There’s a lot going on in January for science fiction fans—the start of the last ten episodes of Battlestar Galactica, the series finale of Stargate Atlantis*, the release of Outlander (which is either going to be embarrassingly bad or Totally Awesome) and more. Io9 has put together a handy day-by-day breakdown of January so you can buy your movie tickets, set your DVR, and get in line at the comic-book store at the right time.
*The nice people at SciFi sent me a screener of the last two episodes, and I can tell you now the penultimate episode of Stargate Atlantis on January 2nd is one of their cleverest ever in terms of storytelling.
SciFi Wire bring us the news that The Terminator, the founding entry in one of the most successfulandinfluential science-fiction franchises ever, has been added to the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which preserves movies deemed to be particularly noteworthy in the national archives. As well as the script and iconic performance by Schwarzenegger, the Library’s citation also singled out the synthesizer-based soundtrack for praise.
These things always start small: First someone programs a computer to read minds, and next thing you know it’ll be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and we’ll all be erasing unpleasant memories.
And how long a step can it be from there to the trippy I’m-in-your-mind sequences from The Cell, or even, dare I say it, The Matrix itself? And the mind-reading computer that starts it all? We’re getting there.
Our ultimate pick for this week is the only movie to have a DNA sequence for a title: Gattaca. An all-too-believable future has divided the world into the genetic haves and have-nots. One of the have-nots sets out to fulfill his dream of traveling into space, proving that DNA is not your destiny. Ethan Hawke, Jude Law, and Uma Thurman all turn in perfectly calibrated performances in this cautionary tale of man who leases another’s genetic identity.
Okay, so today’s pick is not exactly festive fare, but 28 Days Laterdoes celebrate the importance of family along the way, and it even has some christmas lights in it! We mentioned this movie recently in Science Not Fiction’s list of the 10 Best Post-Apocalypses: not only is it a great movie in itself, but it also breathed new life into the Zombie Apocalypse sub genre. A small handful of survivors find themselves alone in a world in which nearly everyone else has been turned into a de facto zombie by a virus in this gripping film.
People seem to either like or loath The Fifth Element, but the alien opera singer’s performance scene alone was enough to win me over. Lavish visuals and entertaining performances from Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, and Gary Oldman make this movie worth watching.
Today at #4 is John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing, one of the few times a remake has turned out markedly better than the original film, in this case 1951’s The Thing From Another World. A group of isolated scientists at an Antarctic research base struggle with a shapeshifting and hostile alien that had lain frozen in the ice for countless millennia. The special effects were groundbreaking for their time, but they do not overwhelm the plotting as Carpenter inexorably ratchets up the tension.
With most of our favorite shows on hiatus until the new year, science-fiction fans need to find some other way to get their fix. Fortunately, this year we have Hulu and it’s admittedly pretty slick streaming technology that means anyone with a reasonably fast Internet connection and web browser can watch video on demand without any fuss. Science Not Fiction looked through Hulu’s science fiction catalog and came up with their five best movies. We’ll be featuring one per day till the end of the week.
Getting impatient for the January 16th kickoff of the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica? To tide us all over until then, SciFi is releasing a 10 webisode series called “The Face of The Enemy” that takes place nine days after the mid-season finale. The webisodes are a few minutes long and are being up put up every two or three days, with the third currently the most recent. The action centers on fan-favorite Felix Gaeta, who finds himself stuck on a raptor stranded in deep space. Revelations abound, so don’t watch it unless you’re caught up. (Those new to the show can watch this “Catch the Frak Up” 13-minute video instead that covers the last 3.5 seasons, hilariously narrated by Katie Sackhoff, who plays Starbuck) Check out the webisodes at the Battlestar website, or on Hulu.
Monday night was the last new episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles until February. The subplot featured Agent Ellison’s hesitant attempts to tutor a nascent artificial intelligence that may or may not grow up to become Skynet, the computer system that attempts to destroy humanity in the future. To speed the process, Ellison’s boss has hooked the A.I. up to the recovered body of a previously-dispatched terminator, explaining to the horrified Ellison that “Many believe that tactile experience is integral to A.I. development.” This was a spot on statement, directly echoing the work of people like Rodney Brooks and his colleagues at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Normally on Sanctuary, the action focuses on so-called abnormals, sentient creatures who either belong an entirely different species to homo sapiens, or who are human beings that are born with genetic mutations. Last Friday night’s episode was a little different: a shadowy group was kidnapping down and outs, injecting them with a drug that caused normal humans to transform into abnormals. In other words, cause their adult bodies to undergo the same kind of developmental changes that would happen to a natural abnormal in the womb (or, in this show’s case, possibly in the egg or chrysalis). Although not focused on developing an army of pliable thugs, the basic idea—changing the genetic cards that an organism was dealt at conception–is the goal of real researchers working on gene therapy, which is popping up all over the place in science fiction these days: for more on the actual science check out Science Not Fiction’s earlier post when Stargate Atlantis took a different tack on the same topic.
Opening today is the remake of the 1951 science-fiction classic, The Day The Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly and directed by Scott Derrickson (who Science Not Fiction interviewed earlier this week). In the original movie, Klaatu came to inform the Earth that the galactic community was Not Happy about the stockpile of nuclear weapons humanity was building up. This time around, it’s the erosion of planetary biodiversity that has our alien neighbors ticked off. It’s actually not an unreasonable motivation — many astrobiologists suspect that bacterial life may be somewhat common in our galaxy; even in our own solar system there are several possible habitats, including Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa. But they have speculated that more advanced lifeforms are exceedingly rare: consider that for 85 per cent of the 4 billion years life has existed on Earth, no multicellular creatures arose. So the rapid extinction of many species here would be a significant blow to the biodiversity of the entire galaxy, not just the Earth’s.
If your primary method of thwarting criminals is a hyper-intelligent car, that car really needs to be bullet proof or else your career will be short. But if your hyper-intelligent car is also super fast and high-performance, you don’t want to install heavy armor panels that destroys that performance. The current version of Knight Rider solves this problem with some nanotech magic, but the original relied on a special bullet-resistant coating, the formulation of which was the source of some of the best episodes they ever aired (The Goliath episodes, for those conversant).
Care of io9, check out this hilarious silent movie remix of the Star Wars IV-VI. It also interesting to see how just dropping a few frames per second converts the unstoppable menace of the AT-AT advance on the rebels at Hoth into the twitchy dinosaurs of King Kong. Ah, stop motion animation. In a world of CGI, I miss you and your greatest practitioner, Ray Harryhausen.
There’s a lot going on in January for science fiction fans—the start of the last ten episodes of Battlestar Galactica, the series finale of Stargate Atlantis*, the release of Outlander (which is either going to be embarrassingly bad or Totally Awesome) and more. Io9 has put together a handy day-by-day breakdown of January so you can buy your movie tickets, set your DVR, and get in line at the comic-book store at the right time.
These things always start small: First someone programs a computer to read minds, and next thing you know it’ll be 
Our ultimate pick for this week is the only movie to have a DNA sequence for a title: 
Okay, so today’s pick is not exactly festive fare, but 
People seem to either like or loath 
Today at #4 is John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of 
With most of our favorite shows on hiatus until the new year, science-fiction fans need to find some other way to get their fix. Fortunately, this year we have 
Getting impatient for the January 16th kickoff of the final episodes of 
Monday night was the last new episode of 
Normally on 
Opening today is the remake of the 1951 science-fiction 
If your primary method of thwarting criminals is a hyper-intelligent car, that car really needs to be bullet proof or else your career will be short. But if your hyper-intelligent car is also super fast and high-performance, you don’t want to install heavy armor panels that destroys that performance. The current version of 
