Category: Invasion Alerts!

By Jason Apuzzo. We’ve been speculating for some time here at Libertas that Disney’s Tron: Legacy might go political. The early, key indication of this was an interview with Bruce Boxleitner in which he suggested that the big bad villain of Tron might be a wicked defense contractor.

In a new interview today, Tron‘s Olivia Wilde adds a new dimension to this story and confirms that the film will, indeed, have a strong political subtext to it. Here she is, talking to Collider:

Collider: Watching last night I sort of got some political undertones in the film –

Wilde: Absolutely. There’s a totally anti-fascist message here.

Collider: She really believes she’s doing the right thing, having this war on imperfection. Do you get that now having seen the whole film?

Wilde: Yes, absolutely, and I saw it more than ever in the movie last night. I knew that was there in the script, but I was really excited to see, like, ‘Ooh, good. We have a little bit of a political slant.’ Maybe no one will notice but you and me, but I think the message, again, is that imperfection is beautiful, the idea of accepting flaws. The story is of a dictator who has ethnically cleansed this universe and what’s left is this desperate and miserable world. The message I think of course is that compassion, humanity and humility are important in our own lives as well as in politics. Again, that makes me think about how incredible Jeff’s performance was because to create a character like Clu who was this merciless dictator who really kind of sends chills up your spine as you think of maybe who he resembles in actual history, but I think it does have a message as well, a political message as well as one just about humanity in general.

Wilde also indicates in the interview that she identifies her own character in the film with Joan of Arc. (This may explain why Wilde was also posing recently as Lady Liberty in ads for the A.C.L.U.; she certainly seems to have an expansive view of herself.)

I would love to know exactly who Wilde thinks Tron‘s “merciless dictator” resembles “in actual history,” wouldn’t you? Why do I think I already know? Hint: I doubt she’s talking about insane Islamic theocrats eager to wipe out Jews, or any actual fascists in today’s world; she’s more likely talking about America’s ‘virtual,’ imaginary fascists that haunt the current liberal imagination. And we all know who those guys are …!

In any case, I think perhaps we’re starting to get the vibe of what this film will be saying. As we’ve said here on almost a hundred different occasions recently, sci-fi is the new medium through which the big, ideological statements are being made in the cinema. (Although, truth be told, sci-fi has actually being doing this for decades.) If Avatar didn’t make that point clearly enough, the many new sci-fi films coming in its wake will.

Incidentally, Tron‘s currently tracking poorly. This won’t help.

Posted on December 2nd, 2010 at 11:23am.

By Jason Apuzzo. There’s been an ocean of alien invasion news since our last Invasion Alert!, so let’s get right into it …

• Three major trailers hit the internet last week for: Battle: Los Angeles (actually, 2 trailers for that one, here and here), Cowboys & Aliens and Green Lantern. My verdict? I thought Battle looked fantastic, while Cowboys and Lantern left me cold. Battle‘s main trailer (see here) had a creepy, realistic, frightening vibe to it – especially with the weird, computer-synth voice on the soundtrack. A lot of the footage in the trailer had the look and feel of war footage from Iraq or Afghanistan – especially the gnarly urban street fighting. Battle actually seems to take its material (i.e., military invasion) ‘seriously’ – or at least, with a straight face – and for that reason clicked, as opposed to what the Strause Brothers just did with Skyline, which sometimes felt like a commercial for Skyy Vodka.

I also liked Battle’s international trailer (see here), although the vibe of that was much different – more like something you’d see on The History Channel. In any case, I’m very much looking forward to this film, which opens in March in what’s becoming a crowded calendar.

Cowboys‘ trailer bored me to tears, if that’s possible in under 3 minutes. The trailer threw one big name out after another: Harrison Ford … Daniel Craig … Jon Favreau … Steven Spielberg … and apparently all those big names were supposed to make up for a listless, confusing storyline and muddy photography. Yawn. I was hoping Jerry Jones or Jessica Simpson might show up, just to liven things up a bit.

A lingering problem with Daniel Craig is that he has no personality; he’s apparently only capable of snarling at the camera. If there’s some other trick in his bag, I certainly haven’t seen it. And Harrison Ford appears committed to doing something he really shouldn’t be bothering with at this stage of his career – which is artificially ‘broadening’ his range as an actor by playing cranky eccentrics and/or bad guys. What a waste.

My friendly advice to Mr. Ford would be to speed-dial Skywalker Ranch and make sure that Indy 5 script gets finished, pronto.

As for Green Lantern, I have only one word: garbage.

• Some big news from last week was that Sam Raimi’s massive alien invasion thriller Earth Defense Force may now get a director, Pierre Morel (Taken). (It’s worth noting here that Morel only has room to take that film because he’s apparently backed out of helming Dune.) The original script for EDF, incidentally, was written by Andrew Marlowe (Air Force One). I’m getting the feeling this film may end up being fantastic. Also: the Timur Bekmambetov/Weinstein Co. alien invasion thriller Apollo 18 now has a director: Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego; and (bummer alert!) Colin Farrell has been offered the lead of the Total Recall remake. [Sigh.]

• The release date on Universal’s The Thing has been postponed from its original April window, apparently because the film isn’t ready yet … but I’m betting it also has to do with how crowded the Spring is looking (Battle: Los Angeles and Apollo 18 are both being released in March, assuming Apollo gets done that fast) – and how good Battle: Los Angeles is looking.

• Some set photos from Men in Black 3D have leaked, featuring (among other things) pictures of Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger as a wicked alien temptress with an old-school Princess Leia hairdo. Nice. Also, there are some new rumors circulating about the shooting delays on that project, and script details are now leaking.

• There was a rumor a few months back that an alien creature invasion project called Pacific Rim, which was designed as a major tentpole project (possibly involving Guillermo del Toro), was going to get folded into the reboot of the Godzilla series. Screenwriter William Monahan shoots that rumor down today; apparently Pacific Rim is still alive as its own project.

• Two more minor new alien invasion thrillers were announced last week: a Brit film called The Animators, and another titled Year 12, produced by Joe Roth. Click on the links to find out more about those – both seem a bit generic on first read. Another pseudo-alien invasion comedy called Pixels also now has Adam Sandler attached to it.

• It appears that Industrial Light & Magic will doing the VFX for most of these alien invasion thrillers, according to Variety. On ILM’s plate in the immediate future are: Super 8, I am Number 4 (see a new feature on I am Number 4 here), Cowboys & Aliens, Transformers 3 and Battleship. ILM is also currently overseeing the conversion of the Star Wars saga into 3D.

• Tron: Legacy is starting to be shown around, more clips are being released on-line, and as the release of that film approaches I imagine that people at Disney are holding their breath. My sense is that the film is probably going to do very well, but it’s not going to do anything like Avatar‘s business at the box office because it appears from everything I’m seeing that Disney is playing it safe with this film. I sense no risks being taken, no strong statement being made on any front – although the film is obviously going to look fabulous … essentially like a big, blue Chanel commercial.

I’m going to be really irritated, though, if it turns out – as we’ve speculated here before – that the big bad villain of Tron is going to be a wicked defense contractor. This is the key interview to watch on this subject, by the way, which only those of us here at Libertas seem to have noticed …

• It isn’t an invasion of aliens … but of KILLER BEES! Yes, in the wake of this summer’s Piranha 3D, and Sam Raimi remaking Day of the Triffids in 3D – about an invasion of extra-terrestrial carnivorous plants – we’re now going to get an invasion movie about killer bees, as director Ash Bolland is apparently on board to remake Irwin Allen’s The Swarm. I actually love this idea – although, admittedly, I’m a sucker for anything Irwin Allen did. No official word on whether this project will be done in 3D … but can there be any doubt?

• Almost a year after it’s initial release, and we still have to deal with Avatar. One tries to pretend the film isn’t there, and yet that’s not really possible, is it?

The film is currently in the midst of another huge DVD/Blu-ray release right now, and more clips are now available on-line of deleted scenes (see here), including yet another politically charged scene such as this one … in which Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington fulminate on the military’s illegitimate provocations for war! [Sigh.] We’re not going to be rid of this film or this franchise anytime soon – Cameron’s endless provocations will make sure of that.

As an aside, Cameron also talks here today about his motivations for making the film – none of which apparently included copying other and better filmmakers (George Lucas and Ray Harryhausen, to name two).

As a Christmas present, I really wish somebody at Dreamworks would announce that they’re going ahead with a Halo movie so somebody gives him some competition on this front.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … we thought we’d take a look at Aussie actress Rachael Taylor, who appeared in the original Transformers movie and next year will be battling alien invaders (in Moscow) in The Darkest Hour – although here she’s basically just selling ice cream.

And until next time … that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front!

Posted on November 22nd, 2010 at 4:35pm.

By Jason Apuzzo. • Finally the alien invasion genre is heading in a direction more to my tastes(!), as Scarlett Johansson has apparently signed on to do an alien invasion thriller called Under the Skin, in which she’s set to play “an alien on earth, disguised as a mesmerizing woman who uses her voracious sexuality to scour remote highways and desolate scenery to snare human prey.” Well! (Right now our male readers are asking themselves, “how come I never run into any women like that?”)

Based on the reporting I’ve seen on this film, it appears that Ms. Johansson’s alien character eventually discovers that Earth men aren’t so bad after all. That’s a relief. Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of Ms. Johansson as an actress, although there are clearly other things worth admiring about her. In general I find her cold and dull on-screen – even if she wasn’t bad in Michael Bay’s underrated The Island – so we’ll see whether she can pull this off. Many people have already been commenting on the similarity of Under the Skin‘s plotline to that of the Species series; the storyline is similar, of course, but the concept of the ‘sexually voracious female from outer space’ has actually been around since the 1950s (1954’s Devil Girl from Mars comes to mind, for example).

We’ll definitely keep an eye on this one – both eyes, actually. No word on whether it will be done in 3D. Here’s hoping it is.

• Our first Invasion Alert! merited a response from the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein, and we want to thank Patrick for his engagement with our ideas here. In response to Patrick’s thoughtful comments, I wanted to say a few things, briefly: first of all, when I said in my last Invasion Alert! that the new wave of ‘political’ sci-fi films are channeling anxieties about (among other things) the somewhat radical turn in American politics of late, I meant that these anxieties are obviously being felt on both the Left and the Right.

It’s quite evident that filmmakers on the Left like James Cameron, for example, are using their films to address what they perceive to be new strains of corporatist/anti-environmental extremism on the Right, as well as what they consider to be American ‘imperial’ overreach around the world. Those were clearly messages from Avatar.

Or there’s Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, which is obviously a response to what Edwards considers to be right-wing American ‘extremism’ on the immigration issue; or there’s NBC’s The Event, which is using an alien invasion scenario to backhandedly comment on ostensive human rights abuses by the CIA during the Bush years. So sci-fi is being used as an open platform for many different people to comment on many different things right now, and frequently from a liberal perspective. (And undoubtedly many – if not most – sci-fi films coming down the pike will betray no political perspective at all.)

At the same time, it seems highly likely to me that this new alien invasion genre – which actually encompasses about 40 projects right now (either films or TV shows on the books) – will follow thematic patterns similar to the 1950s and 1980s that will pull the material toward a more ‘conservative’/Cold War view of the world. Because let’s face it, none of these proposed alien invasion projects involve friendly alien invasions of America’s Heartland, if you know what I mean.

And although most of these projects will probably be riffing off the War on Terror (Battle: Los Angeles and Dreamworks’ proposed Halo adaptation come to mind here), it’s interesting to note that the plotines for several of the more recently announced alien invasion projects even seem to have a retro-Cold War feel to them – I’m thinking of Sam Raimi’s Earth Defense Force (which actually begins with America fighting the communist Chinese), or Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s The Darkest Hour and Apollo 18, or even Michael Bay’s Transformers 3, which apparently features a retro-style, U.S.-vs.-Russia spacerace storyline.

So we’ll see how all this develops. Whatever else, it should be fun to watch. Thanks to Patrick for keeping an eye on us, here.

• We have to talk Tron, of course. The film has a new and final trailer out, which looks spectacular (as always) … and also completely shallow. So that’s now what I’m expecting from this film, along with a light dusting of liberal nonsense about Jeff Bridges’ former company becoming a defense contractor. [Gasp!] In any case, Disney is really going to the mat on this one, releasing one new, boffo poster after another (see here) and even opening Tron stores. They’d better hope the film doesn’t lay an egg. Plus, Olivia Wilde just posed for Vanity Fair. She’s certainly cute; it’s too bad she’s so annoying.

• Visual FX work has already commenced on Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels. Needless to say, those films should be intriguing.

• One of the big announcements of the past week on the Alien Invasion Front was the pickup of Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s Apollo 18 project. Bekmambetov is already shooting (in 3D) right now The Darkest Hour, another alien invasion thriller, set in Moscow. Apollo 18 will be riffing off the real-world history of the space race, apparently; here is how the project is described:

With the recent discovery of Russian film footage that suggests that America’s Apollo 18 space mission actually did occur, despite being canceled by President Nixon in the early 1970s, The Weinstein Company (TWC) announced today that it has acquired the rights to a provocative new film project, titled Apollo 18. To be directed by Trevor Cawood from a screenplay by Brian Miller, the documentary-style sci-fi thriller will be produced by Russian filmmaker Timur Behmambetov …

A quintessential Cold War story, Apollo 18 casts light on the covert and undocumented lunar mission that officially “never happened.” Bekmambetov, hired by Russia to shoot a documentary about the Russian space station, recently came across footage in its space archives that bolsters the idea that an Apollo 18 mission did, in fact, take place, and reveals startling evidence of extraterrestrial life forms. This actual footage will be part of Apollo 18, a paranormal thriller that will interpolate fact and fiction.

Interesting. Comparisons were immediately made to another ‘aliens on the moon’ project called Dark Moon recently picked up by Warner Brothers – and so Warners dropped that project yesterday, only to have Dark Castle pick it back up! So the alien invasions will continue. But as a result of the Weinsteins picking up Apollo 18 for a March 2011 release, it now looks like Roland Emmerich has dropped his low-budget/’found footage’ alien invasion thriller that was also set for a March 2011 release, called The Zone. This kind of thing is becoming inevitable, as those Hollywood skies are getting awfully crowded with aliens right now …

• Speaking of skies crowded with alien invaders, it came to my attention recently that both the original Space Invaders video game (at Warner Brothers) and the old Missile Command video game (at Fox) are currently in development as tentpole movie adaptations. Unreal.

• If you have any doubts about whether sci-fi is going political right now, check out this poster for the new Brit sci-fi adaptation of Henry V, starring Michael Caine and Ray Winstone. In case you can’t see it, the poster’s tagline reads: “How will they justify why they went to war?” Hmmm …

• The whole blonde Scarlett Johansson alien thing reminds me, by the way, that the old Roger Corman-Traci Lords alien invasion cult classic Not of This Earth (1988) just go released on DVD this week. This cheeky, fun little flick – featuring Traci Lords fighting off an alien invader while in a nurse’s outfit (when she’s clothed, that is) – is definitely worth checking out, although it’s not as good as Corman’s original. Also just out on DVD this week is Season 1 of ABC’s reboot of V. Season Two of that series debuts in January. On a somewhat lamer note, here are the full, excruciating details on the huge forthcoming Avatar Blu-ray set, as enumerated by James Cameron himself. [Sigh.] The money in my wallet for that Blu-ray might be called ‘unobtanium.’

• Here are some more new set photos of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Transformers 3. Hooray!

• Paramount apparently needs to get rolling on its long-in-development adaptation of Dune, or else Frank Herbert’s family will be pulling the rights from that studio. I’ve always thought Dune deserved much better than what it got years ago from David Lynch; with that said, part of the problem here is that George Lucas has been successfully using Star Wars to riff off Dune for years, so there’s some question as to whether it’s worth going back to that well. We’ll see. It’s worth noting here that Paramount recently wanted director Peter Berg to do the Dune adaptation, until he decamped to Universal to direct the $200 million alien invasion thriller, Battleship …

• … and a lot of insider dirt is being dished right now about Universal’s $200 million alien invasion thriller Battleship, starring Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker and Liam Neeson. (Clips of the film just got shown yesterday in Rhode Island for the first time.) Apparently Ron Meyer’s head may be rolling because the film was hastily greenlit at a steep price and with a bizarre, trendy premise (i.e., aliens landing on Earth and getting themselves into a naval battle). Stranger still, it seems that Hasbro has been calling a lot of the shots at Universal lately – no doubt due to the success of their other alien invasion franchise, Transformers.

A novel idea that Universal might want to consider – in part because of the money it would savie them – is developing their own, original ideas in-house. Just a thought.

• All eyes are on the Skyline, so to speak, set to open Friday. The LA Times just did an interesting feature on the film’s low-budget origins (see here), ShockTillYouDrop is running one of its interesting set-visits from the film (see here), and you can catch cast interviews (here) and new clips from the film (see here, here and here), as well. JoBlo’s site is also running a feature on the film’s young new hottie, Crystal Reed.

So will the film be any good? Or will it have an ideological subtext worth mentioning? I have no idea. I’m actually trying to avoid the film’s media onslaught right now, because I’d like to be at least somewhat surprised by what I see in the theater. So far it’s looking like the film will be on the vapid side; or at least, they’re not letting anything loose in the media indicating  that the film is treading on any new ground. The question is whether this film will have negative repercussions for the alien invasion genre generally, if it fails. In the short term I think the answer is ‘yes’; but in the long term? Not a chance.

• If anybody is still interested in Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, Aint It Cool News interviews him here. He’s not done with sci-fi, apparently. Too bad.

• Is this teaser art for the next Star Trek movie? Inquiring minds want to know …

• Harrison Ford talks briefly about Cowboys & Aliens today.

• On the TV front, Steven Spielberg’s big-budget sci-fi series Terra Nova is having cost-overrun problems. [Side note: Harrison Ford says there’s no new update on Spielberg’s Indy 5 yet, as George Lucas and his team are still apparently working on the script.] Also, did you known that NBC’s alien invasion show The Event is more or less turning out as I predicted (see here and here)? A lot of snarky people swamped Libertas months ago and told me how crazy I was when I predicted what direction that show was going in. I notice they’re not coming back to gloat. It’s actually easy to predict this stuff; all you need to know are: 1) liberals, and; 2) how sci-fi works.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … the unnervingly hot Brooklyn Decker, star of the forthcoming, $200 million alien invasion thriller Battleship, also has a new trailer out for Just Go With It, in which she stars with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. If this movie heads where I think it’s heading, with Sandler dropping Decker for Aniston … I’m going to wretch. Who actually likes Jennifer Aniston these days?

And that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front!

Posted on November 10th, 2010 at 11:53am.

By Jason Apuzzo. Now that the election is over, I thought it would be a good time to introduce a new feature here at Libertas that I’ve been contemplating for some time: Invasion Alerts!

As regular readers know, for the past several months we’ve been covering the massive new wave of politically-charged ‘alien invasion’ projects that will be unleashed on moviegoers over the next several years. This wave was just kicked off this past week with Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (see our review here), and will be continuing through next week’s Skyline, and is guaranteed to proceed at least through James Cameron’s second Avatar sequel, which is currently slated for 2015. There will be a lot of projects in between those dates – and some potentially gigantic ones even beyond 2015, although you’ll need to keep reading to find out more about those …

Based on recent developments such as, for example, Roland Emmerich’s announcement from last week of his own alien invasion project, The Zone – and a multitude of other projects that we’ve already documented here – I’ve decided that there will be more than enough material coming out of this genre in coming days to warrant its own, special feature here at Libertas. So today, the day after the election, we’re going to kick off this feature with our first Invasion Alert!

Why link this feature to yesterday’s election, one might ask? In brief, because I think Hollywood – as well as the indie film scene – has been channeling a lot of the anxieties on display yesterday well in advance of the election. To put matters simply, the country currently feels like it’s under siege – like it’s being invaded – from forces on the outside (terrorism), and from within (political radicalism). And so it should come as no surprise that filmmakers as otherwise different as, say, Michael Bay and Tim Burton would currently be contemplating (or already shooting) alien invasion films of one kind or another.

But there’s another reason, as well: I think that explicitly ‘political’ cinema in America is currently dead – to the extent it was ever alive, to begin with. And so a lot of political ideas are getting channeled into mainstream science fiction.

Yet there’s more going on here than filmmakers simply resorting to the ‘safe’ medium of science fiction in order to make potentially controversial statements; indeed, I actually think science fiction films are currently ahead of the curve in predicting certain developments in our culture, rather than behind it.

I say this because it seems to me that the really big changes coming in our society, changes much larger than what happened yesterday, haven’t really taken place yet … but are only going to happen once the Baby Boomers finally ease into their retirement, at which point a major reckoning is going to take place with respect to their legacy. That reckoning – which will have financial, cultural and even geo-political aspects to it – is unlikely to be pretty. This, in essence, is the major ‘revelation’ that I expect these new science fiction films to contain: that our American future is highly precarious, and fraught with perils not imagined since the 1930s.

I’ll have more to say about this in days ahead, but let’s get on with our alerts, shall we?

One final point: the fact that the most attractive women in the industry tend to work in this genre has absolutely nothing to do with my deciding to do these alerts. Nothing whatsoever. More or less.

• As you probably know by now, James Cameron has finally committed to his two Avatar sequels – likely to be shot simultaneously – which are now scheduled for release in 2014 and 2015, respectively. No surprises here, but this also effectively puts that Angelina Jolie 3D Cleopatra on hold (poor Cleopatra, scorned again!). Incidentally, if you’re interested in reading a review of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra biography – which the film would be based on – you can catch the Wall Street Journal’s review of the book here. I’m not really thrilled by Schiff’s approach, frankly. In other Cameron news, he may have found a director for his Fantastic Voyage remake – Louis Leterrier, who did the abysmal Clash of the Titans remake. That would be a horrible decision, after what that guy did to deface Ray Harryhausen’s classic.

• The J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg Super 8 has a release date: June 10th, 2011. Circle that date on your calendar, because that film should really be interesting. I’m expecting something like a nasty version of E.T.

• Skyline is coming out next week, and a bunch of clips have leaked on-line (see here and here). You can also hear an interview with the Strause brothers here. Interestingly, the movie is not being screened for critics. Does that guarantee that the film isn’t any good? No, but it likely means that the film’s word-of-mouth (which is generally good) probably can’t be improved any by getting the critics involved. We’ll know by next week …

• Speaking of alien invasions, the first season of ABC’s V reboot is out on DVD and Blu-ray this week. And while we’re at it, feel free to pre-order the newly restored/’complete’ Metropolis 2-disc DVD set.

• As I mentioned above, Roland Emmerich has now committed to doing a low-budget ($5 million) ‘found-footage’ take on the alien invasion theme, called The Zone. Needless to say, this represents a major departure from his huge-scale Independence Day (which still may get sequels) … yet I wonder whether Emmerich is reading the handwriting on the wall here, and noticing how much can be done visually on a modest budget. Interestingly, Emmerich is currently working on Anonymous, a political thriller set in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

• With Steven Spielberg having committed to doing Robocalypse, there’s some potential consternation at Dreamworks because Tim Burton may also be doing Monsterpocalypse there, as well. Robocalypse is about a massive robot uprising; Burton’s film (which he hasn’t yet committed to do) would involve robots being used to combat a massive alien invasion. My advice? Combine both stories into MonsterRobocalypto in which robots and aliens join forces to battle Mel Gibson – and release it as a video game.

• As I predicted, Noomi Rapace is apparently Ridley Scott’s favored lead actress  for his Alien prequel. He obviously wants to go dark with this film, as he did on the original.

• You can check out a new video interview with the cast of The Thing here.

• Based on this current rumor, I’m betting that the new villains of the next Star Trek film are going to be … the Talosians, a cool and sinister alien race from the original Star Trek TV pilot The Cage of long ago … which would be a great choice, precisely for being so old-school. In any case, it does not look like Khan will be appearing, which is probably just as well, as we’ll be spared somebody trying (and failing) to duplicate what Ricardo Montalban did.

• Monsters’ Gareth Edwards talks here about his next project, which will be similarly sci-fi related; plus, he also does a new interview here about Monsters. Some people other than me are already commenting, by the way, on the obviousness of the politics in Monsters; Edwards’ political intentions for the film are quite obvious and on-the-nose, which is part of the film’s problem.

• Battlestar Galactica’s Caprica series just got cancelled … but a new BG series called Blood & Chrome just got greenlit.

• The sci-fi project that’s currently everywhere, though, taking up all the oxygen in the room, is clearly Disney’s Tron. Daft Punk’s “Derezzed” music video just got released (see here), and there are 2 new clips (see here and here) and a new ad – all of which are revealing different aspects of the film … and none of which are relieving my concerns that the film is going to be vapid, if gorgeous to look at. Plus, some people have already seen 20 minutes of the film (the same 20 minutes that Disney is about to preview in 3D IMAX theaters) and are already expressing concerns that the film seems too dour in tone. I don’t know. I’m currently assuming that this film is going to be shiny on the outside, insipid on the inside. I’m hoping I’m wrong about that.

• If piranha invasions are more your thing than alien invasions … check out the specs on the forthcoming 3D Blu-ray release of Piranha 3D. Must. own. this. disc!

• AND I’VE SAVED THE BEST NEWS ITEM FOR LAST. This would, of course, be the ultimate rumor of all-time … if true: there’s some chatter that after all these years George Lucas may, indeed, be contemplating doing a third Star Wars trilogy, which would be set after the events of Return of the Jedi – but likely not involve the Skywalker family at all. [IESB, the source on this rumor, has been pretty good on these things.] The idea would apparently be to have the first film of this new trilogy ready for release sometime after Return of the Jedi 3D comes out, likely around 2015 or 2016. [Incidentally, there’s another hot rumor right now that the Indiana Jones series is about to be converted to 3D, as well.] As this current Star Wars rumor goes, George has apparently been energized by the success the Clone Wars animated series, the Star Wars video games and also the huge success of Avatar.

This rumor makes a certain amount of sense,  and I’ll discuss this whole matter further in another Invasion Alert! down the line … If true this new trilogy could represent the topper of this whole genre.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … I thought we’d take a look at Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, in this photo (above) from the set of Michael Bay’s forthcoming alien invasion sequel, Transformers 3. Do the glasses work for you? They work for me. And from her badge, the pretty Ms. Whiteley (Megan Fox’s replacement in the new film) appears to work at The White House, which is currently under a different form of ‘invasion’ today – the kind involving angry Democrats who just received their pink slips …

And that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front.

[UPDATE: Special thanks to the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein for commenting on this post today, and really engaging the ideas here. I’ll respond to Patrick’s thoughtful analysis in LFM’s next Invasion Alert!]

Posted on November 3rd, 2010 at 2:57pm.