Giant Freakin Robot

The release of Iron Man 3 this Friday will mark the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Two. This movie will launch a new run of Marvel movies  – Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy — that will eventually lead to The Avengers 2 in 2015.

It was rumored that the supervillain Thanos would be the main bad guy in Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers 2, but with the rumored casting of Lee Pace as Thanos’ henchman, The Controller, for GOTG, it’s unclear how the Mad Titan would fit into the new series. One thing’s for certain: Avengers director Joss Whedon has plans for the guy:

Well, Thanos is more powerful. He is so powerful; he is not someone you can just trot out and punch him. Like he did in the comics, you want him threading through the universe and to save the big finale for the big finale. He is definitely a part of what I have got going on. The thing about The Avengers is that they are very powerful but not very stable. So, there will definitely be some people that will shake them up in the next installment.

This could mean that Thanos will be the main villain in Phase Three instead of Phase Two. Perhaps Thanos will be gradually introduced throughout Phase Two, only to appear in The Avengers 2, which could lead into a bigger presence in Phase Three. Marvel has done a great job so far working with all of these elements to build a cohesive movie universe, so hopefully this tactic will pay off for Marvel Studios.

When something calls itself “The greatest 3D event in 100 million years,” it had better damn well have something remarkable to show for it. Well, now that the above 2D  trailer for Barry Cook (Arthur Christmas) and documentary producer Neil Nightingale’s upcoming CGI epic, Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie, has hit the Internet, I can’t imagine that any real-life film that needs 3D glasses could possibly look as good as this film will. I don’t care what the next Jurassic Park film looks like.

Adapted in spirit from the great PBS series, this film brings to mind both Pixar’s Wall-E and Disney’s The Bear. In not relying on dialogue to tell a story — since this film has no interest in getting on your nerves with CGI talking animals — the film must rely on its expansive visuals to give viewers the full experience of living in an era completely alien to the modern human. Of course, liberties have to be taken, since the things we think we know about dinosaurs change often enough.

If you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you probably recall the episode “Second Chances,” which revealed that a transporter accident some years earlier had created an exact duplicate of William Riker, then left stranded on a planet while the original Riker unwittingly went on about his business. While Tom Riker — the name the duplicate took upon reuniting with Will — later appeared in Deep Space 9 as a member of the Maquis, it turns out Next Generation could have had much bigger plans for Tom…and much more final plans for Will.

The folks over at Ain’t It Cool News have posted a look at the special features in the newly released third-season Next Gen Blu-ray set, and they’ve got a rundown of various cool factoids revealed in all the bonus material. One of the more intriguing is that “Second Chances” very nearly killed off Will Riker, and would have replaced him permanently with his teleporter twin Tom. As former Next Gen writer (and Battlestar Galactica rebooter) Ron Moore puts it, “It was a chance to reinvent the character.”

It makes a certain amount of sense. Riker was one of those characters who was always kind of tricky to manage, to the degree that his refusal to accept a promotion and leave the Enterprise became a running joke. Replacing him with Tom would have opened up all manner of story possibilities, most notably with Deanna Troi, who Tom was still very much in love with. It’s a sort of twisted love triangle that Farscape would later do exceptionally well with its story of duplicate Crichtons. At any rate, Michael Piller eventually nixed the Will/Tom death storyline, and Tom went on to serve in Starfleet and eventually pop up in DS9.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is all about giant robots fighting giant monsters. I’m sure there’s more to the story than that, but to be honest, that’s the only part I really care about. Yesterday we got our most in-depth look at the film’s large-scale combat in the footage from WonderCon, and it was about the best thing I’ve seen all year. Seriously, a giant robot uses a full-size cargo ship like a baseball bat and tees off on one of the creatures. Now that conflict has been rendered in poster form.

Bearing the tagline “Go Big or Go Extinct,” this poster certainly follows its own advice, and features one of the robots, called Jaegers, facing off against one of the monsters, called Kaiju. That’s a shoving match that you don’t want to get in the middle of; you might get stepped on.

The other slogan on the poster, “To Fight Monsters We Created Monsters,” points to the fact that, in order to combat the encroaching Kaiju menace, the human race manufactures mechanical beasts of their own. But even though these new tools level the playing field to a degree, things are not going well for us. The war costs lives and resources, and has taken a downward turn. As it turns out, a washed-up pilot (Charlie Hunnam), an untested rookie (Rinko Kikuchi), and an out-of-date Jaeger may be our last hope against extinction.