apocalyptic films hitting your nearest big-screen. Tomorrow, Tom Cruise’s visually spectacular Oblivion will be opening in theatres; June sees the release of M. Night Shyamalan’s Will Smith-lead project After Earth; and now we have Elysium, the new film written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, that South African dude who made the surprise box office hit, District 9, about giant aliens who were really Nelson Mandela or something.

Starring a heroic Matt Damon, an evil Jodie Foster and that perennial background guy William Fichtner, the film is set in 2159 and tells a tale of wealth disparity gone wild, where rich folks live on a colourful, tree-lined interstellar space station (and even have a downloadable cure for cancer!) and poor folks live on a dirty, ruined Earth. Much like District 9‘s widely acknowledged apartheid symbology, this looks like some obvious Occupy Wall Street/1%-ers allegory, but if that’s too pretentiously high-brow, just know that Matt Damon also wears a cool Tony Stark-ish mechanical suit with awesome leather gloves and a helmet that looks like a weird rat’s tail.

See Elysium in cinemas throughout Australia on August 15.