Yesterday at Sony's Comic-Con presentation, Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, writer-director Neill Blomkamp and producer Simon Kinberg attended the panel to show the first footage from Elysium. Before screnning the first footage to the fans in attendance, director Neill Blomkamp prefaced the screening by saying that the only time he’s comfortable with the "salesmanship" aspect of his job is when he is screening footage at Comic-Con for true fans. He also stated the visual effects seen in the footage were still in their rough stages. Read a description of the footage from Entertainment Weekly down below.
It’s 2142. Earth, explains some title cards, is “diseased, polluted, and vastly over-populated.” It’s a wasteland, packed so tight with people that roofs of major skyscrapers have been converted into slums. So the very wealthy have escaped to Elysium, a vast, circular space station in a far orbit around Earth where there is no poverty, no sickness, and no war. Over this explanation, we see a model-perfect woman in a palatial home getting scanned for, and cured of, cancer, in a matter of seconds.
In other words: Paradise, a perfect utopia. But as we see a space ship racing to get inside, we see a final title card: “And you are not invited.” The ship is shot down before it can ever get close.
We cut down Earth, and Damon, a wise-acre factory grunt on some kind of criminal probation, whose probation officer is a dirty plastic robot who can perceive Damon’s sarcasm and dispense pills for mood disorders. One day, while making giant droids, Damon is trapped and irradiated, and told by another robot in a sing-song voice that he has five days to live.
His only chance of survival: Getting to Elysium to cure himself, but that is a bit…tricky. He turns to some underground criminal types, who enlist him in a risky heist of the data chip embedded in the skull one of of Elysium’s citizens working on Earth, played by a sleek William Fitchner, who speaks with an intriguingly clipped, almost robotic accent. To pull it off, Damon is essentially converted into a cyborg, fitted with a pneumatic exo-skeleton that is literally drilled into his skull.
The attack on Fitchner alerts Elysium, run by Foster — also speaking with that same robotic accent — who enlists the station’s nearest Earth-bound agent to help out, played by a dirty, bearded Copley. He spends the rest of the reel delivering as much pain as possible on Damon, who eventually makes it to Elysium. We also got a quick glimpse of Alice Braga, playing a mother desperate to get her sick son to Elysium.
The footage ended with the implication that the data stored in Fitchner’s cranium is perhaps somehow powerful enough to cause serious damage to Elysium.
EW talk far more about the
Elysium panel in their full article which you can view by clicking
HERE!
In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy "Coordinators," people who can afford bio-genetical engineering, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, built by the Armadyne Corporation, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes, a hard government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky ex-con Max is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that if successful will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.
Elysium stars Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Wagner Moura, Sharlto Copley and Alice Braga. It is scheduled to be released on March 1, 2013.