Giant Freakin Robot

After a week of teasing the first full trailer for Looper has arrived, and it’s as badass as we hoped.

The movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a Looper. A Looper is an assassin who murders victims sent back in time to him from the future. Things go wrong when one Looper’s latest mark turns out to be, well, himself. That older version of himself is played by Bruce Willis. It’s never easy to kill Bruce Wills, especially when Bruce Willis is you.

Watch the first trailer for Looper right here, right now…

It will be hard for some of you youngsters to believe, but there was a time, not so long ago, when one did not have a global forum in which to air one’s frustrations, nitpick movie mistakes, and call filmmakers hacks. Yes, before there was an internet, we could not simply log into the comments section on IMDb or YouTube and let the world that know that “tHis mOOvie SUx BALZ.” No, we had to put forward our theories of cinematic ball-suckiness person-to-person, perhaps while standing around a water cooler or huffing paint in our parents’ basement. There were even times, believe it or not, when we would become so irate over the shortcomings of a film or TV show that we would sit down, compose our thoughts, and mail them to a magazine.

Such was the case back in 1987, when numerous angry fanboys took to the letter column of Starlog Magazine to vent their hatred for a little science fiction flick called Aliens. Yes, that Aliens. It seems that not everybody thought it was the classic it’s come to be regarded as, and many fans wrote in to nitpick various elements of the film and whinge in general. Where it gets interesting is in what happened next. As pointed out via Reddit, director James Cameron actually addressed the complaints personally in the magazine’s 125th issue. He corrects misunderstandings, explains that some confusing aspects were the result of deleted footage (much of which appeared in the later director’s cut), and generally defends his work.

Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi movie is centered around the crew of a ship, called the Prometheus, as they encounter the unknown in the far off reaches of outer space. Since the movie’s named after the ship they take to get there, it’s a safe bet that it’ll figure pretty prominently into the film. And as a bonus, it looks fantastic.

We’ve seen a little of the Prometheus so far, this morning we showed you this poster diagraming key areas of the vessel. But now we have a complete and totally detailed look at the doomed star cruiser. In fact we have not only detailed interior photos of nearly every section of the ship, but blueprints of the craft’s layout. Take a look…

It’s become abundantly clear that the Earth’s limited supply of oil isn’t going to last forever. Heck, it may not even last us another 50 years. With so much of today’s world powered by gas or built by machines that require gas and oil to function, we’re going to be in for a crude awakening when that last barrel is bled from our planet.

Enter NASA, the horribly under-funded organization that the government would rather forget about. Guess what, government? These guys may have a solution to our energy crisis, so maybe you should cut your war funding, lose the top-tier tax breaks, and give these guys some dough…

I digress. NASA engineer John Mankins has invented a device that will collect solar energy from outer space, then transmit that energy back to Earth to be distributed. According to Phys.org, the large satellite will be shaped like a flower, mimicking the natural process that a flower’s petals use to collect solar energy, and will be covered in small, curved mirrors to help capture as much light as possible to be converted to usable energy. The project is being undertaken by Artemis Innovation Management Solutions and has been given initial funding by NASA.