Get Drafted into The Forever War

[adrotate banner=”1″]Joe Haldeman’s classic book The Forever War inches closer to actually becoming a real film, and not just a story that fills industry publication pages for forty years. Ridley Scott has been attached to direct since 2008, something he’s wanted to do since the novel was first published in 1974, but the rights were tied up almost forever. Finally, Fox 2000 got them, and recently got around to hiring the writer of the upcoming All You Need is Kill, D.W. Harper, to write the adaptation.

If you haven’t read the book, what are you waiting for??? An engraved invitation from the Taurans? Sheesh. Please excuse my SciFi Lit snobbishness. So anyway, The Forever War is about a soldier who goes to war fighting aliens called Taurans, but thanks to relativity effects from light speed the travel time takes decades, the aliens attack with ever-increasing technological weapons, and Earth is radically different each time he returns. Which causes the soldiers to reenlist and reenlist because Earth is more alien than the aliens. Eventually things get 1970s weird, and the whole books is a commentary on the Vietnam War. It’s often called a response to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and even features a Filipino main character and power armor, but Haldeman has denied that.

Deadline via BeyondHollywood
Tauran image via artbytravissmith

Tauran The Forever War

Man, these hiphugger jeans are just too uncomfortable!

“They Look Like They Make Sense, Don’t They?” – A Reassessment of Prometheus

The following article is unapologetically spoilerific on the subject of Prometheus. If you haven’t seen that film, I’d suggest doing that before reading this. Also, I should warn you that I am quite blunt about genital descriptions, in keeping with the imagery of the film.

Prometheus was one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year. Fans of the Alien films, i.e: everyone, were chomping at the bit for the answers to the unanswerable questions posed by that film’s mysterious “Space Jockey”. Who was that guy? What was his connection to the titular alien? What happened to the rest of them? Well, Ridley Scott finally got his chance to try to answer all these questions in the form of Prometheus, a prequel of sorts to the 1979 film. We were finally going to find out what it was all about!

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Hungry Hungry Hippos….will be a REAL FILM????!!

Hungry Hungry Hippos Brian Cook
[adrotate banner=”1″]What in the flying monkey crap is happening to Earth, planet of humans, that makes jokes reality? Are we being zapped with Ironic Reality Rays from the Evil Skeletor and his gang of baddies? Because suddenly, everyone’s favorite joke board game movie will actually be a real movie! Hasbro has signed deals to bring more of their properties to the big screen. In addition to reviving the long-in-production Monopoly flick and optioning Action Man for some reason, Hungry Hungry Hippos is the third property in the deal with Emmett/Furla Films giving Hasbro the dump trucks full of cash it needs to get these films in production through their Universal subsidiary. Don’t worry, each film will cost less than $100 million, that way they will only lose lots of money instead of a ton of money.

Monopoly will be the first of the three films, probably because a lot of the ground work has already been done over the years. Ridley Scott is still listed as a producer, but I do not know if they will continue with the “guy wakes up in a Monopoly world” plot that was rumored years ago. All the films are being marketed as family films.

Emmett/Furla is also bankrolling The Tomb, Two Guns, and Broken City, so they’re posed to become very very rich. Which they will need when no one watches these Hasbro films. I mean, I can’t wait for Hungry Hungry Hippos!

I actually seriously can’t wait.

Via LATimes
Image created by Brian Cook