Giant Freakin Robot

I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Total Recall, and that’s largely because it mixed genuinely cool science fiction concepts — the alien ruins, psychic conjoined twins — with abject silliness and a generous helping of cheese. I genuinely love the core concept of never quite being sure where the fantasy stops and reality begins, and I think there’s enough meat there to sustain another cinematic stab at the material. I’m obviously not the only one, since the Total Recall remake is hitting theaters on August 2nd, starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Bryan Cranston, and Jessica Biel. But can it possibly be as fun as the original without the joyous cheese of Arnie, triple-breasted mutants, and eyeballs standing out on stalks?

Thankfully, Columbia Pictures is finally letting us get a look at the brand new trailer for Total Recall! Okay, actually, that’s not true. The trailer itself is going to premiere this Sunday. But in order to get people excited about the trailer reveal, they’ve released a teaser…for the trailer. That’s right, they’ve released a video to get people excited about the video that’s supposed to get people excited about the movie. On the upside: flying cars!

If you’re a reader of this site odds are you already understand just why space exploration is so vitally important. Unfortunately, most of our politicians still don’t get it. So NASA remains underfunded and America’s plans to explore the solar system remain mostly on hold. So it’s up to us to make sure they understand just how much this matters. One way to do it might be by signing a petition.

Normally internet petitions are useless and meaningless, but they’re not quite such an empty endeavor when they’re posted on the White House’s official site. There the Obama administration has set up a way for citizens to petition the administration and get answers to the things they care about. If a petition gets enough signatures, the White House will respond. This petition asks the Whitehouse to double NASA’s annual budget and it needs roughly 18,000 more signatures before the Obama administration will respond.

Doubling NASA’s budget might sound like a tall order, but it’s not. Doubling NASA’s budget would only require the government to spend 1 penny for every dollar the government spends. Currently the US government only spends half a cent.

Netflix is in the process of making the jump to become a producer of original content. They’ve already picked up the cancelled TV series Arrested Development, intending to produce new episodes of the dearly departed show. And after the cancellation of Terra Nova the streaming service entered into talks with Terra Nova’s producers, with the intent of doing the same to their dino show. But now they’re not.

The two parties were unable to reach an agreement which would allow Netflix to revive the show. No word on just what the hangup was, but I hope it had something to do with our push on this site to get them to spend their money on something better. Our readers have sent thousands of tweets to Netflix using this link to point them in the right direction.

For anyone wondering why science fiction has been in such a dismal state in Hollywood, at least until the success of The Hunger Games this past weekend, look no further than two upcoming movies: RoboCop and Ninja Turtles. Sound familiar? It’s because those movies have already been done, and now Hollywood is doing them again.

It’s not just the fact that they’re remakes that’s the problem though. It’s the approach Hollywood is taking to remake them. The thing is, RoboCop will no longer be “robo” and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will no longer be mutants.