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.

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.

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.

-Why would Matt Damon take Michael Moore’s suggestion and run for president when he gets to hang out Neill Blomkamp and wear crazy cyborg suits? Being POTUS is a really terrible job in comparison to being an A-list actor.

-You know who probably doesn’t need immigration waivers? Also A-list actors.

-I will only watch a Bewitched remake if it’s a horror story a la the episode of Charmed where Phoebe turns into Samantha.

-Pretty confident video games didn’t cause the London riots.

-Hell yeah steampunk lady scientists (also, SyFy’s H.G. Wells spinoff strikes me as the only way we’re going to get a lady Doctor).

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.