Fuck Yes, "Elysium" Looks Even More Awesome

There are two Great Hopes for original Hollywood genre-movies this Summer. One is "Pacific Rim" (hey Warner Bros? Now that "Man of Steel" is out can we get a hundred trailers and constant TV-exposure for that?) and the other is Neil Blomkamp's "District 9" follow-up "Elysium;" which now has a full(er) trailer.

Premise: It's the future, and class has stratified to the point that a wealthy few live lives of disease, crime and pollution free bliss on an orbital space-station called Elysium while the working-class toils on an increasingly-blighted Earth below - kept from breaching into Elysium's borders (MESSAGE!!!) by ruthless space-defenses, a robot army and bionically-augmented human soldiers. Matt Damon is a worker bee from Earth who, after being mortally-injured in an industrial accident, gets outfitted with a strength-enhancing mechanical exoskeleton so he can fight his way into Elysium to snatch medical supplies for himself and his fellow-afflicted.


I love how this is shaping up. Blomkamp does the "looks plausible AND looks cool" school of scifi design better than almost anyone (gotta love how Henchman Number One is lugging around a Future Sword in a world crawling with automatic weapons), and the design of the robots and exoskeletons are awesome enough to sell me on this movie without the clever, possibly-incendiary setup - I want to see the guys with the power-suits (cosplayers to your soldering irons!) shoot and punch their way through those kill-bots yesterday.