One of the best science-fiction movies of the last ten years or so – by a considerable margin – was District 9. It seemingly came from out of nowhere and blew us all away with its biting social commentary, dazzling visuals and super-cool actiony bits, plus we all got to enjoy that cute little baby alien and laugh at how funny white South Africans sound when they talk.
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Now writer/director Neil Blomkamp has returned to blow shit up in yet more deep and meaningful ways with his new film Elysium. The trailer landed on Planet Internet earlier this week and Jesus H Pants does it look awesome;
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The film is set in the year 2154. Beautiful rich people live on the titular Elysium, a floating space station above the Earth which basically looks like a science-fiction version of Will Smith’s house in The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air. Elysium is a paradise for the privileged, full of happy, attractive and obscenely rich people who can do stuff like cure themselves of cancer just by sitting under something that looks like a giant photocopier.
Everyone else has the severe misfortune to live on Earth, which rather unsurprisingly has turned into a giant shithole and now resembles a large-scale version of a council estate in Tottenham. There is endemic disease, poverty, violent civil unrest and every single retail outlet on the planet is now either a pound shop or a fried chicken takeaway. Only one man can save us, and that man is MATT DAMON.
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The trailer shows young Matthew being fitted with a badass robotic exoskeleton before making it clear that Elysium has shit on its shoes and he’s the shoeshine boy. The exoskeleton’s exact powers are not explained in detail in the trailer, but it basically looks like it should be called The Arsekickotron 5000 as Mattypants starts doing all manner of cool shit like tearing the arms off of robots and dangling from skyscrapers looking manly. Elsewhere, Jodie Foster looks concerned while people fly spaceships and blow stuff up. BLOW EVERYTHING UP.
Elysium arrives in cinemas this August. It looks like epic, action-packed dystopian sci-fi, the kind of thing that’s been missing from big screens for far too long. Sick Chirpse will be in the front row when it comes out, then we’ll go and build our very own Arsekickotron 5000 out of tinfoil and used nitrous oxide cannisters. And then we’ll probably get beaten up/thrown in jail. Either way, we’re in for a good time.
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