Giant Freakin Robot

February, being the shortest month of the year, is expected to have fewer streaming releases than other months. But even given that, the selection is rather dismal. Thankfully, enough has come out to give Cross the Streams something to do besides wish that aliens would show up in the second season finale of House of Cards. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) But how good a week can it be when the most high-profile release features a character as dumb as Elizabeth Shaw? Let’s take our half-full glasses and head into space with Idris Elba behind the wheel-thing.

Prometheus (HBO Go)
As a pseudo prequel to one of the greatest sci-fi thrillers of all time, Prometheus features “Ridley Scott the visual artist” more than “Ridley Scott the master storyteller.” The script from Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof starts with promise, with a team of scientists discovering an ancient message that leads them across the universe to a planet that holds many secrets. Then they discover some of those secrets, and it’s clear that everyone was more interested in spectacle than making a coherent narrative. It’s not a complete wash by any means. The production design is quite literally out of this world, but Michael Fassbender is the only actor who looks like he knows what kind of movie he’s in. It works as a midnight movie more than a Hollywood blockbuster, especially if you have a space helmet bong handy.

Those of you who’ve been counting know that Ridley Scott’s sci-fi/horror classic Alien turns 35-years-old in 2014. And if you’re wondering, yes, it is still just as amazing as it ever was. And so is the sequel. To mark the occasion, Twentieth Century Fox if pulling out all of the stops to celebrate, teaming up with a bunch of different companies to bring out a variety of cool stuff for you to drool over and add to your collection.

Some of the items that will be released include videogames, action figures, other toys, comics, and even a giant freakin’ bust of the Big Chap alien. How awesome is that? Just imagine your buddies all coming over and sitting smack in the middle of your coffee table is a damn xenomorph.

Since their inception, movies have loved to use holidays as a backdrop to the stories they tell. It makes sense. Celebrated by large swathes of the population, their inclusion lends an air of commonality to the proceedings, a sense that the people on screen are not so different from you the viewer. Each holiday comes with its own set of easily recognizable tropes, and many bring with them their own set of complications and problems to add layers to a narrative. How many times have we watched a family gathering set on Thanksgiving, where people not usually in the same room with one another come to blows, real or metaphorical, when forced into close proximity?

Christmas, being the biggest kid on the holiday block, has easily amassed the greatest number of holiday-themed movies, and science fiction is not immune from taking part in the cinematic festivities. In honor of December 25 rolling around once again, we decided to put together a collection of some of our favorite sc-fi you might not remember unfolded during this festive season. Did we miss any of your favorite sci-fi holiday gems?

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Hollywood is waist deep in reboots these days. Comic books were feeling a little bit left out, so Dark Horse Comics has decided to get in the game, rebooting their Aliens, Predator, and Alien vs. Predator titles. And what the hell, they’re going to throw Prometheus into the mix as well. News of these titles hit a little while back—except for Prometheus, that’s a new addition—but now they’ve released a new teaser for their upcoming remixes.

This faux-police line up, which plays like a scarier version of the one in The Usual Suspects, features a collection of humans, surrounding the Predator himself, all with their odds of survival. I don’t know what these odds makers know, but the 10 to 1 on Predator seems a bit off, especially when a normal looking dude is pulling 90 to 1. Then again, I don’t know any of these people, maybe he’s the ultimate space badass.

With the success of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, the notion of franchises existing within a shared universe is very en vogue right now. (They’re giving the classic Universal monsters the treatment.) The same thing has been happening to a much less ambitious degree with the respective universes of Alien, Predator, and Prometheus. The Alien vs. Predator movies were the biggest direct crossover so far, but they’re also very much the black sheep of the bunch, typically not regarded nearly as well as the standalone films. Whether future movies in those franchises will tie together closer or not, Dark Horse Comics is about to take this notion and run with it, rebooting their Alien, Predator, and AvP titles in 2014, then launching an ongoing Prometheus series to form a cohesive shared comics universe.

Dark Horse has been publishing licensed comics for titles such as Aliens, Predator, RoboCop, and others for decades now. That’s a lot of years of stories shifting into the rearview mirror, but the nice thing about Dark Horse’s Aliens/Predator/Prometheus reboot is that it isn’t a reboot in the traditional sense. The movies still stand as canon, this is just making a fresh start for the comics side of things.

The folks over at io9 conducted some great interviews with Chris Roberson, Paul Tobin , Joshua Williamson, and Chris Sebela, the four series writers. We’ve sifted through the lot and picked out the biggest take-aways that should leave you excited for Dark Horse’s grand experiment.

When combined with the global outlet that is the Internet, passion for our favorite movies and TV shows can inspire people to translate that passion into a thousand different, unexpected creations. We here at GFR regularly feature fan-created artwork and short films that can rival Hollywood when it comes to creativity and unique vision. But this one, this is one of those things where trying to figure out how they came up with the idea is enough to give a guy a headache. The left half of the image above is obviously pulled from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. But before we spoil the how or why, you’re just going to have to take our word for it when we tell you that the right half of the image? That’s Blade Runner too.

That multi-colored barcode comes from the MovieBarcode Tumblr blog. It was created by taking frames from the film, squeezing them down into digital strips, and then assembling them in sequence to create…well, barcodes. And while these images don’t tell you much about the story or characters of your favorite films, they do simply demonstrate one visual quality of films that it sometimes overlooked: the color palate, and how it changes over the course of the movie. Knowing that and looking back at the Blade Runner image up top, it makes sense. You can see the film’s mixture of dark imagery peppered with bright neon flashes, a concise summary of the visual world Ridley Scott created.