Granted, the only thing any of us really care about seeing in the next Transformers movie is more giant freakin robots, but there will be some humans in it too. Shia LaBeouf is coming back, and now EW says Jonah Hill is in talks to join the cast.

If you don’t know who Jonah Hill is, then I suggest you run out and rent (does anyone still rent movies?) these awesome, geektastic movies immediately: The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad. Or, just hop over to a theater and see Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He’s genius.

How that comedic genius will fit into Transformers 2 though, remains to be seen. Word is that he’ll be playing Sam Witwicky’s college roomate, which I guess could mean he’ll be sames new comic-relief sidekick. Except I thought the robots were Sam’s sidekick. Or maybe Sam’s their sidekick. I’m really not sure which.

In 1992, with George Lucas’s Star Wars movies nine years out of the limelight, little known (yet Hugo Award winning) author Timothy Zahn single-handedly reignited the imagination of Jedi fandom and launched Lucas’s universe into an entirely new realm. He did it with the release of “Heir to the Empire”, a book set in the Star Wars universe and taking place after the events of Return of the Jedi. “Heir” was the first of three books, known as the Thrawn trilogy, and with them not only did Zahn keep the fires of Star Wars burning bright during the long years between the original films and the prequels, he launched an all new, multimedia empire of expanded universe novels and merchandise which has since ballooned into dozens and dozens of books and comics by various authors and made George Lucas even richer than rich.

More importantly though, the Thrawn Trilogy was good. Really good. Unlike most of the usual franchise gunk that’s published in paperback form, Zahn’s novels stood on their own as legitimate literary works. They had value beyond the world of easy-to-please fanboys. He didn’t just slap some lightsaber descriptions between two covers. Zahn revolutionized not only Star Wars, but genre series writing in general.

Unfortunately Zahn didn’t have the good sense to leave well enough alone. He followed up the Thrawn Trilogy in 1997 with a sequel called “Specter of the Past” and he’s since released four others, culminating in this latest entry, “Allegiance”. With each release the quality of Zahn’s work has degraded until now, “Allegiance” isn’t just bad it’s almost unreadable. What happened to the Zahn we used to know and love?
read this entry »

We’ve got a new clip from this week’s upcoming episode of Battlestar Galactica, “Escape Velocity”. If the ending to last week’s episode rocked your world the way it did mine, then you’re already on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens this week.

In this new clip from the shows upcoming episode, Baltar is back to playing his man of the people thing. Take a look:
read this entry »

We don’t normally cover a lot of superheroes here on GFR, even awesome, red, demonic ones. But here’s something that’s just too good to pass up. The plot of the next Hellboy movie, Hellboy II:The Golden Army has been kept pretty well under wraps, but a new poster released for the film at the New York Comic Con speaks volumes about what he’ll be up against in his new movie. Gone are the tentacles of the first film, and in their place… he’s fighting giant freakin robot bugs! Now that’s cool.

Behold the evidence:
read this entry »

They’ve kept fans twisting in the wind for months now, but it looks like Fox has finally made up its mind about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It’s coming back. They’ve decided to renew the show and give it a second season according to TV Guide.

About time too. The ratings were good, reviews were solid, why did it take them this long? Bring back Sarah Connor was a no brainer.

No word yet on exactly when that second season will start for The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but at least we know its happening. Psychotic killer robot fans rejoice.

With the addition of defecting former Cinema Blend writer Matt Norris to the team, we’ve done a lot better job over the past couple of weeks of well… catching everything that’s interesting. It helps too that we avoid all the superhero and straight up, completely non-sci-fi horror dreck here the clutters up so many sites. Yeah, it’s a traffic winner but it’s been covered more than adequately everywhere, usually at the expense of other, more legit sci-fi.

So while we love us some Batman, we’ll stay focused on the rest of the science fiction genre on GFR (with only an occasional superhero pit stop), and in this, your weekly Giant Freak Update. It’s your guide to all the cool stuff our wives wouldn’t let us get around to reporting for you throughout the week, probably because they wanted us to “spend time with them”. I know, I don’t get it either. I’m really not that interesting. Here we go:

Ron Moore Making A New Sci-Fi Trilogy For Film! – Battlestar Galactica creator and all around science fiction guru has been given a blank check to create his own science fiction trilogy for the movies. We don’t know what it’s about, but it’s Ron Moore, so it’s going to be good. Move over Lucas, here comes Ronald D. Moore.

Spielberg Makes Ghost In The Shell – Yeah, that Steven Spielberg. He’s producing a live action version of the classic Japanese Manga/Anime Ghost in the Shell.

Star Wars In WWII – Ever wanted what Star Wars characters would look like if they were thrust into World War II? Yeah, me either, but the folks at Toy Mania have done it anyway. See Han Solo, WWII bomber pilot here.

Bad Fandom: Worn Out By Whedonites – Let’s face it, no matter how much most of us may love Serenity, we all know those Joss Whedon fans are a little nuts. Stuart over at CB had the balls to call him out on it. As anyone who knows a Whedonite would probably expect… they responded by trying to proselytize Buff. Worth a read, check it out here.

Trek Remastered Rescheduled – If you’re wondering why we didn’t have another one of those cool Star Trek: Remastered teaser images from Michael Okuda this week, it’s because the next episode has been rescheduled. The newest one, “Mudd’s Women” was supposed to air this weekend, but has been rescheduled to next weekend instead.

Good news: We’ve got a new trailer for Disney’s upcoming redo of Jules Verne’s classic tale Journey to the Center of the Earth, this time in 3D. Bad news: It still doesn’t look like it’d be any good. Unless of course your idea of good is lots of things flying at the camera in order to show off Disney’s gimmicky 3D technology. Somehow I don’t think Jules Verne would approve. Take a look:

It’s been a big week for X-Files news. First we finally got the movie’s official tite, X-Files: I Want To Believe. Now we have the plot of the film.

The somewhat ironic thing here is that Chris Carter and the folks at Fox have gone to almost draconian means to keep the plot of this underwraps, and now it’s all been for naught because it’s slipped out via the description of the movie’s novelization. That’s gotta hurt.

Here’s the plot description which has been making it’s way around the net. We’re not exactly sure where it originated, it seems to have at first popped up on ComingSoon.net or JoBlo.com, but now it’s been removed from both sites… which by the way seems to lend even more creedence to the notion that it’s the real deal. Of course, as always, take this with a grain of salt, but here’s the text being circulated as plot synopsis from the back of the X-Files 2 novelization by Max Allan Collins:
read this entry »

Ready for it? Here it is… The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Yep, that’s what they’re going with. A slogan off a poster which hung over Mulder’s desk in the series. They should have just gone with “The Truth is Out There”. At least we can all finally stop referring to it as the Untitled X-Files Sequel.

We still don’t know what exactly X-Files 2 is about, or for that matter even what it will be called (X-Files 2 is not the title), but we can now say with some certainty that Mulder and Scully will be cold. Really cold.

It’s parka weather in X-Files land, in these three new images just released by Fox for the sequel film. They leaked out online a couple of days ago, but now Fox has followed up and let us have the real deal. Take a look: