“The poorest people are in the back of the train,” explained cast member Chris Evans in a recent interview, ” and as you move forward in the train the classes rise. Then there’s a revolt, a revolution from the people in the back to the front of the train…”

Class divides were explored before sci-fi movies even existed, of course – take a look at HG Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) for one example – and was the central theme in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a genre cinema landmark. But the financial crisis – and our leaders’ various attempts to reverse its negative effects, from bank bail-outs to stinging austerity measures – appears to have struck a chord with sci-fi screenwriters and filmmakers, and brought the debate about the proverbial One Percent to the fore.

“The idea on Elysium is that it’s […] a mirror of how the west is now, with immigration,” Blomkamp told Indiewire. “A lot of people want to help out the rest of the world. They want to take that wealth and pour the glass half out to balance it in the rest of the planet. Other people want to close the borders.”

There’s a certain irony, perhaps, that many or all of the films discussed have been created or financed by the one percent they criticise. It could be argued, too, that these movies reflect the world as it currently is, but offer few valid ideas as to how it could be improved; In Time openly revels in the notion of redistributing wealth, but its final image of Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried robbing banks and dishing out time cartridges to an excited populace was more wishful thinking than workable solution.

Even Metropolis, classic though it is, ends with a groan-inducing scene in which its heroine acts as the mediator between the working class and the intellectual rulers – a conclusion even its creator described, with the benefit of hindsight, as a fairytale. “I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now,” Lang said in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1998 book, Who The Devil Made It. “You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that’s a fairy tale – definitely. But I was very interested in machines…”