Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel is coming to the big screen August 9th

The Naked Sun, First Edition, one of his best works.

… except that the project is titled “Elysium” starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster.

Confused? Bear with me.

Ok so I’m a self-professed Asimov fanboy and the world of geeks was on fire last night and today as the first official trailer for “Elysium” hit the web. In sheer excitement I jumped in to watch it as well and join the fun.

Set in 2154 the trailer begins by showing this nearly perfect world. Quite futuristic but not ridiculous and quite in line with what I had always imagined Asimov’s worlds to be like. Then we get a shot of Jodie Foster welcoming a couple of people to Elysium followed by a lady next to a pool with a robot servant, who goes into her chamber to “cleanse” herself. Then we get the tagline of “no poverty  no war, no sickness”. At this point I’m thinking “Holy shit this is Aurora/Solaria and that’s Gladia with R. Giskard right behind her in living flesh (tin)!”

And as if to answer my next question “But what about Earth”, the trailer shows us Earth, in actually a sorrowful state. It’s not quite Caves of Steel atmosphere, but more like post Robots and Empire set.

This is where the book and the movie seem to diverge quite drastically. I’ll just let you watch the trailer here.

So this got me curious to know if anyone else has drawn the parallels between Asimov’s famous Robot Series of books and Elysium. I could not find anyone that has made the analogy yet, but I found several very telling hints that this is indeed Asimov’s world re-imagined.

One: More than a year ago Deadline reported that John Scott 3 and Henry Hobson were set to write and direct Caves of Steel. That seems to never have panned out.

Two: The two were supposed to work with Simon Kinberg on bringing this project to life as a producer.

Three: Simon Kinberg never ended up producing Caves of Steel, but he did end up producing Elysium.

I think the three have met at some point last year. Threw around some ideas and talked about Asimov’s books and potentially make a script out of it. It’s likely that all three read Asimov’s four main Robot books and were highly influenced by it. The resemblance between Asimov’s material and what’s presented here in the plot is uncanny and I’m not willing to write it off to pure chance. Especially when taken in context of the fact that these three people have previously worked or attempted to tackle Asimov’s famous

Honestly, I think Elysium looks spectacular and even if it can channel some of Asimov’s work I think this could be a fantastic movie.

Elysium is an amalgamation of Solaria and Aurora and hints at some of the issues Asimov tackles over the span of four books. My hope is that they eventually make Asimov’s movies proper and give them a right treatment, but in meantime I think Elysium provides a small clue as to how that world could be realized and what It may look like when they do bring it to life.