2012

Looking for something good and geeky to watch? Check out this week's new sci-fi home video releases:

2012 (DVD and Blu-ray)
Watch Roland Emmerich destroy the world with some spectacular CG magic in this fun and bloated schlockbuster starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet and a whacked-out Woody Harrelson.

Where The Wild Things Are (DVD and Blu-ray)
Director Spike Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers cook up a raw, spirited and innovative flick about a rowdy kid and his imaginary monsters, based on Maurice Sendack's beloved kid's book.

Alice (DVD and Blu-ray)
Syfy's hit-and-miss quasi-sequel to Lewis Carrol's classic tale is worth a rental, if only for Primeval's Andre Lee Potts' charming performance as the clever Hatter. Banking on this week's theatrical release of Tim Burton's Alice, the 1966 Alice in Wonderland starring Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts also hits stores today, along with the 1933 version with Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and W.C. Fields.

Cold Souls (DVD)
Paul Giamatti is great (no surprise there) and David Strathairn is hilarious in this dark, twisted and meandering indie that sees Giamatti (playing himself) putting his heavy soul in deep-freeze storage.

Clash of the Titans (Blu-ray)
The campy '80s stop-motion classic gets the high-def treatment, just before the slick new CG version hits theaters.

Roland Emmerich has been attached to direct an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation for some time now. If that's somehow news to you, I'm sure you're scratching your head and wondering "The man behind 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow adapting Foundation? That's like a movie version of I, Robot starring Will Smith! Oh. Wait." Then you sigh and walk away slowly.

Empire spoke with the Maestro of Destroying the World on Film about his plans for the film. What he has to say is discouraging and encouraging in equal measure. On one hand, he directly calls out I, Robot as the wrong way to tackle this property:

"I, Robot as a book was so much more than it was as a film and I think, because of that, fans were very disappointed. I don't want to repeat that disappointment; I want to give people exactly what the Foundation trilogy is. You have to tell a story that represents the books but also works as a film. That's the challenge."

Does this mean that Emmerich has no intention of turning Asimov's dense story of politics and civilization into an action series? Seems kind of odd for a man who ups the ante of destruction and mayhem with every film he makes. The Foundation series does deal directly with an intergalactic civil war and the falling of a massive empire, but it's all in the background, focusing on a specially created colony that was constructed to survive the chaos through an experimental process called psychohistory, which will predict the challenges they'd encounter. The seven book series follows the colony for a thousand years or so. There's definitely scope here, but it's not the kind of scope Emmerich is known for.

Not long after the film 2012 hit theaters, its director Roland Emmerich was running around telling people that they were planning a spin-off television show that would follow survivors of the first film attempting to rebuild humanity after arriving in Africa. Speaking to Movieweb about the upcoming 2012 DVD, Emmerich now says the TV show is most likely dead in the water because what they wanted to do was just too expensive for TV.

He says, "It's not totally dead. Mark Gordon is still trying to come up with an idea on how to make it cheaper. I don't think it will happen. I had a certain vision. We realized what kind of compromises we were going to have to make. Because of that, I said, "No thank you." Speaking more about the plot, Emmerich added, "It would have been a great TV show. Because it would have dealt with the facts of arriving in Africa. We would have seen what happened had Cape Town survived. Those people already living there would be majorly pissed. Because the ships didn't take them. There was this whole political edge to it. It would have been a very political TV show. It had such big themes. It was about reaching for the stars. There was an economic reality that kept it from becoming a reality. We didn't want to compromise. We said, "Let's not do it."

Hey, no skin off my back -- Emmerich's films are usually more about the spectacle than the characters, and it's easy to lose yourself in spectacle for two hours, but week in and week out? No thanks.

What about you? Pissed there's not going to be a 2012 TV show?

2009 is almost over, and it's been a banner year for science fiction. More than three dozen science fiction themed films have seen release in the US. Some emphasize the science fiction more than others, and a couple may be more occult/horror than actual science fiction, but they're close enough.

While the quality of the films listed below varies wildly, the fact that science fiction elements are featured in so many wide released films is outstanding, and there are at least three critical and box office hits among the list below. At least three of the movies listed below give me hope that smart science fiction films are still viable.

I can't help thinking I'm missing something. I didn't include TimeCrimes because it came out on DVD. What else should be on this list?

9
2012
Alien Trespass
Astro Boy
Avatar
Battle for Terra
The Box
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Cold Souls
District 9
The Fourth Kind
G-Force
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Gamer
Gentlemen Broncos
Knowing
Land of the Lost
Men Who Stare at Goats
Monsters vs. Aliens 3D
Moon
Pandorum
Planet 51
Push
The Road
Star Trek
Stingray Sam
Surrogates
Terminator Salvation
Thirst
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Watchmen
X-Men Origins: Wolverine

TV and straight-to-DVD, or otherwise extremely limited theatrical release include: The Mutant Chronicles, Dante 01, Eden Log, Before the Fall, Sleep Dealer, The Objective, and Outlander.

What was your favorite?

This could be the place where I go on a diatribe about how the Oscars continue to prove themselves more and more irrelevant every year and how, as a writer for a science fiction website, I continue to be annoyed by the lack of respect shown to genre films at awards season. For shame, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! Shame on you and your children and your children's children!

But I'm not going to, because there is news afoot.

The Academy has announced the fifteen films on the shortlist for the visual effects Oscar, the only award that consistently goes to science fiction and fantasy films. Only three will get to wear tuxes and get luxurious gift baskets full of expensive hand creams. Why only three? Why not five? Probably some silly Academy rule, similar to the one that keeps good documentaries from ever getting any sort of recognition.

And your children's children's children!

But I digress. The fifteen films are as follows:

Angels & Demons
Avatar
Coraline
Disney's A Christmas Carol,
District 9
G-Force
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Sherlock Holmes
Star Trek
Terminator Salvation
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
2012
Watchmen
Where the Wild Things Are

[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

Note for the spoiler-weary: the below video reveals little the trailers for 2012 haven't already shown.

So much of our beautiful planet gets blasted apart in 2012 that it's hard to pin point just one centerpiece of the film. One of the most memorable sequences, however, involves a particular geological feature of Yellowstone National Park that is currently missing in the year 2009; namely it exists now and doesn't in another three years. So if you'd like to see what kind of efforts are put into smiting a national treasure, click on to see just how much of it was shot practically, and how much of it involves planting a Winnebago on a gimble and blasting it with fire, which may just be my favorite behind-the-scenes image ever.

The above ad for the film 2012 is currently plastered in subway tunnels in Rio de Janeiro, and as you can see the clever twist here is that they make it look like the tunnel is filling up with water. Granted, it's not too hard to figure out this is just another movie marketing tactic, but still -- it's kinda freaky and might not be the proper image you want people to take with them when they're in an underground tunnel.

What do you think? Is this a piece of cool, clever movie marketing or an ad that simply takes it a bit too far?

Larger version below.



[via Gizmodo]

Soon we're going to be able to see what happens after the world "ends." The movie hasn't smashed its way to screens yet, but Roland Emmerich (director and producer of 2012) has told Entertainment Weekly that they're already working on transporting the story to the smaller screen, saying there's "plenty to do" with a television series.

Before you wonder how the hell they could take a show through the potential end of the world and not die in the budgetary stress of big explosions and effects -- not to mention staving off the apocalypse if ratings are good and more seasons are ordered -- this will be a continuation of the film. "The plan is that it is 2013 and it's about what happens after the disaster. It is about the resettling of the Earth." Writer Harold Kloser came up with the idea, and they took it to TV producer Mark Gordon (who worked on the film). Emmerich says: "I think it will focus on a group of people who survived but not on the boats ... maybe they were on a piece of land that was spared or one that became an island in the process of the crust moving. There are so many possibilities of what they could do and I'd be excited to watch it."

Sounds a smidge like Lost, eh? That's a wee bit convenient since rumor has it ABC is in talks for the series, and while Gordon wouldn't confirm that information, he noted the network's "opening in their disaster-related programming after Lost ends."

Are you game for a new disaster series where folks must find their way through a newly fashioned Earth?

Unless you live on a blissful island that lacks an Internet connection, it's hard to avoid the clunking marketing machine that accompanies the release of any of Hollywood's big-budget, blockbuster hopefuls. No longer can one simply watch a trailer or read an interview, as those outdated marketing elements are now being rolled together in a new PR buzz word: The Experience.

Take for example ThisIsTheEnd.com, a site which, to its credit, clearly confesses to being part of the "2012 Movie Experience". It's filled with planned 'viral' videos that illuminate some of the details of Roland Emmerich's upcoming journey toward complete destruction of all mankind. And while most of the early videos are quite boring, the honchos behind them have decided to spice things up by including YouTube videos of Charlie Frost, a self-confessed paranoiac that firmly believes the Mayans are right about the end of times (hint: they are not).

What's interesting about the videos, which are otherwise forgettable, is that Charlie Frost is played by Woody Harrelson. Now I haven't seen the movie, so I can't say how much of a role Harrelson plays, but he is officially listed in the credits, so either he shares more running time with John Cusack and Amanda Peet than previously thought, or his role exists so as to extend this ad campaign.

Check out the two videos below; which are amusing because of Harrelson, but sport a YouTube view count that I'm betting is a lot lower than Sony was hoping for.

Take THAT Roland Emmerich! The problem with these end-of-the-world movies, like 2012, is that when they come out people sometimes freak because they actually believe the world is coming to an end. The marketing strategy for the upcoming Roland Emmerich film doesn't help either, since it seems the studio wants people to believe the 2012 Mayan prophecy -- so much so that they've gone and created a whole slew of fake websites and Facebook pages tied to the film and tied to the Mayan legend. Of course, this sort of fluff may help the film's box office take when it hits theaters, but it certainly doesn't help the folks at NASA who've been fielding thousands of emails from people who, thanks to the movie and its marketing plan, think the world is ending in 2012.

Says NASA scientist David Morrison, "I don't have anything against the movie. It's the way it's been marketed and the way it exploits people's fears." To dispute some of these claims, Morrison has taken to a new online column where he's been answering questions about 2012 and the mysterious planet Nibiru.

So what does he really think about the Mayan calendar ending on that specific date in 2012? In his column, Morrison says: "Calendars exist for keeping track of the passage of time, not for predicting the future. The Mayan astronomers were clever, and they developed a very complex calendar. Ancient calendars are interesting to historians, but they cannot match the ability we have today to keep track of time, or the precision of the calendars currently in use. The main point, however, is that calendars, whether contemporary or ancient, cannot predict the future of our planet or warn of things to happen on a specific date such as 2012. I note that my desk calendar ends much sooner, on December 31 2009, but I do not interpret this as a prediction of Armageddon. It is just the beginning of a new year."