Thanks to our friend Alex at Firstshowing, we’ve been made aware of a very interesting video sent to The Movie Blog. While it may look like just a crackpot talking about humans needing to die to save nature, the theory is that it is really part of the blossoming viral for Neill Blomkamp’s upcoming movie Elysium. Watch the video after the break and read what we think.
The Movie Blog (and others) received an email with this message:
My name is Joseph Kulper, I work as a geneticist at Celtran
Corporation, one of the world’s leaders in bioengineering, and I’m
sending this message to you because I have discovered something very
important, something that has the potential to change everything we
know about human life. I’m not asking for anything from you, I don’t
want you to reply or click anywhere, alI I’m asking of you is that you
watch the video I have posted on youtube. Search under my name ‘joseph
kulper’ and you will find it. It’s for you that I’m posting this
video, for all of us, so please take just a moment to watch it.
Well, what are you waiting for? Watch the video below.
If you’re still wondering why there were random flashes of black and white imagery, then you didn’t watch the dryly spectacular ending. To sum up, this video features Kulper talking about how humans have outgrown their host and that he realized something needed to be done to speed up evolution and control the population. Thus, he created a genetic virus that infects anyone who isn’t 70% above the human average for intelligence, killing them within weeks. Kulper expects over 4 billion people to die. The twist is that this video (and specifically the collection of random images) is the cause of infection, and its not biological, but psychological. Once infected, you’ll transmit it to others whether you like it or not.
The video is fascinating to me, because it starts off as boring, then kind of creepy, then finishes brilliantly. Before we start speculating, lets get what we know out of the way. First of all, this video is over a month old, yet we’ve had no new developments in learning anything from it. Also, Joseph Kulper and Celtran Corporation seem to be made up entities, since a Google search didn’t pull up anything of note.
So, we know it’s fake, but what is for, then? The predominant theory is Elysium. Little is known about the plot of Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9, other than it is sci-fi and set in either the future or another planet. The all-star cast so far (which includes Sharlto Copley, Jodie Foster, and Matt Damon) leads me to believe it’s not just a SyFy movie with a budget, and a plot involving wiping out 2/3 of the human race (or a world in which that has already happened) could be pretty deep. Considering how big the viral marketing was for District 9, it makes sense he’d be interesting in doing it again. In fact, that video of the weird pig-thing from Wired is speculated to be some kind of teaser for Elysium.
The key ingredient in this theory is the name of Kulper’s virus. Supposedly, he calls it “Elysium”, but I hear “Alethea”. The two names do sound very similar, and Kulper has a slight accent that makes it hard to be certain either way. What do you think he says? Is this the start of a viral campaign?