Marsters is apparently in talks with the UK's ITV network for an upcoming project called Moon Shot that will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The made-for-TV movie - which promises unnamed "big American" actors to play Neil Armstrong and forgotten third astronaut Michael Collins - will recreate the last 11 days before the launch of the Apollo 11 mission that changed the world, using a mixture of NASA footage, CGI effects and Marsters' unusual transatlantic accent.

The movie is scheduled to premiere in the UK in July 2009.

Marsters ready to join ITV's 'Moon Shot' [Digital Spy]

The Earthrise photo (and check out the video if you really want to feel tiny) taken from Apollo 8 is one of the most famous space pics ever taken. Along with a few other nearly identical images, the shots are the only space-borne perspective that feature our pale blue dot from anything like a wide-angle view. This sort of thing is exactly what we need more of, Wolfe said. Imaging all of the phases of Earth (crescent, half, gibbous, full, etc.) from at least one lunar distance away would give us tons of info for what a world with continents, a dynamic atmosphere and water looks like.

The grand prize would be taking an image of the Sun's reflection on our oceans in polarized light. "That would give us a measurement of what the glint of sunlight on water looks like," Wolfe said, which could be used to determine whether planets are other stars have liquid water on their surfaces too.

Image: NASA

To some extent, it's understandable that space adventures play fast and loose with physics. After all, who wants to watch Han Solo spend years on the journey to Alderaan, only to find that the planet has twice Earth gravity and he can barely stand up, much less swagger?

The categories of mistakes in our report card should be pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, I'll expand on them a little bit:

• There's no sound in space
• Not all planets have Earth gravity
• Planets should have diverse climates, instead of one unified climate across a "desert planet" or "forest planet."
• It shouldn't be too easy to communicate with alien creatures, without some kind of high-technology "translator" explanation.
• And it definitely shouldn't be too easy for humans to interbreed with aliens.
• Humans exposed to vacuum without a spacesuit shouldn't explode or shatter. And a "hull breach" where the ship's crew is exposed to vacuum should kill everyone instantly.
• You can't have fires in space, unless there's oxygen leaking out somehow.
• Asteroids or other objects shouldn't be able to float close together without falling into each other's gravity
• People shouldn't be able to dodge lasers and other speed-of-light weapons
• And there's no reason why someone would move in slow-motion in zero gravity.
• Faster-than-light travel is probably not ever going to be possible.

Today we're not impressed unless our science fiction involves explosions, boobs, mutants, or all three, but back in the 60s when science fiction became science fact, it seemed like the country could unite to do anything. I caught this film last year at Sundance sandwiched between melancholy indie art films that make you pray that you might choke on your own tongue, and I was blown away. It's a great testament to the entire space program, and what might be one of the last memorable looks at the surviving men who have walked on the moon.

If you're looking for a trippier moon experience, however, pick up the Brian Eno scored For All Mankind, which was culled from the massive amounts of film that NASA shot on flybys of the moon. You'll recognize the "Deep Blue Day" track immediately from the time Ewan McGregor had to go diving in that shit-encrusted toilet in Scottish junkie flick Trainspotting to fetch his opium suppositories.

io9: the only place that will take you from the surface of the moon to a feces-covered toilet in Scotland. Sorry, it had to be said.

What was the most challenging aspect of making a film that involved teleportation?

We did everything for real. We didn't use computer generated characters. You know the superhero films that preceded this have relied heavily on them, and obviously it would have been a really simple way to do the visual effects, because if you computer generate the characters, you can easily make them "jump." It's a lot more difficult to have somebody teleport when you have a real actor doing it. Part of the reason the visual effects stand out in this is because we put all that extra work in when we were shooting.

Traditionally, there have been two kinds of Hollywood tentpole movies: there's the visual effects version where you shoot it all on a soundstage, you never leave it although you "pretend" you left it to go to all these places, and you use visual effect to do the pretending for you. Then there's the version where you physically travel the world, a la James Bond or Jason Bourne, but then you don't do any visual effects in those places. You justify that by saying since we're going, we won't have to use visual effect to communicate that we're there.

We did something that was a bit unusual. We physically traveled to all these places, and then we did visual effects in those environments. We really flew a helicopter over the Sphinx and around the Pyramids. It would have been a lot easier to just generate that stuff in a computer; they're simple geometric shapes, there's just desert in the background, it couldn't have been simpler to generate. But it would never look the way it looks when you see Hayden Christensen on the Sphinx. There's a level of reality that computers just can't achieve at this particular state.

Was he actually on the Sphinx or digitally put up there?

He wasn't digitally put on top of it. We designed the shot, we pre-visualized the shot, we went to the Sphinx without Hayden and flew a helicopter around it following a very specific trajectory. Then we took the telemetry of that shot and filmed Hayden in Mexico using a cable-cam which could play back the moves the helicopter did, and then we combined these two pieces of film the old-fashioned way. It didn't require any digital creations because they perfectly matched up. Every single of grain of film is real, not something that was created in a computer. We shot the real elements wherever we went.

We know the film is based on Steven Gould's books Jumper and Reflex, and now he's also published a novel called Jumper: Griffin's Story which is meant to tie-in with the film. What was the script like when you came onboard?

There was a first draft by David Goyer, which was very faithful to the Steven's novel. Anyone who has looked at my Bourne adaptation will see that I kind of take the cool idea from the book and then reinvent the whole thing as a movie, and I tried to bring that whole logic to Jumper. In particular because the book dealt with terrorism, which I didn't like. The combination of jumping and terrorism didn't seem good to me. There wasn't a second jumper in the book. I had really just fallen in love with Steven Gould's character David who was using his power for selfish means, and I wanted to actually pursue that more than he had in the novel.

I love the notion that... okay, you're a superhero, you're globetrotting, you have it all, and then suddenly you meet another superhero who is significantly more talented at it than you are, and you're not the big man on campus anymore. I found that really interesting. The moment I decided to chase David Rice's darker side, you don't get to have your standard cookie-cutter superhero movie plot. There's not a villain who is setting out the destroy the world, and you don't have a hero who is trying to save the world. I didn't feel the Hollywood need to have David Rice become a hero in the Hollywood finale. I didn't want to see Hayden Christensen become Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man in the second half of the film.

Did you create anything for the movie that wasn't in the books? The movie uses jumpscars and jumpcraters whenever someone uses their jumping ability. Were those created for the movie?

Those were created for the film. The source for them is that I wanted this movie to follow, as much as possible, to follow the real laws of physics that govern this planet and the universe. One of the most primary rules is that you don't get something for nothing. It's all a closed loop, it's a closed system. Everything you do has some kind of a price. For example, cars seemed like a magical device when they they were first invented, but they ultimately came with a price with pollution and global warming.

In other superhero films, people tend to have the power, but there's never any physical price that the person or the planet pays in order for that phenomenal event to take place. I wanted there to be some kind of consequence every time you jump, and that leaving behind a trace would ultimately mean that you wouldn't want a lot of people jumping because of those effects. They could be dangerous if somebody walks into them, they could be harmful to the environment.

I've tried to show that in some really subtle ways. For instance when he jumps from New York to Ann Arbor, the tv changes momentarily to a New York station. I'm trying to communicate that these portals stay open for a short burst... for instance if you jump from the Sahara desert to the Arctic, would be bringing warm air and cold air to each environment, and that might not be good for the planet on a large scale. If you jumped and there were no after effects or repercussions, it would seem like a much more magical power. But, my bullshit meter in me says this would come with a consequence, and wouldn't be like Superman just being able to fly. If he could actually fly, he'd leave a wake turbulence, and there would be consequences to him and other people when he'd fly. These things can't just happen for free.

What about Samuel L. Jacksons character and the Paladins who pursue the Jumpers?

There's no Paladins in the book, there's no mythology of that, there's no one pursuing the Jumpers in that first book. In the second book people are trying to catch the Jumpers for personal gain. You know if you could get a Jumper to work for you, they'd be extremely useful. I was more curious to explore a villain who really wasn't a villain, other than that they wanted to destroy the Jumpers simply because of what they can do. I really believe that in our current climate, if there were people who could actually teleport, there would be people who would think that was treading on some sort of holy land, and that should only be reserved for god. There are already plenty of people who kill in the name of god for far less dramatic reasons.

We do like the fact that there isn't a lot of exposition in the film about how the jumping works, or explanations of things like jumpsites and jumpscars. They just accept it and get right into it.

Well, because David Rise isn't a physicist. If I had a character who was quantum physicist at MIT who one day discovers he can teleport, then that character would commence an investigation as to how that happens. But, a high school dropout is never going to understand how he's able to teleport, and since I'm telling the story from his perspective, I didn't feel like it was necessary to bog down in science that the characters themselves wouldn't understand.

Can you tell us about your next film? We know that it involves going to the moon, but what else can you let us know?

The premise of the movie is about a group that mounts a private expedition to not only go to the moon, but also to colonize it. It's set present day, and it is not science fiction, it's science fact. The blueprint for going to the moon was designed 40 years ago, and the components for implementing it are so old that they're in museums waiting to be stolen. So the group steals, buys, and in other ways pull together all the components it would take to launch and actually land on the moon.

Their goal is to actually leave somebody behind. They're recreating the Apollo mission up to a point, and then exceed it by leaving someone behind and starting mankind's exodus out into the universe. Plus, you can imagine how much shit can possibly go wrong, and it does. It's actually a miracle that it didn't go wrong in any of the lunar landings. What I'm also hoping to do with this film is to once again celebrate what was America's greatest accomplishment in its 200 and some-odd year history. There really is no other country that could have done what we did in the 1960s with the space program.

We know you're executive producing the Knight Rider television movie that comes on this weekend, how involved have you been with it?

I've been very involved with it, at least as involved as I can be given the fact that I'm finishing a visual effects movie. But I'm very involved with it and I would remain a producer on it if it goes to series.

Apollo's Song was originally serialized in a weekly comic magazine back in 1970. This was during the transition phase of Tezuka's career—his production company had just tanked, and he was skeptical of the anime industry, which insisted on censoring his work. It was the same year that he wrote Alabaster, a story about a homicidal, partly invisible ex-athlete intent on destroying all the beauty in the world.

For Tezuka, science fiction was never a goal; it was the medium through which he chose to explore complex, often taboo issues of his time, like love and hate and promiscuous sex. By addressing these issues via animated fictional characters living in a surreal future, he avoided controversy and criticism in the real world.

Apollo's Song is a coming-of-age story that starts in the present and warps back and forth into the past and future. The ambiguous protagonist is a boy named Shogo, who learned to despise the idea of love during a childhood mired in his mom's promiscuous affairs with his many papas. He hates it so much that he obsessively murders any living thing showing even the slightest hint of passion. These killing sprees land him in a mental hospital, where a mysterious doctor puts him through electroshock therapy and transports him into different roles, each in extreme imagined environments—an island where dozens of zoo animals procreate, an isolated house in the mountains, and Nazi Germany. Through his adventures, Shogo finally learns to love. Hypnosis takes him to his final destination—Tokyo in the year 2030, where super-humanoid clones called Synthians rule a cold, heartless world. There, Shogo is caught between two tasks he's been ordered to perform—to kill the Synthian queen, but also to teach her how to love.

The inner lives of animals, reproduction, twisted sexuality, reincarnation, and the inevitable war between humans and their creations—clones and robots—are themes that arise repeatedly in Tezuka's manga. Even today, a lot of Japanese people don't talk that openly about love and sex. Manga is often a prime medium for understanding these issues—sex ed is often taught in comic strips, and almost every male magazine has pornographic graphic novels tacked into its end pages.

Nearly 20 years after his death and over half a century past his heyday, only twelve of Tezuka's titles have been published in English. But with the Asian Art Museum's recent exhibit on Tezuka and other titles being worked on by publishers like Vertical and Viz, we should be seeing a greater rollout in the years to come. If you're going to start somewhere with Tezuka's science fiction works, Apollo is the place to go.

According to http://roadrunnerdm.livejournal.com/84288.html">Roadrunner's LiveJournal:

• Starbuck will be locked up in the brig for "some time." Not exactly the sort of reception you'd expect for returning from the dead.


• Leoben will be back in Starbuck's life, and they'll be spending some quality time together on a beach... on Earth. At least they won't have to jockey for a good spot on the sand.


• Starbuck will have a lot more scenes with Laura Roslin, and with the Cylon ladies as well. One thing Starbuck has never really done is have a girl's night out.


• Starbuck believes that she is a Cylon, although Katee herself doesn't buy it. One thing is for sure, if Starbuck turns out to be a Cylon, half the audience will have expected it, and the other half will be searching for Ron Moore's house with torches.


• Kate Vernon will be reprising her role as Ellen Tigh, although she's not the 12th Cylon. Since Saul has always been torn up about having to kill her, this will most likely be some sort of guilty flashbacks coming from the bottom of a bottle.


• Lee Adama is still a civilian in season four, although it's unclear if that means for the whole season or not. After the way he resigned last season, it's hard to see him putting a uniform back on. Of course, that doesn't stop him from hopping into a Viper whenever he feels like it and taking off.


• She also made it fairly definitive that she won't be coming back to Bionic Woman at all, strike or not. Apparently there is no love lost between her and series star Michelle Ryan.

News dump from Burbank conventions [Roadrunner]

Razor Flashbacks: The Sci Fi Channel has been airing original "flashbacks" in a desperate bid to get people to watch Flash Gordon. Er, we mean a thinly veiled marketing ploy to see what you'll get if you buy the DVD. Frak, actually we mean in an effort to bring the fans a little backstory about the First Cylon War. These short episodes can be seen on the Sci Fi website, and will also be part of the longer Razor which goes on sale December 4th. So what do these six clips tell us?

• 
  
• Day 4,571: Young rookie "Husker" Adama gets some action in his rack, and we find out that the familiar "What do you hear? Nothing but the rain" exchange came from his own commander. He fears that with rumors of a Cylon surrender on the horizon, he won't get to see any action in this war. Movie watching veterans know that's usually when the roof caves in.
• The Hangar: Husker's wish comes true as he prepares to launch out on his first combat mission. However, he spies his girlfriend on the floor of the flight deck, having just returned from her own patrol with half of her face blown off. He growls out "Let's do this" while waiting in the launch tube.
• 
  
• Operation Raptor Talon: One of the best battle scenes ever on BSG, webisode or not. Husker and his wingman shoot down several old school (yep, they look just like the ones from the old TV show) Cylon Raiders before witnessing the destruction of the Battlestar Columbia. An angry Husker chases two Raiders into the atmosphere of a nearby planet, which results in a catastrophic collision and his Viper plummets to the surface.
• 
  
• Free Fall: In a bit of a ridiculous scene, Husker bails out and goes toe-to-toe with a Cylon (old school too!) in mid-air while they both free fall. Remember the scene in Moonraker where Roger Moore's James Bond and Jaws fight in mid-air? You get the picture. Adama and his toaster-buddy crash through the ceiling of a building on the planet's surface and Adama goes medieval on the Cylon's ass (well, his face really) with an iron rod and "kills" it. Then he realizes he's in some sort of a Saw-like torture chamber and grabs the Cylon's gun.
• 
  
• The Lab: With gruesome Cylon/Human body parts hanging all over the place like a perverted flesh fair, Adama tries to figure out what he's stumbled into. He sticks his arm into some murky water in what looks like a Cylon birthing chamber, and of course something grabs him from underneath. A creepy looking man floats to the surface and looks at Adama before vanishing. Was he really there? A disembodied voice tells Adama "All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
• 
  
• Survivors: Adama struggles to free a group of humans from Gemenon locked inside the Cylon laboratory, but only succeeds in opening the door a few inches. As the room starts to come apart around him, they urge him to save himself and to remember them. He flees the collapsing laboratory, leaving the humans trapped behind.
• 
  
• Escape: Stumbling out of what turns out to be a Cylon ship, Adama watches as it takes off into the atmosphere with the humans still aboard. He tries to call in support, only to hear that the war is over: the Cylons have surrendered. Cut to an older Commander Adama on the flight deck of the Galactica, two days before the decommissioning ceremony. He surveys the museum-ready ship and reflects, standing in front of an old-school Cylon encased in lucite, not knowing that he's about to revisit the past in a big way.
• 
  

While these clips show us some cool scenes from the First Cylon War, they unfortunately show very little. Plus, isn't it a little coincidental that Adama just happens to be the one who discovered the first hybrid Cylon/Human and didn't see fit to mention it until now? But, there are a lot of coincidences in the BSG universe, so we'll take it in stride.

One thing to note: all of these flashbacks take place 41 years in the past, which means that Adama has to be about 60 years old or so by now, which sounds about right. Kudos to Nico Cortez, who plays a fairly convincing (and relatively smooth-cheeked) young Adama. He even gets the raspy voice right.

• Midway through Season Two, the Galactica encountered another Battlestar that survived the Cylon attack: the Battlestar Pegasus. It's a much newer ship than the Galactica, is twice as big, has a ship-building facility onboard, and superior firepower.
• Pegasus is commanded by Admiral Helena Cain, an iron-fisted woman who defines the term "hardass." She's skeptical of everyone and everything, and doesn't tolerate anything less than perfection.
• Cain's Executive Officer is Colonel Fisk, who serves as the whip for Admiral Cain. He drunkenly tells the Galactica's Colonel Tigh that Cain killed her previous XO for not following orders. It's unclear if he's joking or telling the truth.
• The Pegasus has a Cylon Number Six model in captivity in their brig. This model is later freed by Baltar, and she executes Cain with a point-blank shot to the forehead.
• Colonel Fisk assumes control of the Pegasus after Cain's death, but is later killed by a man running a large black market in the Colonial fleet. After he dies, Chief Engineer Barry Garner assumes control, although he quickly proves that while he's a whiz at solving engineering problems, he's not much of a commander. He dies saving the ship, after which Admiral Adama promotes his son Lee to commander, and gives him the Pegasus as his first command.
• Commander Lee Adama sacrifices the Pegasus in order to save the Galactica and the Colonists fleeing from New Caprica. The ship is destroyed in a massive firefight, although the crew is able to abandon ship.
• Razor takes places between seasons Two and Three: Lee Adama is the commander of the ship, but through a series of flashbacks we're told how the Pegasus evaded destruction during the initial Cylon attack, and what happened to them up until their encounter with the Galactica.

The SASA list is a mish-mash of semi-reputable sources, cast interviews, and wild rumors. But it sounds as though many people will (naturally) suspect Starbuck of being a Cylon when she returns miraculously. To which Starbuck (or Katee Sackhoff?) says, "I'm not a cylon, bitch!" Starbuck will wind up in a cell and may hold President Roslin at gunpoint to try and get out. There are also suggestions that our heroes will find Earth early in the season — but it won't be our Earth. Oh, and supposedly the name of the thirteenth colony in the scriptures? Is Cylon.

S4 Spoiler and Spec Thread! [SASA]