Remember the first time you watched Jurassic Park on the big screen? Steven Spielberg created something like we’d never seen before, taking Michael Crichton’s masterpiece science fiction novel and giving it the spectacle it deserved. A new book will take you back to that magic. In James Mottram’s Jurassic Park: The Ultimate Visual History, available now here at Amazon, fans of the original movie and the franchise finally get a behind-the-scenes chronicle worthy of the amusement park ride adventure, just as the latest movie, Jurassic World: Dominion, is being finalized for a summer 2022 release.
It’s been another long year of great entertainment. Before we wrap our coverage of 2018, it’s time for the sixth annual round of new honorees for the borg Hall of Fame. We have plenty of honorees from 2018 films and television, plus many from past years, and a peek at some from the future – 40 in all. You can always check out the updated borg Hall of Fame on our home page under “Know your borg.”
Some reminders about criteria. Borgs have technology integrated with biology. Wearing a technology-powered suit alone doesn’t qualify a new member. Tony Stark aka Iron Man was an inaugural honoree because the Arc Reactor kept him alive. The new Spider-Man suit worn by Tom Holland is similar to Tony’s, but as far as we can tell it’s not integrated with Peter Parker’s biology. Similarly Peni Parker, seen outside her high-tech SP//dr suit in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Black Manta from Aquaman (and decades of comics before), seem to be merely wearing tech suits. We’d love a reason for a Mandalorian to make the cut, like Boba Fett, or Jango Fett, since nobody has more intriguing armor. Maybe Jon Favreau’s new television series will give us something new to ponder next year.
Also, if the creators tell us the characters are merely robots, automatons, or androids, we take their word for it. Westworld continues to define its own characters as androids (like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Lt. Commander Data throughout the TV series), and not cyborgs (going back to Michael Crichton’s original story), so we continue this year to hold off on their admittance unless something changes, like the incorporation of living biological (blood, cells, etc.) materials. Are we closing in on admitting individuals solely based on a breathing apparatus that may allow them to breathe to in non-native atmospheres? Only if integrated (surgically). Darth Vader has more borg parts than his breathing filter. We assume new honoree Saw Gerrera does as well. With more biological enhancements we’d allow Tusken Raiders, Moloch, and Two Tubes from the Star Wars universe, and Mordock the Benzite from Star Trek, but wouldn’t that also mean anyone in a deep sea suit or space suit is a cyborg? Again, integration is key. Ready Player One has humans interacting with a cyber-world with virtual reality goggles and other equipment, but like the Programs (as opposed to the Users) in the movie Tron, this doesn’t qualify as borg either, but we’re making an exception this year for the in-world Aech, who is a cyborg orc character, and two Tron universe characters.
Already admitted in 2017 were advance honorees that didn’t actually make it to the screen until 2018. This included Josh Brolin’s new take on Cable in Deadpool 2 and Simone Missick’s Misty Knight after her acquisition of a borg arm in Marvel’s Luke Cage. New versions of Robotman and Cyborg are coming in 2019 in the Doom Patrol series, but they are already members of the revered Hall of Fame. Above are the new looks for these two earlier honorees.
It was only back in 2015 that the fourth film in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World, premiered its first trailer, and a rather bad one at that. Now as 2018 approaches we have a trailer for the fifth film in the series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. And the latest trailer reveals yet another rehash of the original, brilliant, Steven Spielberg adaptation of Michael Crichton’ fantastic novel. As with Jurassic World, the effort is not entirely futile, Jurassic World was simple entertainment on a big scale–a feast for the eyes. But for some of us, for all its incredible special effects and fantastic futuristic technology, Jurassic World proved the maxim George Lucas laid out in reference to the success behind the original Star Wars–“Special effects are a tool, a means of telling a story… A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” And that summed up Jurassic World–the umpmillionth variation on the Frankenstein how-not-to-build-a-monster story, and the latest twist on Crichton’s original look at a theme park gone haywire in his movie Westworld.
Yet if every other blockbuster that takes the leap into Sequel World is able to continue forward with more and more and more and pulls audiences into theaters, why not Jurassic Park? For those that want to reclaim even a spark of the original in the theater again, maybe it’s enough. So what does the trailer tell us that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has going for it?
First off, Chris Pratt is back. Audiences like Pratt movies in part because they simply like Pratt’s charm. He has the same brand of star power as John Wayne, who always appeared to be playing John Wayne in all his movies. Like Schwarzenegger, Willis, Van Damme, etc. It must be an action star thing. So if you’ve watched Pratt (like we have) in everything from Everwood to Guardians of the Galaxy 2, we’re wagering you’re going to like Pratt returning as dinosaur wrangler Owen Grady. Bryce Dallas Howard is an equally good if not better actor, with less of a fan following, and here she and Pratt are back again being snarky with each other (snore) in a Jurassic World preview. If they didn’t have chemistry in the first film, why would we expect it to surface in a sequel? Maybe what we need is the return of Jeff Goldblum in his best-loved role as Dr. Ian Malcolm? His performance in 1993 was so well-received that Crichton, who killed off Malcolm in the original novel, resurrected the character for the sequel. Did Goldblum’s return help The Lost World: Jurassic Park? Not really. But it’s been twenty years since we last saw Dr. Nature… Finds… a Way, so maybe enough time has passed so we can love him all over again.
And there are dinosaurs. We’ll never get tired of more dinosaurs. I want to see a triceratops racing a stegosaurus on the big screen. How about you?
Check out this new trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom:
So many continuing genre TV shows! CW’s iZombie, Arrow, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl, and Riverdale. Then we have all the fantasy genre shows like Vikings, Outlander, and Game of Thrones. There’s The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and The 100. HBO’s sci-fi series Westworld. And new superhero shows–Black Lightning, The Defenders, and Gifted.
What do they all have in common?
All 16 were featured in panels this weekend at San Diego Comic-Con. And each has a new trailer or special Comic-Con video recap leading into the next season. The winner? Check out yesterday’s exciting trailer for Stranger Things, season 2, (shown here at borg.com) which seems to eclipse them all. But from today’s list make sure you watch Netflix’s The Defenders–if you liked any of the other Netflix Marvel series, this will be a must-see. And the four minutes of iZombie is a great recap of fun TV.
So let’s get on with it. Watch your favorites or check out all of them, straight from Comic-Con 2017:
Masters of the Universe. Red Dwarf. Mortal Kombat. And we revisit Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek.
Let’s start this year’s borg.com Hall of Fame ceremony by talking a little about who is NOT in the Hall of Fame who might come close if borgs were more loosely defined. We still haven’t included the non-organic: like automatons, androids, or robots. Think Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation before he met the queen in Star Trek: First Contact–despite his perfectly life-like appearance. For the bulk of the series Data was always an android, not a cyborg. He’s just a highly advanced C-3PO–until First Contact.
Droids from Star Wars,Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still,Robot B-9 from Lost in Space or Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet, the Autobots and Decepticons of Transformers, the police force of THX-1138, Box in Logan’s Run, the perfectly human appearing kid-like star of D.A.R.Y.L., the several automatons of episode after episode of The Twilight Zone,Beta in The Last Starfighter,Tron and Flynn and the other microscopic, human-like bits of data in Tron, Hellboy II’sGolden Army, the future Iowa Highway Patrolman in Star Trek 2009 (we assume he’s just wearing some police safety mask), Rosie the maid in The Jetsons,Hogey the Roguey from Red Dwarf,Marvin the Android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, X-Men’s Sentinels, Lal and Juliana Tainer from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the title character of CHAPPiE, or Iron Giant, despite their human-like or bipedal nature, none are actual borgs because they lack biological matter, living cells, or the like.
The same applies for the robotic hosts in Westworld–Michael Crichton’s original was clear these were merely automaton robots and we’ve seen nothing from 2016’s HBO series to show that has changed (even the NY Timesgot it wrong). Which explains why The Stepford Wives aren’t on the list, or Fembots, either from The Bionic Woman or the Austin Powers series, or the Buffybot in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
So who’s in?
Here is Round 4, the twenty-eight 2016borg.com Hall of Fame honorees, in no particular order, some from 2016 and others from the past, bringing the roster count to 134 individuals and groups:
First up is Time, yep… Time itself. From Alice Through the Looking Glass, a powerful Father Time-esque human/clockwork hybrid who rules over Underland–
From George Lucas’s original Force-wielding character as envisioned by Mike Mayhew: Kane Starkiller from Marvel Comics’ alternate universe story, The Star Wars:
The Major, from 2017’s Ghost in the Shell:
Max Steel got his own movie in 2016:
Steel hails from the Mattel action figure who received multiple super powers due to an accidental infusion of nanobots:
Cave Carson from the update of the classic DC Comics comic book series spelunker, the new series Cave Carson has a Cybernetic Eye:
Although he was a charter member of the borg.com Hall of Fame, Darth Vader returned in Rogue One, providing some new images of the classic borg:
Westworld was writer/director Michael Crichton’s original high-tech vacation theme park-turned disaster blockbuster film, from 1973. Twenty years before Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs went on a murderous rampage, it was a sideshow automaton from the Old West pavilion that turned on the tourists. We showed you the first teaser trailer for the new series Westworld (discussed here at borg.com) and now we have a fuller look at the newest incarnation of borgs Hollywood has created for us in HBO’s latest trailer for the series.
Jonathan Nolan, brother of The Dark Knight series’ Christopher Nolan, is directing the return of the sci-fi classic, also the latest J.J. Abrams production. The original Westworld starred Yul Brynner as the cool and unflinching Gunslinger, with Richard Benjamin running for his life, along with appearances by James Brolin and Majel Barrett. The new series stars a great, comparable actor to Brynner as the Gunslinger–Ed Harris, as well as Anthony Hopkins in a role like Richard Attenborough’s mastermind in Jurassic Park, plus a host of genre actors: X-Men’s James Marsden, Jimmi Simpson (Psych, House of Cards, Zodiac), Thandie Newton (Mission: Impossible II, The Chronicles of Riddick), Ingrid Bolsø Berdal (Hercules, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters),Star Trek’s Clifton Collins, Jr., Veronica Mars’ Tessa Thompson, Prince Caspian’s Ben Barnes, and James Bond’s Jeffrey Wright.
But it’s Evan Rachel Wood’s character Delores who takes center stage in this trailer–and hopefully the entire series, which looks to hone in on what it takes to be human. It’s a theme we love to see in the best borg shows, from the mind of Philip K. Dick in Blade Runner to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data to Terminator Genisys, and the BBC series Humans last year. We ask the question all the time here. Are the creations in the new Westworld just updated automatons? Merely androids? Or will the biological meet high-tech to give us something else?
Check out the latest trailer for the series Westworld:
In a thick 459 pages, British author Daniel Godfrey begins a new time travel series full of twists and turns in New Pompeii, his first novel from a major publisher (Titan Books). Billed as a novel in the tradition of Michael Crichton, New Pompeii is evocative of Crichton’s early novels, but more closely follows the plotting and style of the time travel science fiction novels of Connie Willis (Lincoln’s Dreams, To Say Nothing of the Dog) and the pacing of a Tom Clancy thriller. Fans of Crichton’s Timeline and Westworld, Philip K. Dick’s short stories and his novels Time Out of Joint and Man in the High Castle,Doctor Who’s “timey wimey” stories and films like TimeCop will appreciate this new entry in the time travel and parallel universe sub-genres.
Despite a daunting 75 chapters, New Pompeii is a quick read. Godfrey follows Nick Houghton, a history scholar who has yet to earn his doctorate as he is inexplicably courted into joining a venture with a corporation that promises the impossible–Novus Particles plucks people from just before the point of death and brings them into the present, cheating the timeline manipulation restrictions like the field trips in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” Think Philip K. Dick’s Paycheck meets Final Destination. The company is not a secret–it is well documented that it saved a flight of passengers from a plane crash. But why are all the survivors now committing suicide? Who is the ghost student that has been emerging from a bathtub at a college campus over the course of thirty years? And how do you hide an ancient civilization in the modern world?
Told in short, alternating chapters from the perspective of Nick as he walks among ancient Romans in a secluded Eastern European town in the present day, and college student Kirsten Chapman as she appears unstuck in time across a span of time periods like Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie or Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five, the truth behind the corporation’s purpose is slowly revealed. You won’t find a lot of complexity in the time travel elements here, which makes this appealing for the most casual sci-fi reader. Fans of any Star Trek or Doctor Who time travel story will be familiar with the rules here.
Do androids dream of a surreal town in the Old West?
Known for one of the most bizarre characters ever played by actor Yul Brynner, 1973’s Westworld was writer/director Michael Crichton’s original theme park-turned disaster. Twenty years before Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs went on a murderous rampage, it was sideshow automatons from a high-tech vacation spot that turned on the tourists. Now we have a fuller look at the revival series with a preview released this week by HBO for its new Westworld series.
Jonathan Nolan, brother of The Dark Knight series’ Christopher Nolan, is directing the return of the sci-fi classic. The original starred Brynner as the cool and unflinching Gunslinger, with Richard Benjamin running for his life, along with appearances by James Brolin and Majel Barrett. The new series stars a great, comparable actor to Brynner–Ed Harris, as well as Anthony Hopkins, James Marsden, Jimmi Simpson, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal,Star Trek’s Clifton Collins, Jr., and James Bond’s Jeffrey Wright.
The new trailer creates a world that feels very much like the trapped, askew community in Wayward Pines, and unlike the original film the series delves into what it’s like to be an android or borg as was so nicely handled in the series Humans.
Check out the first teaser for the series Westworld:
In simplest terms, Jurassic World is simple entertainment on a big scale–a feast for the eyes. But for all its incredible special effects and fantastic futuristic technology, Jurassic World proves the maxim George Lucas laid out in reference to the success behind the original Star Wars–“Special effects are a tool, a means of telling a story… A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” And that sums up Jurassic World, as a film and a 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital release–the umpmillionth variation on the Frankenstein how-not-to-build-a-monster story, and the latest twist on Michael Crichton’s original look at a theme park gone bad in his movie Westworld.
Touted in its marketing as the #1 movie of the year, and proven out at the box office, in many way Jurassic World is a remake and certainly an homage to the original Jurassic Park. More than twenty years after the devastation caused in Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a fully realized, fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond. You’ll experience deja vu several times as these new characters, and one from the original, fail to learn the lessons of history. Didn’t the production team watch The Lost World (Jurassic Park II) and Jurassic Park III? The new theme park is built over the old park where so much went wrong and so many died, including leaving the original park all derelict and intact as it was in the last scene of the original movie, including leaving old Jurassic Park jeeps around for a modern, distracted teenager to magically restore to driving condition in a single scene. Dinosaur battle shots mirror those from the original, including the finale, although despite new technology the dinosaurs don’t seem as “real” here. Jurassic World seems to repeatedly search for a scene to match that “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” scene in the original. Michael Giacchino’s score misses the wonder and excitement of John Williams’s original themes. Although the effort is there, no single scene in Jurassic World captures the startling jumps and wows of Jurassic Park.
With four script/story writers for Jurassic World, it’s obvious why the story failed to deliver. Although we note above that George Lucas knows storytelling, he is also now famous for the stilted dialogue of his Star Wars prequels. The story team in Jurassic World offers up similarly strange words from the mouths of its actors–things no one would possibly say. And we can’t believe these dinosaur monsters are scary when the cast bounces back from each near-death experience so quickly. Even the worst of the characters, the youngest boy (who is a walking disaster) seems barely affected by the death going on around him for half the film.
The real conflicts within the script can be found in the strange parallels and inconsistencies. For one, director Colin Trevorrow has been quoted as saying his inspiration for the film was an image of a little girl texting in front of a T-Rex behind her. The corporate bad guy theme that underlies the plot is that no one cares about dinosaurs anymore, they are old news, and audiences needs something bigger and better. You can just see Trevorrow and executive producer Steven Spielberg laughing all the way to the bank over the irony here. The message, as delivered in the climax, is “bigger isn’t always better” and that often the original, the classic, offers up the best experience. Yet Jurassic World hammers into us the over-sized fantasies of Godzilla and King Kong instead of the science-fictional world that made a success of Jurassic Park.
Known for one of the most bizarre characters ever played by actor Yul Brynner, 1973’s Westworld was writer/director Michael Crichton’s original theme park-turned disaster. Twenty years before Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs went on a murderous rampage, it was sideshow automatons from a high-tech vacation spot that turned on the tourists. Will HBO’s new series Westworld also add in the other theme parks (like RomanWorld) as in the original? We’ll know soon.
Jonathan Nolan, brother of The Dark Knight series’ Christopher Nolan, is directing the return of the sci-fi classic. The original starred Brynner as the cool and unflinching Gunslinger, with Richard Benjamin running for his life, along with appearances by James Brolin and Majel Barrett. The new series stars a great, comparable actor to Brynner–Ed Harris, as well as Anthony Hopkins, James Marsden, Jimmi Simpson, and James Bond’s Jeffrey Wright.
Check out the first teaser for the series Westworld:
