Giant Freakin Robot

Humans have come so far in their quest to find true love. You used to have to actually leave your house and put physical and financial effort into finding a significant other. (I’m speaking as a male, but not wanting to leave out the liberated females here.) Then there were party lines, which gave unattractive and antisocial people a chance at perhaps turning a conversation into something more. Speed dating…well, that’s just a stupid idea anyway. Here in the Internet age, you don’t have to get out of your hyperbaric chamber to find literally millions of people to talk to, flirt with, and barrage with candid photographs of food arranged around your genitalia.

Formerly generic in nature, these dating websites have become super-specific in drawing their clientele, focusing on characteristics such as race, religion, and politics. Well, here comes a site that will definitely go on longer and farther than any of those petty experiments. I’m…talking…about…Trekkies. (It’s hard to pull a Shatner impression off in print.)

Trekkie Dating wants fans to mingle electronically in order to “Live Love and Prosper.” Take a few minutes to create a free profile (suggested user name: USSEnterMe), using a false picture of course, and check out some of what this particular dating pool has to offer. If you find something to your taste, you have to get a premium membership for a fee in order to actually contact anyone. Dammit, it’s a dating site, not a money-tree grower. And that part right there makes it sound like almost every other dating site, just with more Vulcan ears.

I was too young to remember many details about seeing Return of the Jedi for the first time, but I distinctly remember being mentally terrified of the Emperor. Not the full-fledged physical fear I had for Freddy Kreuger or Norman Bates, because sci-fi wasn’t at all real to me. But it was in thinking that the biggest, baddest, heaviest-breathing motherfucker in the universe, Darth Vader, actually had someone above him calling the shots. Add to that a face whose wrinkles added up like jelly beans in a jar, and the character was forever memorable to me. Twenty-seven years later, Lucas doesn’t even have to do anything to sort of ruin it for me.

Ian McDiarmid appeared at the New York Comic Con this year and gave fans their nerdbucks’ worth in a panel full of whimsical tales. The one in particular that floated to the top of the pile was his story about how he actually got the job playing the Emperor. It’s all in the nose, see.

As massive as George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise has become, it’s easy to forget that there was a time, not even that long ago, historically speaking, when nobody but Lucas himself had any clue what the hell a Wookiee was, and most people would probably have assumed that a Lando Calrissian was some new model of car. For those of us who have never known a society where the Star Wars films weren’t already a thing, it’s hard to imagine what it was like for the moviegoers who bought a ticket having no idea what to expect. But there is no more definitive — or funnier — snapshot of the pre-Star Wars world than the following newspaper clipping, which labels Vader a “metallic … Star Creature.”

The clipping is part of a batch of photographs unearthed by SF Gate as their retrospective look at the opening of Star Wars in the Coronet Theater, one of the only 37 theaters nationwide in which Lucas’ space opera was first released on May 25, 1977. While the clipping is pretty damn hilarious in retrospect, I have to feel some sympathy with the poor reporter who was tasked with trying to write up a movie he or she obviously hadn’t seen and which they probably expected to be little more than a forgettable B movie. Hindsight’s a bitch, ain’t it?

In some ways, reading about the way the first Star Wars film built word of mouth and became a mega hit is a bittersweet experience for me, simply because I was a few years too late to be a part of that initial Star Wars fandom. Sure, I loved the movies growing up during the ‘80s, but my friends I never got to have a similar movie experience that we “discovered,” and by the time I was in my teens the burgeoning internet had pretty much rendered that sort of experience moot. There are plenty of advantages to getting to follow every interesting film project step-by-step through the production process…but I still don’t think it’s the same as lining up with a bunch of excited, like-minded people to see a movie that most of the population has never heard of, and which is about to change the movie landscape forever.

A new day comes with a new dawn. With the announcement of director Matt Reeves dropping out of The Twilight Zone remake and signing on to direct Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Twentieth Century Fox has brought on screenwriter Mark Bomback to tailor the script to Reeves’ strengths.

THR is reporting that Bomback will be brought on to the Apes project to do a pass on the script before the film goes into production. Bomback, whose writing credits include Live Free or Die Hard and Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake, will rewrite the original script by Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, who also wrote the script for The Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011.

Matt Reeves was brought onto Dawn of the Planet of the Apes when Twentieth Century Fox decided to get the sequel on track as quickly as possible. The director of the previous film, Rupert Wyatt, walked away to direct the film Agent 13 starring Charlize Theron. [The writer of that movie, T.S. Nowlin, wrote another sci-fi script that Tom Cruise may star in. - Ed.] Reeves is an inspired choice and has proven himself as a more than capable director with his recent films, Cloverfield in 2008 and Let Me In, the American remake of the popular Swedish horror film Let the Right One In, in 2010. There is no doubt Reeves will elevate the material to make a worthy sequel.