If you agree with us that the biggest landmark in the visual representation of futurism in science fiction over the last several years was Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow, Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and Netflix’s Altered Carbon, then you might also see something similarly new and refreshing–and yet new and different–happening with the new Paramount+ series Halo. As I described it last month here at borg, Halo’s first episode was a dense set-up of a series opener, establishing the world building, the opposing factions and key characters in this new universe extracted from the video game franchise. But the series’ second episode, titled “Unbound,” doesn’t miss a beat in showing viewers an even more layered science fiction story is in play, with plenty of visual surprises.
It seemed like a different world back then. Waaaay back in July 2019 at San Diego Comic-Con we saw the first images of an unpredicted, unthinkable sequel to the 1986 classic Top Gun. Top Gun: Maverick carries forward with Tom Cruise as Captain Pete Mitchell, call sign Maverick, still flying, and still with the same attitude. Despite Cruise’s efforts to do his own stunts, Cruise didn’t get permission to fly the military’s jets in the new film, but the filmmakers appear to have done nice work splicing Cruise flying some other craft into the footage.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion), the film co-stars Jon Hamm (Baby Driver, Mad Men) and Jennifer Connelly (Labyrinth, Alita: Battle Angel). The plot finds Maverick still training at fly school Top Gun, watching over his old pal Goose’s kid.
Wall Val Kilmer get any bigger appearance than in a photo on the wall? Check out the new trailer for Top Gun: Maverick:
It’s one of those head-scratching things. Previews for horror movies in October for movies not arriving until around Valentine’s Day. And it happens every year. Valentine’s Day is a big time for horror, and two movies heading your way next year look like you’ll want to see them if not in the theater at least streaming once they arrive on home video. Also, this weekend is DC Fandome, an online streaming event like Disney’s annual D23 fan event (which arrives next month). If you’ve wondered where DC Comics movies have been, they’ve evidently been waiting for next year–even before the pandemic they’ve been lagging behind the Marvel movies. DC rolled out several teasers this weekend, many highlighting concept art as they make their way to their final stages of production. Each of the new movies has promise, and you’ll want to compare them to our single Marvel preview below.
Below check out trailers for two 2022 horror movies, a Marvel series coming soon, and five movies starring characters from the pages of DC Comics, beginning next year.
One of the greatest–and most widely popular–chapters of the 55 years of Star Trek is coming back to the theaters this summer. The 35th anniversary of the film that expanded Star Trek beyond sci-fi fandom, 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home hits theaters again across the country in a limited release as Paramount Pictures partners with Fathom Events. It was all about having fun while fighting for Earth’s very survival with the beloved crew of the starship Enterprise, the film that wrapped up a trilogy of sorts after the death and rebirth of Spock. It’s one of the best-received time travel movies of all time, and it sparked a generation of environmentalists who would actually take heed of the film’s cautionary story to go on to save endangered whales in real life.
It’s been 35 years since we first heard the message from Kyle Reese given to Sarah Connor, “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Producer James Cameron is back in the franchise for the first time since Terminator 2, with Tim Miller (Deadpool) directing the November release Terminator: Dark Fate. This time we’re told audiences are supposed to ignore everything that came after Terminator 2, and substitute this next chapter, similar to the “picture hopping” the Halloween movie franchise has become known for. The original Sarah Connor is back with Linda Hamilton reprising her role also like Jamie Lee Curtis has done for Halloween. (Although this is only Hamilton’s third movie as Connor, compared to Curtis logging four leading performances as Halloween’s Laurie Strode plus two more in the works–not that we’re keeping score).
The CGI-heavy action sequences we’ve seen so far look closer to the original film The Terminator than Cameron’s groundbreaking effects on Terminator 2: Judgment Day–we’re not sure that is what audiences were hoping for. Newcomer to the series Mackenzie Davis is “almost human,” and Gabriel Luna plays a villain, making them the faces of the next Terminators, following in the footsteps of Jason Patrick, Kristanna Loken, Byung-Hun Lee, and Jason Clarke. And, best of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back, as promised. Although it’s difficult not to cringe when Hamilton says she hasn’t seen Davis’s kind of Terminator before, since audiences have, with Loken’s great Terminatrix in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Wouldn’t it be great if they just brought back Michael Biehn as a parallel timeline Kyle Reese? The studio has announced Edward Furlong returning as John Connor, so anything is possible with Cameron and Miller here.
First here’s the new poster, followed by the brand new trailer just released, and seven additional teaser reels released yesterday, August 29, the franchise’s “Judgment Day”–
The first full day of San Diego Comic-Con 2019 began today with a big trailer, Paramount Pictures′ sequel to the 1986 classic Top Gun.Tom Cruise was on-hand to preview Top Gun: Maverick. The sequel carries forward with Tom Cruise as Captain Pete Mitchell, call sign Maverick, still flying, and still with the same attitude, confronting Ed Harris(The Right Stuff, Apollo 13), in the first trailer. Despite Cruise’s efforts to do his own stunts, Cruise didn’t get permission to fly the military’s jets in the new film, but the filmmakers appear to have done nice work splicing Cruise flying something else into the footage.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski(Oblivion), the film co-stars Jon Hamm (Baby Driver) and Jennifer Connelly(Alita: Battle Angel). The plot finds Maverick still training at fly school Top Gun, watching over his old pal Goose’s kid. From this first trailer, it’s clear the sequel has pulled out all the beats from the first film, looking to tap into moviegoer’s nostalgia vs. taking Maverick into new territory.
Paramount also released the first poster for the movie:
Check out the first trailer for Top Gun: Maverick:
When we created last year’s preview of 2018 movies we were pretty sure we were going to have some great movies this year, but we were surprised by what ended up being the best. All year we tried to keep up with what Hollywood had to offer and honed in on the genre content we thought was worth examining. We went back and looked at it all and pulled together our picks for our annual Best Movies of 2018.
Genredom. As always, we’re after the best genre content of the year–with our top categories from the Best in Movies. There are thousands of other places that cover plain vanilla dramas and the rest of the film world, but here we’re looking for movies we want to watch. What do all of this year’s selections have in common? In addition to those elements that define each part of genredom, each has a good story. Special effects without a good story is not good entertainment, and we saw plenty of films this year that missed that crucial element.
Come back later this month for our TV and print media picks, and our annual borgHall of Fame inductees. Wait no further, here are our movie picks for 2018:
Best Film, Best Drama – Bohemian Rhapsody (20th Century Fox). For the epic historical costume drama category, this biopic was something fresh and new, even among dozens of movies about bands that came before it. Gary Busey played a great Buddy Holly and Val Kilmer a perfect Jim Morrison, and we can add Rami Malek and Gwilym Lee’s work as Freddie Mercury and Brian May to the same rare league. But it wasn’t only the actors that made it work. Incredible cinematography, costume and set recreations, and an inspiring story spoke to legions of moviegoers. This wasn’t just another biopic, but an engaging drama about misfits that came out on top. Honorable mention: Black Panther (Disney/Marvel).
Best Sci-fi Movie, Best Retro Fix, Best Easter Eggs – Solo: A Star Wars Story (Disney/Lucasfilm). Put aside the noise surrounding the mid-year release of Solo before fans had recovered yet from The Last Jedi, and the resulting film was the best sequel (or prequel) in the franchise since the original trilogy (we rate it right after The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars as #3 overall). All the scenes with Han and Chewbacca were faithful to George Lucas’s original vision, and the new characters were as cool and exciting, and played by exceptional talent, as found in the originals, including sets that looked like they were created in the 1970s of the original trilogy. The Easter Eggs scattered all over provided dozens of callbacks to earlier films. This was an easy choice: no other science fiction film came close to the rip-roaring rollercoaster of this film, and special effects and space battles to match. Honorable mention for Best Sci-Fi Movie: Orbiter 9(Netflix).
Best Superhero Movie, Best Crossover, Best Re-Imagining on Film – Avengers: Infinity War (Disney/Marvel). For all its faults, and there were many, the culmination of ten years of careful planning and tens of thousands of creative inputs delivered something no fan of comics has ever seen before: multiple, fleshed out superheroes played by A-list actors with intertwined stories with a plot that wasn’t all that convoluted. Is it the best superhero move ever? To many fans, yes. But even if it isn’t the best, its scope was as great as any envisioned before it, and the movie was filled with more great sequences than can be found in several other superhero movies of the past few years combined. But teaming up Thor with Rocket? And Spider-Man with Doctor Strange and Iron Man? That beat all the prior Avengers team-ups that came before (and anything offered up from the other studios). It’s easy to brush off any given film with so many superhero movies arriving these days, but this one was the biggest, grandest, and greatest made yet and deserves all the recognition. Honorable mention: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Sony Pictures Animation), Black Panther (Disney/Marvel).
Best Fantasy Movie, Best Comedy Movie – Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Columbia Pictures). No movie provided more laugh-out-loud moments this year than last winter’s surprise hit, a sequel that didn’t need to be a sequel, and a video game tie-in for a fake video game. A funny script and four super leads made this an easy pick in the humor category, but the Raiders of the Lost Ark-inspired adventure ride made for a great fantasy film, too. Honorable mention for Best Fantasy Movie: Black Panther (Disney/Marvel), Ready Player One (Warner Bros./Amblin).
Best Movie Borg, Best Borg Film – Josh Brolin’s Cable, Deadpool 2 (20th Century Fox). Brolin’s take on Cable ended up as one of those great borgs on par with the Terminator from the standpoint of “coolness” factor. But the trick that he wasn’t really the villain of the movie made him that much more compelling in the film’s final moments. Ryan Reynolds was back and equal to his last Deadpool film, and his Magnificent Seven/Samurai Seven round-up of a team was great fun. If not for all that unwinding of what happened in the movie in the coda, this might have made the top superhero movie spot. But Deadpool 2 was a good reminder there is something other than Disney’s MCU to make good superhero flicks.
The best production of 50 years of Star Trek, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, returned to theaters Sunday for two screenings nationwide, and audiences packed theaters from coast to coast. The 35th anniversary of the biggest summer of movies continues Wednesday with your last chance to see 1982’s The Wrath of Khan back on the big screen as Paramount Pictures partners with the Fathom Events series once more. We couldn’t wait to see it again and saw the first screening Sunday and were quickly reminded why the film was such a success. What were my takeaway thoughts this time through the film? Leonard Nimoy’s voice echoed throughout the theater with every line (was this his finest work as Spock?). Kirstie Alley’s Lieutenant Saavik fits right in as the new crewmember. The lengths director and screenplay writer Nicholas Meyer took to make the Enterprise look like a functioning military vessel: from the boatswain’s whistle, to the formality of the uniforms and ship inspection by Admiral Kirk, the pulsating real-world sound effects of the two competing vessels, and the military tactics and trickery as Khan and Kirk try to one-up the other that always connects this film for me to another favorite, The Hunt for Red October. William Shatner was so cocky and confident. Tightly edited action sequences, camera angles placing the audience inside the bridge and into every nook and cranny inside the Enterprise (Turbolift doesn’t work? Let’s take the ladder), and James Horner’s unforgettable and unique musical score. And it was fun for me to think back of all the people who made this film that I have had the good fortune to meet, like Shatner, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Walter Koenig. Each of these actors seem to have done their best work in this film.
What surprised me? After watching Sunday’s screenings I heard remarks from viewers about how many new scenes they did not remember, and this was echoed across the Internet, including comments from long-time Star Trek fans and insiders. But it makes perfect sense–unless you are a rabid Star Trek fan, you probably didn’t track all the variations in the film that have been released over the past 35 years. If you have a photographic memory at all, you may hear lines in this week’s presentation that don’t quite match up. But if you only saw the film in theaters or via early DVD and Blu-ray releases, you will have seen different versions of the film (for one example, the original cut didn’t include the current title, instead it was Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, without the II). If you watched the expanded ABC TV movie re-broadcast on television in 1985–as many did before the prevalence of home video options–you saw a version different from the 1982 release, full of entirely different takes of several scenes. In 2002 a Director’s Edition was released, and if you saw the film recently at all, but before 2016’s official Director’s Cut, then you probably last saw the Director’s Edition. The differences from what was scripted and filmed and what made the original theatrical version alone literally fills ten pages of Allan Asherman’s 1982 book The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but even that book of course couldn’t include the differences found in the much later ABC TV version and subsequent editions. The version in theaters this week is the official 2016 Director’s Cut, itself absorbing so many modifications from the original 1982 release from prior incarnations. But this is the final, the version Nicholas Meyer (the reputed “Man Who Saved Star Trek”) discussed with me in my interview with him here at borg.com last month.
Wait–What’s going on here? I don’t remember this scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan! (Keep reading!)
So if you recall a more suggestive relationship between Kirk and Kirstie Alley’s Lieutenant Saavik, or sensed a romantic relationship brewing between Saavik and Kirk’s son David (played by the late Merritt Butrick), you won’t notice that so much in the Fathom Events presentation (below you’ll see the ABC TV version offered more “steamy” close-ups and additional dialogue amplifying the more womanizing Kirk of the original series). If you don’t recall that Scotty has a young relative aboard the Enterprise, be prepared for a pleasant surprise, including some great additions featuring Kirk and Scotty. The midshipman’s (played by Ike Eisenmann) death is more poignant in the latest cut, and an entire sequence between McCoy and Kirk gets us further into Kirk’s thoughts in the aftermath of Khan’s attack. A conversation about ego between Spock and Alley adds further justification for Kirk’s actions as he taunts Khan into the nebula.
Newspaper advertisement for the 1985 ABC television presentation of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
But do you recall seeing a child in Khan’s crew on Ceti Alpha V? McCoy mentioning he served with Paul Winfield’s Captain Terrell? How about McCoy operating on Chekov after he returns from the Genesis planet and Chekov struggling to return to help on the bridge? Sulu’s promotion to the Excelsior, or Kirk’s final line, quoting Peter Pan’s “first star on the right, and on ’til morning”? That Saavik is half-Romulan? David besting Kirk and holding a knife to his throat? How about these lines from Khan:
Not many R-Rated movies these days get much attention in a genre world of sci-fi, fantasy, superhero, action, or suspense/thriller films. The current wave of hit films seems to be targeting the broader, all-age audience, not just the adult set, with Deadpool being the notable exception. But a new historical romance opening this weekend is so loaded with genre actors it drew our attention. The background for Tulip Fever is as unusual as its subject matter. Tulip Fever was initially set to be a Steven Spielberg film with Paramount Pictures starring Jude Law, Keira Knightley, and Jim Broadbent, way back in 2004, but a change in UK tax rules stopped the film in its tracks. So Harvey Weinstein bought the rights and re-cast the film and production commenced in 2014.
The costumes, from Academy Award winning designer Michael O’Connor (Dredd, The Duchess, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) and the set design by Simon Elliott (Bleak House) look quite good, a dark European drama with Les Miserables-esque cinematography. The film’s premise is unusual. Academy Award winning actress Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Jason Bourne, The Danish Girl, and next year’s Tomb Raider) stars as Sophia, a young married woman who falls for a portrait artist during Tulip Mania in 17th century Amsterdam. Her lover is played by Dane DeHaan (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, The Amazing Spider-man 2). The comparison of this couple to Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s secret lovers in Titanic is unmistakable. But can a movie set with the backdrop of Tulip Mania possibly hope to draw the appeal of the sinking of the Titanic? Probably not where this film is heading. The film was originally screened at Cannes in 2015. It’s release has been delayed at least six times.
But the genre actor cast list continues. Sophia’s husband is played by two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz (Spectre, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, The Legend of Tarzan, Muppets Most Wanted). Oscar winner Dame Judith Dench (the James Bond series, The Chronicles of Riddick, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Shakespeare in Love, Henry V) has a cameo role as a nun. BAFTA winner Tom Hollander (Pirates of the Caribbean series, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Muppets Most Wanted, Valkyrie, Gosford Park) plays a doctor. Primetime Emmy winner Zach Galifianakis plays a friend of DeHaan’s character and DeHaan reunites with Valerian co-star Cara Delevingne.
One of the greatest all-time sci-fi villains and best productions of the 50 years of Star Trek is coming back to the theaters this summer. The 35th anniversary of the biggest year of movies continues, with the 1982 masterpiece Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan hitting theaters across the country as Paramount Pictures partners with the Fathom Events series. It is the sequel not only to Star Trek: The Motion Picture but a direct follow-up to the original series episode “Space Seed” starring the incomparable Ricardo Montalban–and his Khan has remained the unchallenged best villain in the franchise ever since. Initially Montalban envisioned his character as a brash, over-the-top, shouting image of villainy, but director Nicholas Meyer took Montalban aside to coax from him his iconic, sinewy, scarily subdued personification of the Klingon proverb, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
The legendary test of character for a Starfleet officer, the Kobayashi Maru, and the death of the entire Enterprise bridge crew revealed in only the first minutes… A ship full of trainees… An experiment called Genesis… Where Jaws prompted us to fear water everywhere, The Wrath of Khan made us fear anything crawling into our ears. Kirstie Alley as Lieutenant Saavik… Paul Winfield as Captain Terrell… Ike Eisenmann as Scotty’s ill-fated nephew… Who would have guessed James T. Kirk had a son? The most emotional of scenes of the series as Spock says goodbye to Kirk… And with all the new faces, the familiar ones were back again, at the top of their acting game: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Walter Koenig… All rounded out with a score by James Horner and the most memorable of uniform styles for our heroes created by Robert Fletcher.
But you already knew that, right?
“Making Star Trek II seems like only yesterday,” Shatner said announcing the theatrical re-release. “Even back then, we knew we were creating something really special, and to have The Wrath of Khan back on the big screen 35 years later is a wonderful testament both to the film itself and to the incredible passion of Star Trek fans.” *Don’t miss our borg.com interview with The Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer here.
