Giant Freakin Robot

The beauty of the science fiction genre (or any genre for that matter) is that it doesn’t have to be confined by its tropes. They can bleed into other genres to make something fresh and exciting. Enter Richard Curtis, the writer of wonderful British romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Love Actually, who has stepped into sci-fi territory with his new time travel romantic comedy, About Time.

About Time is the follow-up to Richard Curtis’ last directorial effort, The Boat That Rocked (Pirate Radio), and follows Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson), a 21-year-old young man who discovers the family secret: they can travel through time. His father (Bill Nighy) reveals the secret to him, but also tells him the limitations of the special ability. He can’t change history, but can change his own life. Tim uses his newly discovered power like any 21-year-old young man would: he tries to get a girlfriend when he meets Mary (Rachel McAdams). Unfortunately, he accidentally erases the timeline and must try to win Mary’s heart all over again.

This Thursday, audiences will be finally be treated to the latest film from J.J. Abrams, Star Trek Into Darkness. To promote the upcoming film, Abrams appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to talk about all things Star Trek. It didn’t take long, however, before the conversation skewed to that other franchise Abrams will soon be handling, and the differences between the two.

Abrams admitted that he wasn’t a Star Trek fan when he was growing up. It wasn’t until he started working on the reboot that he finally saw why Star Trek was so important to so many people. Growing up, Abrams was, and continues to be, a Star Wars fan, and it’s no secret that his love of Star Wars informed his approach to the Star Trek reboot.

Change is inevitable when it comes to Doctor Who. Hell, it’s built right into the premise. The regenerating Doctor, the companions who come and go, it’s exciting because you never quite know what the show will serve up next. Sometimes, however, that change can be painful. I know many who fell in love with the show during David Tennant’s tenure are still mourning his departure, but what if there was a way to enter an alternate timeline? To peer into a universe where Tennant didn’t abandon ship so soon, and instead stayed on for another season? If only we had a TARDIS or some other device that would allow us to explore alternate realities, then we could…I’m sorry, what’s that? Steven Moffat just up and told us about it? Okay, well, that works too.

In a recent interview with Doctor Who Magazine, Moffat fielded a reader question about the road not taken: a fifth season starring David Tennant:

I only had the roughest idea. Had David stayed for one final year, it would certainly have been his last, so my pitch was that it would start with the TARDIS crashing in Amelia’s back garden — as now — and a terribly battered and bruised Tenth Doctor staggering out. Amelia finds him, feeds him fish custard (no that was for Matt, it would have been something more Davidy) and generally helps him. But we, the audience, can see he’s in a truly bad way. Dying maybe. Eventually he heads back to his TARDIS, and flies off.

But when he returns — many years later for Amy — he seems perfectly fine, and indeed doesn’t remember any of those events…And of course over time, we realise what we saw was the Tenth Doctor at the end of his life, about to regenerate. Events that we return to in Episode 13…

One of Star Trek Into Darkness‘ writers, Damon Lindelof is one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood at the moment. Along with Into Darkness, Lindelof was the co-showrunner on the TV series Lost, the co-writer of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, and the co-writer of the upcoming zombie war movie World War Z, starring Brad Pitt.

Lindelof was profiled in the recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, where the 40-year-old writer talked about World War Z and J.J. Abrams‘ forthcoming Star Wars: Episode VII. During World War Z ’s production issues last year, the film’s producer and star Brad Pitt called Lindelof to do a pass on the script’s final act. Pitt was a big fan of Lindelof’s work on Prometheus and thought the screenwriter could work wonders with World War Z. Lindelof says:

‘The idea of a large-scale, epic, $150 million zombie movie starring Brad Pitt sounds pretty good to me,’ he says. ‘Because I haven’t seen that before. I haven’t seen the go-for-broke, insane zombie movie. One of the things that Brad said was, there are so many tropes we’ve come to expect in zombie films, and he wanted to do something different. And the only way to do it different was to