Neill Blomkamp got about triple the $30 million budget of his first feature film, the apartheid-themed alien invasion movie District 9 to make Elysium, his parable of a society radically divided by class, which is due out on August 9. And on that figure, smaller than many of the other action movies on their way to us this summer, it’s still producing some of the best-looking trailers I’ve seen this year, and its concerns are starting to emerge more clearly:

It looks like Max De Costa (Matt Damon), the earth-bound worker who’s the movie’s main character, is going to have two main motivations for breaking into Elysium, the fortified, off-world compound for the super-wealthy controlled by Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster). First, there’s his own experience in an industrial accident, whereupon rather than his company taking any sort of responsibility for him, he’s tossed a bottle of pills by a robot, and thanked for his service in a sick, brisk ritual of termination. Then, there’s a very ill young girl to whom De Costa’s connection is unclear. But it’s obvious that Elysium, where people can have their bodies scanned and scrubbed of potential cancers on a daily basis, has a much higher standard of care, and makes it much more widely available, than is the case on earth. And if it’s mostly a thicket of policy that preserves those differences in contemporary America today, Elysium appears to have Sharlto Copley with a very big sword to do the job.

I have high hopes for Elysium, given what a strong outing I thought District 9 was both in its lower-budget special effects and as a movie that was deeply concerned with social commentary, rather than just slapping on a gloss of it. It would be really nice to see Blomkamp make the case that thoughtfulness isn’t a turnoff, that you don’t need to spend $200 million to buy your way to a viable audience (even if District 9‘s marketing budget was triple its production costs, it still would have made a profit), and that if you’ve got a genuinely compelling human plot, good acting is your best special effect. I don’t expect Blomkamp alone to turn the tide in a significant way on what Hollywood loves in a blockbuster. But if it, and the current crop of indie science fiction movies like Safety Not Guaranteed could carve out even a consistent little patch of the box office calendar for themselves, I’d be quite pleased.

As a fan of near-future science fiction, I’m eager to see Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which looks like it’s going to be as much a psychological drama as a science fiction movie:

It’s very easy to skip forward into a fully-established brave (or not-so-brave) new world, to 2161 when Starfleet Academy is up and running, for Rick Grimes to wake up in the hospital after the zombie apocalypse has already run its course, for Katniss to live in a District 12 that treats whatever cataclysm that dramatically reduced the human population of the United States and brought it under the dictatorial authority of the Capitol as an even that’s distant beyond memory.

But so much of the really interesting science fiction, particularly of the last few years, has been set at inflection points instead, rather than in the world those seminal moments produced. Max Brooks’ World War Z was a fascinating and refreshing spin on zombie apocalypse not because his zombies were fast or slow or some hybrid thereof, but because it was about people improvising, and learning, and making terrible sacrifices and awful mistakes to respond to a phenomenon that challenges everything they knew about the world. District 9 had the good sense to imagine the social consequences of an alien invasion, and to suggest that human unity in response to the revelation that there was life on other planets could make us seem as ugly as the giant insects marooned in Johannesburg. And Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is about a moment when we could have careened on over into a plague-scarred wasteland, but yanked ourselves back from the bring by discipline and chance instead.

Gravity may not be even that futuristic, though Cuaron’s work on Children of Men makes me hope he’s doing at least some world-building here. But however far away from our own time its set, it’s exciting to see a science fiction that isn’t set in a world where we’ve established full control of the stars, and where the future retains some of that bigness and risk.

Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is one of my favorite science fiction movies of the last five years, and his follow-up, Elysium, is probably the movie I’m most looking forward to this year, and I’m glad to see that the first trailer for it doesn’t contain any signs I should contain my enthusiasm:

One of the things that I think the best dystopian fiction gets at is the idea that technological advancements will not be distributed equitably or universally, and in fact, that technology may be used to provide an escape hatch for the most privileged people in society. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the anti-aging treatment that’s developed by Mars’ first settlers goes to the wealthiest people, who are often associated with multi-national corporations, first, while the much larger and poorer segments of the population are denied it. In Alaya Dawn Johnson’s excellent young adult novel The Summer Prince, the main characters live in a society that’s physically stratified, the most powerful living on the highest levels of an enclosed dwelling, and the least on the lowest levels, which are most affected by both sewage and the results of agricultural production. This was something that actually struck me particularly strongly on my trip, which was my first experience with resort travel, a system that, from your pickup at the airport by a preassigned shuttle, to the huge gates you pass through on the way to your actual hotel, is designed to make sure you have as little contact with the actual country you’re visiting as possible.

Given that Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and that his family migrated to Vancouver to get away from South Africa’s extremely high crime rates, it makes sense that he’s particularly attuned both to physical separate by class and race, and the possibility of exit from a system that seems to have failed. It was that awareness that make District 9, in which a stalled alien spaceship united black and white South Africans, who joined together to ghettoize the lost extraterrestrials in a township system like the one that was once used to restrict the movement of black South Africans, such a smart and moving piece of science fiction. In that movie, someone went from the privileged side of the divide to the underprivileged one and discovered that he couldn’t go back again, that there are strict rules for who you have to be to live in a comparative paradise. It looks like Elysium is flipping that divide in having Matt Damon crash the gates of a heaven near to earth, surprising the residents of that gated community with his capacity to get inside. I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets there.

I very much want to like SyFy’s Defiance, its new alien-invasion story, which is set to arrive on the network in April of next year, but this initial trailer has me feeling somewhat uncertain:

On the plus side, I appreciate that SyFy is selling that what happens when an alien and human culture meld is one of the things that makes the show distinct and worth watching. I want to know what it means that “It wasn’t exactly Earth anymore. Something new had been created.” That sense of our planet not being precisely Earth anymore, and that question of how humans and aliens will deal with each other once the possibility of staying separated is gone, was what made District 9 such a fantastic movie. Defiance could be an opportunity to move closer to those points of conversion than District 9 was. In District 9, the people who had commercial and sexual relationships with aliens were black Africans, rather than people like our white protagonist, immigrants rather than South Africans, criminals rather than citizens. It would be interesting to have a show that interrogates what it’s like to cross over those boundaries, to feel friendship, or attraction, or love for someone who is profoundly other, to have a show grant the other that humanity at all, rather than to keep those interactions, that mingling of worlds, at a distance.

But on the other hand, Defiance is being released in conjunction with a video game, and from this footage, looks it. These are some very cheesy-looking alien invaders. And the fact that Defiance isn’t just comfortable telling a society-building story and is continuing the invasion is worrisome. If you feel like the world you’re placing your characters in isn’t interesting enough without posing holdouts on Helm’s Deep-like battlements, that the conversations your characters will have are less engaging than CGI-shootouts, you have a problem.

I’ve enjoyed SyFy’s weird-things-happening-in-the-world-we-think-we-know shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13, but I sort of thought TNT and Fox stole a bit of a match on the network with shows like Falling Skies and Terra Nova that were based further in the future and did more to posit alternative societies. So I’m excited to hear about Deliverance, SyFy’s upcoming program set in “a world where humans and aliens live together on a planet ravished by decades of war.” Apparently, it’s kind of a western, with a human sheriff and mayor trying to keep peace between the human and alien populations of the former St. Louis.

My boredom with alien invasion stories is well-documented, so this is a nice variation, and the first pop culture product of its ilk since District 9, really. Cowboys and Aliens foundered in part, I think, because it didn’t have a clear sense for who or what its alien invaders were meant to represent. An old-school Western with aliens standing in for George Hearst and his minions, a kind of sci-fi Deadwood would have been sort of amazing, but Cowboys and Aliens was not that thing. The fact that humans are in charge of governance in Deliverance suggests that humans are somewhat more powerful than aliens, but I do think you could do something interesting where aliens are the more powerful constituency without being tyrannical or enslaving humanity. And a situation where aliens and humans are close to parity or co-dependent could be a really useful tool for exploring our attitudes towards immigrants or to coalition-building across constituencies. Stories are better when they know what their metaphors are for specifically, rather than standing in for a Random Big Bad Thing.

A new paper positing some scenarios for first contact between humans and extraterrestrials, whether it’s Megyn Kelly erroneously saying that NASA funded it or Dan Foster mocking the authors for assuming that more advanced societies will naturally be progressive. Ignored in all this hoopla is that the paper’s chock-full of scenarios that would make for awesome alien movies that go beyond the derivative invasion scenarios that were so popular this year. Here are five of my favorites:

1. Some of us discover we’re being kept under alien observation, and we reach out to make first contact, with…interesting results. The Prime Directive has the Federation refraining from messing with new societies, but what if we’re the society someone else is trying not to interfere with? Contact was the last major movie to explore what would happen if other species are waiting for us to grew up, but stopped short of exploring the implications of humanity reaching out in the universe:

The intentional form of this solution is sometimes known as the Zoo Hypothesis because it implies that ETI are treating Earth like a wildlife preserve to be observed but not fully incorporated into the Galactic Club…The Zoo Hypothesis thus implies that ETI could make contact with humans at any time. Perhaps such stealthy ETI will reveal themselves once Earth civilization has reached certain milestones. They may be waiting until we have reached a sufficient level of sophistication as a society such as the start of a METI program or the discovery of light speed travel, or they could be applying a societal benchmark such as sustainable development or international unity.

2. A two-sided story about two groups of people trying to get in touch with each other. Flip the perspective, and show both human and alien societies stumbling towards each other. Would require actual creative world-building to make the aliens, their society, and motivations feel as rich and compelling as our own, but those are good things to strive for:

Even if ETI exist in the nearby galactic vicinity, this does not necessarily imply that communication with them will be possible or straightforward. One major challenge is selecting the frequency at which to broadcast and listen. The electromagnetic spectrum consists of a continuum of wavelengths for communication that includes radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray bands. Searching this entire range is a monumental and nearly impossible task, so we choose particular wavelengths that seem more probable for interstellar communication.

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Super-commenter Gabriel Rossman pointed me in the direction of University of California, Davis professor Greta Hsu’s work on movies that span multiple genres a while back, and in the wake of Cowboys and Aliens, it seemed like an opportune time to dive deeply into a couple of her papers. Her research into the relationship between how active movie watchers assign categories to movies, and the commercial and critical reception of those movies, demonstrates a fairly unsurprising conclusion: “Producers who target a broad area of the market have access to greater potential revenue; the extent to which they capitalize on this potential, however, depends on the clarity with which they communicate their fit with targeted genres.”

This makes a lot of sense. If you take a gander at the top 10 all-time grossing movies (leaving aside for the moment factors like problems in calculation, the growth of the industry, the high cost of 3D tickets), they’re all very clean, effective genre-bridging movies. Avatar is a sophisticated science fiction adventure story that’s animated in part by a gooey romance. Titanic is a gooey love story facilitated by intense action sequences. James Cameron is a visionary film director who is pushing movie technology forward, but he’s also the undisputed master of working across genres. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is an epic struggle that’s also substantially concerned with whether our Bearded Hero Other Than The Short Dudes will get his elfin princess. Pirates of the Caribbean entwines its love story with its adventure story — Will falls in love with Elizabeth essentially at the moment that she steals a piece of cursed pirate gold from him when they’re both children. Toy Story 3 doesn’t really feel like a genre movie at all to me — it’s the only move in the top 10 that doesn’t fit into an easily identifiable genre category, which demonstrates the strength of that sort of simple categorization. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides brings back one of Jack Sparrow’s lost inamorata. Alice in Wonderland is the reverse of most of the movies on this list, which are largely movies men could take women to and the women wouldn’t mind, accomplishing this gender switch by turning Alice into a warrior. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 would have been a giant hit no matter how good or bad it was, but it’s also the movie in the series that is most a genre mash-up: it’s an intense adventure, during which the main characters’ romances come into full flower. The Dark Knight is perhaps the movie on the list that has the smallest amount of genre-crossover; Rachel Dawes and Bruce Wayne aren’t together in the movie, and while her death is a blow, it’s definitely a B or C plot in the movie, which is otherwise a very focused action morality play. And I don’t even know what to make of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
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I’ve long lamented the fact that we’re probably not ever going to get a movie series or television show based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because it’s too big, and too deeply rooted in discussions of science, to translate for a mass audience. But it sounds like Neill Blomkamp’s post-District Nine project, Elysium, in addition to boasting a cast that includes Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, and Sharlto Copley, may be exploring some of the same things I’d hoped we’d get out of a Mars project. A viral teaser for the movie comes in the form of an advertisement for a fictional company called Armadyne advertising for folks who work in everything from “zero g welders, mega-structure engineers, quantum networkers” to “zero g coupling and multi-generational planning”.

This seems promising. Mars is a major character in the Mars trilogy, but all of the characters’ engagement with the particular planet they settled are shaped by the equipment they have to work with, the structures they build, and the dramatically longer perspective they have on the impact of their work and the events of their relationships. Those concepts can be usefully applied to places other than Mars and to situations other than colonization. I thought that overall, Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City was not a particularly successful novel, though I did think that the best parts of the book were the ones about the fleet of ships sent from Earth to start new colonies that showed how extreme longevity could do the opposite of what Robinson suggests in the Mars trilogy, making people increasingly detached from morality, the value of relationships, and the consequences of their actions.

I’m not particularly surprised that Blomkamp, of all directors, would make a movie that’s engaged with structural issues. District 9 is about how humanity fails to understand the structure of an alien society because it doesn’t really see that the structure is there at all. And human governments manage their sense that they’ve got an anarchic — and to them, disgusting — society in their midst try to quarantine it with techniques that haven’t really worked perfectly before. Blomkamp did something astonishing and original when he demonstrated what happens when a society’s sense of what is true and what is possible is profoundly disrupted. I’ll be excited to see him build a new one from scratch.