Urban imagination plays a crucial role in SF film's narrative. The fantastic future urban-space is not only the geographical projection and extension of real cities, but also endowed with rich spatial political meanings. The imaginary cities of post-human SF films are built in a binary oppositional geographical structure. By employing Edward W. Soja's post-metropolis theory, this paper explores the bipolar spatial imagination in the film Elysium. It is the belief of the author that the future cityscape in the film shows a picture of fractal city as Soja proposed, and reflects the spatial mismatch in American post-metropolises in reality. Meanwhile, the Utopic ending of the film opens up a new space for popular cultural imagination, and expresses the need for spatial justice.

urban imagination  /  spatial politics  /  Elysium  /  fractal city  /  spatial mismatch