Surprise sci-fi hit District 9 earned director Neill Blomkamp a name for being able to tell an unusual story in an arresting way, so now he’s been given a much bigger train set to play with.
Matt Damon is the marquee name Elysium, which stays firmly in the scary future explored in that first hit.
It’s 2154 and the gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been wider. The nobs, led by Jodie Foster, live on a giant orbiting space station called Elysium, where there is no war, no poverty and no illness.
Everyone else has to scrap for survival down on battered planet Earth.
When Matt is exposed to radiation he has just days to live unless he can fight his way into the heavily-guarded Elysium, and they don’t want his sort of people there.
That means there’s plenty of action along with the social commentary, and unlike many high concept sci-fi sorties we’ve seen recently this keeps the running time down and the story rattling along.
The Mortal Instruments is a series of fantasy novels for young adults, so that leaves me out.
But they are popular enough to attract interest from Hollywood’s money men, so here comes Mortal Instruments: The City Of Bones which will obviously be the first of a series if it goes down well.
Ordinary New York teenager. discovers there’s another world alongside our own that humans – or ‘mundanes’ – can’t see.
It’s filled with demons, warlocks, vampires and werewolves – and she’s got Shadowhunter blood in her veins.
Shadowhunters? These half-angel warriors protect the human world from demons, obviously. Didn’t you realise that we were all threatened with extinction?
Cliches galore, of course, but it’s slickly put together to appeal to its audience, as the 12A certificate indicates.
Amanda Seyfried stars the true story of sad 1970s porn star Linda ‘Deep Throat’ Lovelace.
She’s was naive teenager lured into the seedy world of porn where she became a global star. It wrecked her life, but despite her notoriety she put the experience behind her and became a feminist icon an anti-porn activist before her early death. An interesting story, a top cast, and a grown-up film.
Jennifer Aniston is back in We’re The Millers, a comedy about a reluctant drug dealer who aims to get across the border without a full body search by recruiting a squeaky-clean all-American family as cover. Stripper Jen agrees to be his wife, two teenagers play his kids. Guess what happens? It’s a return for Dodgeball director Rawson Marshall Thurber Casey, and although there are no surprises it’s a harmless enough helping of humour