I”m an admitted total and utter sucker for Guillermo del Toro’s monsters, so I’m intrigued by what little we see of the beast in Pacific Rim in this teaser:

The thing I’m hoping for the movie, though, is that it’s at least in part about how you go from having military jets shoot rockets at monsters to a point where a multi-national fighting force is going mano-a-mano with the damn things in battle robots. The viral content for the movie seems promising—it’s got things like emergency tests and troop transfer orders that demonstrate a society adapting itself to a new and unnerving reality. If I can have bureaucracy and monsters and Idris Elba, I will be a very happy woman.

In the years I’ve been working as a professional critic, I’ve never been as excited for a follow-up to a directorial debut as I have been for whatever Niell Blomkamp decided to do after District 9, his story of a South Africa in which white and black citizens have united to enforce apartheid on a group of stranded aliens they’ve herded into townships, which for my money was both the smartest alien invasion movie and one of the most shattering love stories in years. I’d heard rumbles that his subsequent feature, Elysium, would follow up on some of the same themes, and according to the first reported plot summary, it sounds like that’s the case:

In the year 2159 two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard the 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 Max (Matt Damon) 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.

In between this and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim (In Time did this too, but less well) I’m very, very excited for the fact that a new crop of sci-fi movies that recognize that mobility is something that gets more valuable as society gets more stratified. Immigration reform gets treated like a poor people’s cause, in some limited cases, like it’s a gay cause—lack of mobility from one country to the next becomes a magnifying factor of the joblesseness and violence people face in Mexico, or the second-class treatment by the federal government of marriages between same-sex couples. But the ability to move across borders, and to do so free from harassment isn’t something we should take for granted. I’ve always loved fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which recognizes that restricting mobility and immigration is a way of reinforcing inequality. I’m choosing to believe that two big-budget science fiction movies on one of my favorite themes is my reward for fighting sexism.

Idris Elba talked to Vulture about Pacific Rim, the monster movie by Guillermo Del Toro he’s starring in, and wow does it sound incredible:

He’s yet another man of authority, but this time much higher up. He’s the head of the army and the army is the essential fighting force against these monsters. The world is crumbled and this alien lived underneath the surface of the Earth for a long time. Our only defense has been these massive robots that fight back — they’re basically tanks that are put together to look like men and can walk. I play the leader of that sort of movement. Then we lose our funding, basically, and the world decides to build walls around countries, which basically means the rich can get in and the poor can’t. So our characters go, “No. We’re going to fight this our way.” It could be a box-standard, fight-against-the-aliens sort of film, but not with Guillermo.

It sounds like it’s almost a commentary on class and immigration.

Well, it’s certainly a commentary on if the world were under attack who would survive and who wouldn’t. Interestingly enough, the poor would probably more survive than the rich.

Why is that?

Because they have less and are used to less; therefore, more resilient and more tough. If an alien attacks a big skyscraper, people in the skyscraper are going to die. The people on the floor may not.

It’s often splashier and scarier to pit humans against aliens in science fiction, and to portray alien invasion as an engineer of a new, happy, human solidarity. But we’re a lot likely to get fierce international and inter-class struggle and competition before we end up in a fight with spacemen. That Del Toro is acknowledging that and giving us his signature awesome monster design has me very, very excited indeed.

-New in government research: the military gives us Pandora for reading.

-If Guillermo del Toro makes Maleficent, can Selma Blair play the title role? I love the idea of Liz Sherman being able to turn into a dragon.

-Ian McShane will hang out with Snow White.

-I will be highly amused if Dan Snyder sues the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for saying mean things about him to Nikki Finke.

-Why haven’t you listened to Rave On Buddy Holly yet? Start with Cee-Lo’s contribution:

Then bop on over to NPR and stream the rest.