Charlie Jane Anders

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What Would The Ultimate Nerd Wish-Fulfillment Look Like?

Click to viewMovies just aren’t doing a good enough job of pandering to our escapist wet dreams. A nerdy guy who turns into a green destructo-ape when you fuck with him? An MIT engineer who builds the ultimate super-armor? A clerk who turns super-killer? Bah! Hollywood could do a much, much better job than that … Continued

io9Television

First Awful Glimpse Of Keanu Reeves As Klaatu

This morning’s spoilers include the first image of Keanu Reeves as Klaatu from the Day The Earth Stood Still remake, plus your daily allowance of Joker-isms, from a new Dark Knight trailer. Other clips include TV spots for X-Files 2 and the bad-science show Eleventh Hour, plus new promos for the animated DVDs Gotham Knight … Continued

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First Look At Death Race’s Deadly Mask

The official website for Death Race, the quasi-remake of road-rage classic Death Race 2000 starring Jason Statham, just went live. And it includes this glimpse of the metal mask that Statham wears as Frankenstein, the star racer of the prison where he’s locked up. Statham wears that mask as he pretends to be the dead … Continued

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What Scifi Teaches Us About Lying, Deceitful Mentors

In two of this summer’s biggest action movies, the hero’s mentor turns out to be a lying, manipulative sack of villainy. And nobody in the audience is surprised, because it’s a scifi fact of life: mentors lie to you. They feed you half-truths (“Darth Vader killed your dad”) and outright lies, to get you to … Continued

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9 Ways Hancock Could Have Been A Pretty Good Movie

Click to viewWill Smith’s drunk-and-disorderly superhero movie, Hancock, hits theaters today, a full three days early. You can’t help but wonder if Warner Bros. is trying to get the movie out there before all the bad buzz, and horrendous reviews, take effect. The sad thing is, there are a bunch of ways that Hancock could … Continued

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BSG TV Movie Will Be The Man Show

More details have come out about the first (and maybe only) Battlestar Galactica TV movie, which may air as soon as this fall. The good news is, it’ll be written by Buffy/Firefly scribe Jane Espenson, who just scored a hit with the BSG episode “The Hub.” The bad news is, it’ll be directed by BSG … Continued

io9Television

Secret Origins Of Vader’s Apprentice And Dr. Horrible

Spoilers can open up your whole world, letting you see the bigger picture – like when you find out how Darth Vader and his secret apprentice first meet and form a special bond in the next Star Wars video game. Or when you learn the secret name of Dr. Horrible, the hero/villain of Joss Whedon’s … Continued

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Whatever Happened To Rocky Jones, Space Ranger?

You’re always hearing about Flash Gordon this and Buck Rogers that. You see Flash and Buck, snorting their comet-dust and dancing with robots with obscenely shaped heads. But nobody ever thinks about Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, who rocked just as hard back in the 1950s. Did Buck have a comedy sidekick named Winky? Or a … Continued

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Nobody’s Pure, In New Dark Knight Clips

Is Batman just another lawbreaker, like the Joker? Is there a place for his vigilante justice in Gotham City, or should he let crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent do the crime-fighting? Even Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne isn’t sure, in these fascinating new clips from The Dark Knight, which opens July 18. (Plus there’s more … Continued

io9Movies

The Terrifying Super-Lions Of The Post-Apocalypse

More proof that environmental collapse is the new apocalypse: Wanted scribes Michael Brandt and Derek Haas have just sold a movie script called All Creatures Great And Small to Sony and producer Neal Moritz. In the future, after the fossil fuels dry up, humans retreat inside walled forts, to defend ourselves against savage, super-evolved animals. … Continued

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This Week’s TV: Giant Rats, Alien Sex, And Stuart Gordon’s Ultimate Horror

Cancel those Fourth of July plans! This is going to be a totally righteous week of science fiction television. First, there’s a new Middleman, featuring those Mexican wrestlers we showed you a while back. And then, giant human-eating rats are going to fight environmentalists, to see who rules science TV. There’s a new journey into … Continued

io9Television

New Official Details About Hellboy 2, Transformers 2, Heroes And Sarah Connor Chronicles

Apparently there’s something called “spoiler stress” that comes from reading too many spoilers, and it can shorten your life! So handle our new motherlode of spoilers for Hellboy 2 and Journey To The Center Of The Earth 3-D with caution. And don’t let all of the crazy spoilers/rumors about Saturday’s finale of British time-travel show … Continued

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Doctor Who’s Russell T. Davies Is The Gay Michael Bay

After watching last night’s Doctor Who episode, I wished for the first time ever that Russell T. Davies would stay on to produce a fifth season of the BBC’s time-traveling adventure show. Not because I think a fifth RTD season would be good, but because I’m dying to see how he could come up with … Continued

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Watchmen Shouldn’t Be A Movie

All of the discussion about next March’s Watchmen movie has focused on whether it’ll be faithful to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel. But really, they’re missing the point – Watchmen shouldn’t be a movie at all. It only makes narrative sense as a comic book, because so much of its strengths are … Continued

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Flying Into The Gaping Maw Of Mars

This is one of NASA’s proposed landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory, which looks like a set of giant gaping jaws of evil. Do those look like teeth to anybody else? Actually, they’re sand deposits resulting from wind activity, with the lighter parts being bedrock. The green and blue areas are full of iron- … Continued

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Is Star Wars Just A Video Game Franchise Now?

A new Star Wars movie, Clone Wars, hits theaters in a month and a half – and all the online excitement still centers around the forthcoming video game The Force Unleashed. People cheer for every screenshot from Unleashed, where you get to play a “secret apprentice” to Darth Vader, wielding huge Force powers. Meanwhile, there’s … Continued

io9Television

Will The Sci Fi Channel Water Down The Doctor Who Finale?

The season finale of time-traveling adventure show Doctor Who will be much, much longer than a usual episode – 65 minutes instead of the show’s usual 45 to 50 minute range. In England, at least. But how long will the episode “Journey’s End” be when it airs on the Sci Fi Channel? Probably about 42 … Continued

io9Television

James Kirk’s Earliest Challenge, In J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek

Welcome to our spoiler orgy. A tantalizing new report on some Star Trek footage gives away one or two new plot twists, including which classic characters don’t get assigned to the Enterprise right away. Another batch of new Dark Knight footage shows a few new dimensions to the Joker’s batshit-insanity. And a new Doctor Who … Continued

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Never Say Someone Will Be Fine During A Shootout With An Alien Spaceship

You don’t see nearly enough spaceship battles inside a planet atmosphere, let alone dogfights which turn into ground-to-air battles. Which is why I love this sequence from Recon 2022: The Mezzo Conspiracy, which just came out on DVD. That, plus the giant flaming hole that gets blown in the wounded guy, right after someone says … Continued

io9Books & Comics

The Secret Masters And The Conspiracy Against Democracy

Could a publisher buy a Hugo Award? Maybe, if the cost of a non-attending WorldCon membership gets capped at around $40 a head. It could only cost a few thousand, or maybe $10,000, to buy enough memberships to “win” an award, worry some in the fan community. But the larger problem is that the Hugos … Continued