District 9 was one of my favorite movies of 2009, so I'm certainly excited to hear that Sharlto Copley and Neil Blomkamp are working together again on another science-fiction movie. Nobody knows anything about the plot, except that the movie is supposed to be set a long time in the future on a planet far, far away, and that Matt Damon might get involved which raises two questions for me. First, how will Blomkamp do at drawing historical parallels when he's not working off a familiar, but fractured, backdrop like that of apartheid? And second, how will he do working with a major star, and how will Copley stand up against Damon? I thought Copley was remarkable in District 9, and I trust Blomkamp to write something good for him, but I have no sense of how he was against a more established cast in The A-Team.
If we're working just from the title, though, I'm intrigued. Presumably Elysium is meant to be allusive. I'd be very curious to see a science-fiction take on the underworld of heroes, even if I have no idea what it would look like. We live in an age where heroes are just men, rather than something of a different ilk entirely, and when they die, like us, they stay dead. I'll be curious to see if Blomkamp reaches back to past conceptions, or whether he comes up with an entirely different understanding of heroism entirely.