'Elysium' Trailer: Matt Damon Has Five Days To Save His Life (VIDEO)

The last time director Neill Blomkamp released a science-fiction film with political overtones in August, the result was "District 9." Four years later, Blomkamp has returned with his first feature since that 2009 Best Picture nominee: "Elysium." The first trailer for the sci-fi thriller, out on Aug. 9, has been released by Sony.

"I try to show as little as I can," Blomkamp said during a media presentation for the film on Monday (via Vulture). "The thing is, if you're a responsible, functioning filmmaker in the 21st century, you can't spend a hundred million dollars and then try to behave as though you're going to keep [the movie] wrapped under a blanket ... I realize that you have to get it out there."

Based on an original idea, "Elysium" stars Matt Damon as a factory worked named Max who, after suffering a deadly jolt of radiation poisoning, tries to break into the space station Elysium to find a cure. The space station houses the world's richest citizens, leaving the have-nots to fend for themselves on the remnants of planet Earth. Vulture's Kyle Buchanan noted that "Elysium" is an action movie for the "99 percent."

"If you went to a third-world country now, that's what all of Earth is like [in this movie]," Blomkamp told Moviefone last year at Comic-Con about his vision of Earth's future. "So it's like the bad parts of [any] country; the bad parts of Cuba, the bad parts of Haiti, the bad parts of South Africa. It's like all of the wealth got pulled out -- all of the structure and the first-world elements imploded because they were pulled off onto a space station, so you're left with a lot of people [who] are slightly desperate and things don't really work."

"Elysium," which also stars Jodie Foster, is out on Aug. 9. Watch the film's new trailer above.