Screenhead

And I don’t mean A Terminator, either.  I mean the whole shooting match. Lock, stock, boxtop and rights.  You too can own the rights to a pretty successful franchise that usually costs plenty to exploit, though it usually makes its money back.

Interestingly, though, Joss Whedon actually made an offer for the Terminator rights, but it was significantly less than the current owners wanted:  a whopping ten grand.

He even had some pretty sweet ideas, including branching out into porn (cue that wa-wa pedal guitar!) and even doing a musical.  He thought twice about the musical, but I say it could work.  I’ve actually got part of the opening song already written and would be happy to contribute for the low, low cost of ten percent of the grosses.  You’re welcome, in advance.

But seriously, this is a move that might actually end well, assuming the right people get a hold of the rights.  I doubt they’ll get the twenty five million they want for them, though.

Ridley Scott is one BUSY individual.  But let’s face facts–the man’s got like thirty hojillion projects in the works right now, so his announcement that he’s considering an Alien prequel needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  A grain of salt about, say, the size of a Buick.

But he’s clearly been thinking it over, and even has some possible strategies.  Dig the word:

“It’s a brand new box of tricks. We know what the road map is, and the screenplay is now being put on paper. The prequel will be a while ago. It’s very difficult to put a year on Alien, but [for example] if Alien was towards the end of this century, then the prequel story will take place thirty years prior.”

There are possibilities here.  After all, I seem to remember that one of the earliest parts of Alien described an alien ship that crash-landed on LV 426.  Checking Wikipedia confirms my scattered memories, so a great point for an Alien prequel would be, what is that ship, and how did it get jam-packed with xenomorphs?

Of course, it’s a fair bet that that’s a Predator ship that was seeding the planet for use as a hunting ground, so they may have already kinda sorta covered that already.  Still though, I find myself plenty interested in where they’re looking to go with this one.

So maybe Peter Berg wasn’t the best choice to handle the upcoming remake of Dune.  He walked off the project very recently, leaving Paramount to fill in the hole as best it could, and man, do they ever have an option.

They’ve sent out scripts to two new director possibilities, and you won’t believe who they are.

Neill Blomkamp and Neil Marshall.

Oh yeah.  District 9 and Doomsday themselves are going after Dune.

And even better, chances are Berg took Robert Pattinson with him back when R-Pattz was thinking about tackling Paul Atriedes.

Between two prime directors with actual sci-fi cred now possibly handling the Dune remake, and the fact that Rob Pattinson likely now has nothing to do with Dune, suddenly I’m feeling like getting into a happy dance out here.  There’s so much joy and win in this news post that I may well faint from the sheer happiness of it all.

After hearing the various rumors flying around the Star Trek remake, which was still one of the all time greats as far as the Star Trek series specifically goes, and probably as science fiction in general goes, it was a surprise to catch up to this new chunklet of news.

Apparently, there’s talk that no less than William Shatner will be coming back to the second installment of the remade Star Trek.

J.J. Abrams himself is apparently looking at bringing Shatner on Board, saying that he “would love to work with him (Shatner)”, but the big problem was that “his character died on screen in one of his (Shatner’s) Trek films and we that we wanted to adhere to Trek canon”.  So let that be a lesson to you, kids…Shatner cares more about Shatner than he does established canon.

It’s pretty much shameful how Shatner’s been handling this pretty much since the inception of the Trek remake got started, so frankly, I’d sooner not see him back at all.  But if Abrams can work out a way, I’m willing to work with it.

Hey everybody–but especially everybody out on the West Coast of the United States–I just got word direct from Chance Shirley, the guy who directed that Interplanetary movie we broke here a while back.

Seems that this Friday night, nine PM, as part of the Hollywood ArcLight theater’s Hollywood Film Festival, Interplanetary will be screened.  For you West Coast dwellers in and around Los Angeles, the date at the ArcLight is probably going to be about the only chance you get to catch this one in theaters.

Chance further tells me that the projection and sound mix are going to be absolutely epic on this one, so if you read our coverage of Interplanetary, and got an interest in catching it on the best screen possible, be sure to get out to the Hollywood Film Festival.

Oh, one last thing–Chance also mentioned that, if you’re interested in pre-buying tickets for the event, you can get them right here.

I admit that, before I wrote this one up, I had to hit Wikipedia and get better acquainted with the Red Dwarf series.  All I had seen of it was some occasional PBS episodes back in my high school days, and frankly, it looked WAY too low-budget to be entertaining.

Of course, I’ve caught a few more since then, and improved my outlook considerably, but I still needed a refresher going into the newest adventure of the Dwarfers, Red Dwarf: Back To Earth, a copy of which was recently sent my way.

Here, the crew of the Red Dwarf, a mining ship stranded in space for fully three million years following an accident, find themselves in another dimension after an attempt to get home and restart the human race: namely, our own, in which the Dwarfers are the cast of a popular sci-fi sitcom.  They’ve also just found out something horrible–they’re about to be canceled.  Now, can they get their series renewed and get back to the Dwarf?  Or will they share Star Trek’s fate?

This really is good stuff, folks.  Even if you haven’t seen a whole lot of Red Dwarf, you should still be able to appreciate the panoply of jokes thrown at you from the sidelines, and all the extra-strange minutiae isn’t just sci-fi. There’s one great sequence where Lister, quite possibly the last human being alive, commandeers his series’ creator’s typewriter and proceeds to run amok, commanding hologram Rimmer to repeatedly bash his crotch against a writing desk and android Kryten to step on a series of rakes, in the grandest Sideshow Bob tradition.

Yes, Simpsons already did it.  I love subreferences.

Anyway, the Screenhead Ten Scale hands this riotous British sci-fi a full eight out of ten for being obscure yet  hilarious.

Man, when you actually hear this chunk of news, chances are you’ll nod your head in agreement, convinced that you’ve already heard it somewhere, but no.  You heard it here, folks–there’s going to be a special appearance in Tron: Legacy by vaguely electronica group Daft Punk.

No, seriously.  Daft Punk.  You know, that club band everyone was listening to back in the late nineties, early two thousands or so?  They’re not just appearing in it, either, they’re also scoring it.

Just for reference’s sake, I’ve attached a video directly below courtesy of YouTube to give you a better idea who these guys are and why it’s actually terribly appropriate that they show up in a movie like Tron.  Like I said, this is actually a pretty good idea; so much so that you’d almost be convinced you heard it already, it’s just that rational a fit.

Tron: Legacy hits theaters this Christmas where it will likely pound holy hell out of its competition.

The idea of putting Hugh Jackman in a role featuring enormous battling robots  is an idea that makes me question if my medication is sufficiently strong, but then I read about it in a few movie websites–including right here–and suddenly things start to make sense.

But it’s true–the movie’s called Real Steel, and it assumes a future in which boxing is declared illegal as it’s too dangerous.  Thus, it’s replaced by letting one-ton fighting robots take over.  Jackman will discover a model previously thought obsolete that has the strangest habit of actually winning.

It’s kind of an awesome thought, with Jackman playing the Doc Lewis to the robot’s Little Mac, even if it’s got that vaguely familiar / derivative feeling to it  thanks to previous attempts at making a Robot Fight Club like Rock ‘em Sock’em Robots, the old Virtual Boy game Teleroboxer, or even the really apt description of a weird hybrid of Rocky meets Robot Jox

I’ll admit though, this has the great potential to be a charming, hilarious and action-packed title when and if they finally figure out just what all they’re going to do with it.  They won’t even start filming this until at least summer 2010, so forget about catching this one before 2011.

I walked into Pandorum feeling pretty peppy about the whole affair.  It had been a goodish while since I’d seen an actual space opera in theatres (I seem to remember my last experience with a massive spaceship in theatres as being Event Horizon but that was way back in high school) and so I was definitely looking forward to it.

And then the surprises started.  The interesting thing here, however, is that they did not let up until the very end of the movie, and it is for this reason I’m actually surprised to report that Pandorum kicked a whole lot of ass and I’m actually surprised to BE surprised.

The plot of Pandorum is actually pretty simple–it’s what they DO with it that’ll kill you.  We join a young corporal and his grizzled lieutenant on the flight deck of a massive spaceship that’s probably a few miles long at least.  It’s heading somewhere.  But no one’s sure exactly where because they’ve all been unconscious for who knows how long in hypersleep chambers and they’re just now coming around.  The ship is pitch black, seemingly falling apart…oh, and there’s SOMETHING running around belowdecks.

This bad day in space will only get worse–you may rest entirely assured of that.

And like I said, there will be a whole lot of fantastic surprises, and not just the ones built into the plot, either.  You’ll get an incredible performance from Dennis Quaid who most definitely has still got it.  You’ll discover Cam Gigandet can do more than swishy sparkly vampires.  You’ll discover all sorts of cataclysmic plot twists that will do an excellent job of holding your interest–at least, they held MY interest, and that’s saying something.

But perhaps the most mind-blowing surprise of all is that this really good lump of science fiction glee was brought to us by Paul W.S. Anderson.

You did in fact read that last sentence correctly.  Pandorum, a fantastic sci-fi deep space action flick, is directly connected to Paul “I Turned Resident Evil Into A Slipknot Video” W.S. Anderson.  Of course, he just produced this one, which is awesome as he’s finally found a niche where he can’t ruin perfectly good video games by turning them into godawful movies that are only vaguely related to their original titles.

Of course, the result is that anyone calling this a “Resident Evil in Space” will not be terribly far off, but the combination is surprisingly palatable and plenty of fun.  Call me biased if you must but I’ve always been fond of big ship movies, be they oceanic or interstellar, and Pandorum definitely provided.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands over a full-on nine out of ten for Pandorum, a movie that managed to bring a whole bunch of surprises to the table, defy plenty of expectations, and still managed to let me have  a good time watching.  If you’re even vaguely into science fiction, folks, especially with a little dystopia on the side, well, this one’s definitely for you.

Sorry, Nigerians out there, but if you want to see one of the biggest sci-fi films America generated this year, you’re going to have to get your passport in order and head for another country–District 9 is officially banned in Nigeria.

File the rest of this under the “unintentionally hilarious because no one really cares what Nigeria thinks” department as Nigeria then began to get a hugely overinflated sense of its own importance and began issuing the following demands.

1. Sony must apologize for portraying Nigerians as “gangsters and cannibals”.

2. Sony must edit its movie to remove all references that sound vaguely like the name of their former president, Olusegun Obasanjo.

3. Sony must edit its movie to remove all references to Nigeria.

There’s no word on what prizes Sony would get in exchange for knuckling under, but the country’s “information minister”, who apparently isn’t terribly interested in information about growing crops and feeding citizens and instead is focused entirely on finding insults to the country in modern film, issued a statement which read in part:

“We have directed that they should stop public screening of the film,” Ms. Akunyili said. “We are not happy about it because it portrays Nigeria in bad light.”

Bravo, Ms. Akunyili.