The year is 2013, and Neill Blomkamp is still a promising up-and-coming director riding a wave of positive buzz for his feature film debut, District 9, which earned four Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. His new follow-up film, Elysium, earns more money at the worldwide box office, but fails to garner the same level of critical praise as District 9.

The year is 2017. Blomkamp has since released the much-maligned sci-fi movie Chappie, and though he’s still making exciting short films, he seems to have lost a bit of luster on the big screen. Now Blomkamp says he’d be interested in making an Elysium 2 that clarifies some of the themes he was attempting to explore the first time around.



Speaking with ScreenRant, Blomkamp explains his desire for a chance to make an Elysium sequel:

“Elysium is more something I feel like I could have done better. I think that if you were to take something like Elysium and play with it inside a setting like this [his Oats Studios short films] you probably would hone it – you would end up, I think, with something well thought through and that has all of the thematic elements that I wanted. I still love the set up to Elysium. The idea of the separation of class warfare presented with this space ring is incredibly appealing to me and I would love to go back and make another movie in the world of Elysium because it’s compelling. I just think I can do a better job in setting up what the themes are more clearly and what the character’s motivations are. I can do it better, I think.”

I agree that the world of Elysium is a compelling one, but the thing about the first movie is that it very obviously states its themes and character motivations – so much so, that it becomes one of the movie’s problems. The idea of a ring-shaped space station where only rich people can afford to live hovering over the Earth,while the rest of humanity scrapes by in the slums of the planet’s surface is a crystal-clear visualization of societal inequality, and Matt Damon‘s character motivations were equally clear: he was doused with radiation and only had a few days to live, so he had to reach the health care facilities on the space station or die. Not exactly a lot of room to misinterpret his motivations there.

That being said, we might be in a Golden Age of Hollywood filmmakers exploring new themes in old cinematic realms. Look at what Ridley Scott is doing with the Alien/Prometheus movies, what Matt Reeves has done with the Planet of the Apes prequels, or what James Cameron is about to do when (if?) he drops those Avatar sequels on us. The idea of Blomkamp turning the universe he set up in Elysium into his own playground to continually explore injustice sounds interesting to me, especially since those topics won’t suddenly become irrelevant any time soon.