Disaster: Volcano
Our Breaking Point: The Subway Scene

How long do you think the people were sitting in that train? Seriously — how long? After a little while of watching people pass out, one after the other, from heat? I'd LEAVE. But no, this guy has to die a painful death walking through lava. Which in itself was a horrible thing — walk faster, melty guy!

Here's the remixed version — watch the full scene here.

Disaster: Deep Impact
Our Breaking Point: The Wave of Love

Nothing brings a daughter and a distant father back together like a giant tidal wave. Call me black-hearted, but this whole "I'm facing my destruction head on, and what? Oh hey, there's my dad who was never around. What the hey, I forgive you!" Tasted like yuck. And to all the people loading up their cars: Come on, it's the end of the world, the roads are always blocked. I bet they felt foolish when they realized they could have just stood on a high mountain to avoid the water. But the hug-it-out wave was still the worst.

Disaster: Armageddon
Our Breaking Point: Ben Affleck
Good theme music and spaceman slo-mo walking, but even if you can convince the audience that a team of misfit drillers can be trained to do their jobs in space, there's no way you can make me believe this scene. Remember, the crew went up in two ships, and they get separated. But don't worry, Ben Affleck's asteroid rover isn't damaged, and he and the remaining crew drive across a sharp-as-razors terrain, fly over a cannon, and find their way back to the other crew. After they shoot their way out of the ship. WHY DID IT HAVE GUNS IN THE FIRST PLACE? Uh, no.

Disaster: The Day After Tomorrow
Our Breaking Point: Frost Running

I didn't think it was possible for a character to piss me off more than when Dennis Quaid announced that he would be walking from Philly to New York, through the worlds most horrific storm, ever. And then his movie son Jake Gyllenhaal and his friends ran from frost, and a pack of wolves. They outran cold. You cannot run from cold, and you cannot protect yourself from cold by shutting the door, nor can you breathe air that is that cold — but screw science, you just plain can't run from cold.

Disaster: Twister
Our Breaking Point: Thank God For These Leather Straps

Twister was a fun movie about lunatics who chase twisters, thus making storm-chasing look infinitely cooler than it could ever be. But for the most part, it's just lots of driving and yelling up at the sky and seeing cows fly past, etc — you know, good stuff. Until the big one. At the end, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt chase and get chased by the really, really big tornado, and instead of dying, they tie themselves with leather belts to a pole, and survive. Their arms remain intact and neither of them manage to get hit by any of the debris that is encircling them. Lucky ducks, eh?

Disaster: The Core
Our Breaking Point: Explaining Unobtainium

The science behind the ship. It's made out of unobtainium, so the hotter and deeper it gets the stronger it gets. And it's shaped like a penis. So yeah...

Disaster: Outbreak
Our Breaking Point: Dustin Saves The Town With His Words

Between a ton of accidental spills and the trained professional scientists sticking their hands into infected blood samples or falling asleep on the job, the worst moment of all is by far Dustin Hoffman's magical speech. Yes, it's worse than the little girl playing with the ebola host monkey. Never in a million years would Dustin Hoffman be allowed to sit up there in that plane. I'd give him two minutes before he was shot out of the sky.

Disaster: The Happening
Our Breaking Point: The Ending

First the plants attack cities, then the roads, then the small cities, then groups, then angry people, then it's the wind. What. The Hell. How can something that probably took millions of years to develop change in hours? Because M. Night said so, that's why — so quit your whining and watch the big ending payoff. Wahlberg and Zooey then decide to suicides themselves, because Zooey decided even though the plants are killing everyone, she should take their dead friend's child outside to run amuck. And now they are trapped — by wind. Time to give up hope and walk towards each other with big sweeping instrumentals, what HAPPENS? Nothing. "The event must have stopped before we went out here." Screw this movie.

Disaster: Dante's Peak
Our Breaking Point: Grandma Gives Her Life

While I agree with having those who have already lived full lives sacrifice themselves first, this is a freaking strange scene. They're like, "Five seconds to the dock," and she decides to walk to the shore too, for extra dramatics.

[Thanks to Annalee and Ray Wert for the phallic Core jokes]

Why do the studios decide that scenes are strong enough to make it into movie trailers, but not strong enough to show up in the finished product? It's a mystery, but it shows how much last-minute editing and tweaking goes into movies nowadays. We're not the only ones to notice this — when I was almost done writing this post, I came across this discussion over at Cinematical.

Here are some examples from giant films of the past decade or so:

Incredible Hulk:

Star and co-writer Edward Norton famously clashed with Marvel over how long this movie should be, and a couple of scenes were featured prominently in the trailers but didn't make it into the theatrical release. There's this fireside chat between Bruce Banner and "Doc" Samson:

And then there's the whole opening sequence where Banner goes to Antarctica to try and kill himself, which supposedly includes a glimpse of Captain America's frozen body:

And also, the same trailer includes a bit where Bruce Banner argues with General Ross, saying there's only one thing that can fight the Abomination and "it's in me."

Terminator Salvation:

There seems to be a lot of stuff that was cut from the final print of the movie, where John Connor obsesses about how the future has been altered by all the time traveling in previous installments. "This is not the future my other warned me about," he says in one trailer.

In another trailer, his wife Kate says, "If you saved us in another future, you can save us in this one," or words to that effect. I get the impression all of Kate's stuff got cut out of the final print of the movie. That scene is included in this four-minute trailer:

Also, I can't remember Connor actually saying, "Win or lose, this war ends tonight" in the actual movie. Did he say that, and I just missed it?

We're also pretty sure that Connor putting his hand on his wife's pregnant stomach wasn't in the movie. (In fact her pregnancy hardly comes up at all.)

And there's a glimpse of a naked figure (or at least barelegged) reaching down and grabbing a Terminator's arm gun to blast the hell out of someone or something. Could that have been a rejected sequence featuring Arnie's T-800? I bet they shot a lot of stuff with Roland Kickinger, the bodybuilder whose naked body stood in for Arnie's:

Star Trek:

We know they filmed a decent amount of stuff for this movie, including some more of Kirk's childhood and the reasons he decided to trash that Corvette. But the main thing that shows up in the trailers is the birth of baby Spock:

There's also a sequence where Nero says "The wait is over," which is in a bunch of the trailers but not in the movie. I think this is right after he busts out of the Klingon prison.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

Actually, this doesn't seem like it would have been such a great scene, but one trailer includes a sequence where we meet Storm as a kid:

Wanted:

A poster at Cinematical says the whole great scene where James McAvoy asks Angelina Jolie "Are we gonna bond now?" and she says, "Would you like to?" isn't in the movie. I don't have the movie on DVD, and can't remember off-hand if they're right:

Armageddon:

As a commenter at Cinematical pointed out, the trailer for this film includes a whole inspirational speech from Bruce Willis, which never turns up in the movie:

I Am Legend:

This IMAX trailer (and some of the other trailers, I think) include some snippets of the film's original ending, which was replaced at the last minute. It's the bit where the plague mutant hisses right next to Will Smith's face, at around 2:20 in this video:

2046:

Another one the Cinematical commenters noticed. Apparently this film's trailers include a ton of futuristic scenes that aren't in the movie, including Maggie Cheung as a robot:

Reign Of Fire:

Annalee has been annoyed for years that this movie's trailer featured dragons fighting helicopters, but it didn't really happen in the movie:

True Lies:

And finally, reaching back quite a bit further, here's a trailer for True Lies that includes a number of scenes that aren't in the movie, or even in the DVD:

Time travelers hunted them to extinction:

"Big game hunters from the future may have wiped out the dinosaurs," suggests Arthur C. Clarke, in the course of explaining one theory of time travel. (That you can travel millions of years in either direction, but not any closer to your own time, because then you run into your own timeline.)

Also in the early Isaac Asimov story "Big Game," aka "The Hunted," an explorer hears a drunken story about time travel and what really killed the dinosaurs off. A similar idea plays out in A Gun For Dinosaur by L. Sprague DeCamp and "A Sound Of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury, but I don't think it actually results in the dinosaurs' extinction in those instances.

There's a weird-as-heck twist on this idea in the story "One Giant Step" by John E. Stith. In an alternate future, the super-intelligent descendants of the dinosaurs invent time travel. So they travel back in time 65 million years to meet their dinosaur ancestors. "That's one small step for a reptile, one giant step for Reptilia." But one of the three travelers, Ektor, has smuggled back some bombs, which he uses to wipe out all his own ancestors, because of all the suffering and mass extinction of other species the reptile overlords have caused. "Reptiles were not meant to rule the Earth... let some other species take over," he announces before detonating.

And commenter QuantCoates points out that 2000 A.D.'s strip Flesh demonstrates conclusively that stegosaurus-riding cowboys from the future actually killed the dinosaurs.

Aliens did them in:

The Cybermen, Doctor Who's second worst enemies, turn out to have killed the dinosaurs - and the Doctor's math-whiz sidekick Adric - in "Earthshock." It's all because Adric wasn't quite fast enough with those logic puzzles, actually.


In Animorphs, Megamorphs #2: In The Time Of Dinosaurs by K.A. Applegate, the Animorphs travel backwards in time to the dinosaur era. There, they meet two warring alien races, the Mercora and the Nesk. The Nesk divert a comet so that it slams into the Earth, aiming to destroy the Mercora. But instead, the comet merely wipes out the dinosaurs, and provides power for the Animorphs to return to their own time again.

That's also the premise of the story "The Dreams A Nightmare Dreams" by Harlan Ellison. (And in the essay "Revealed! What Killed The Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself," Ellison also suggests it was actually television and other mass culture that wiped them out.)

And then there's the Futurama episode, "The Why Of Fry." Fry asks the Giant Brain at the center of the Infosphere what killed off the dinosaurs, and it replies, "Meeee!"

Cthulhu, an alien from way back, takes credit for wiping out the dinosaurs in Neil Gaiman's short story "I, Cthulhu." (Thanks to commenter m_faustus for pointing this out.)

A superior species emerged:

The classic movie Reign Of Fire explains everything. Dinosaurs died out because dragons evolved as a superior life form, and the poor dinos just couldn't compete. If only the dinosaurs had had Christian Bale on their side.

Writer Jeff Hecht also advances this theory in his story "Extinction Theory," which ran in Asimov's Science Fiction in 1989. It postulated that "the evolution of intelligent dinosaurs was the real cause of the mass extinction at the K/T boundary."

They did it to themselves:

In the Jim Henson Productions show Dinosaurs, which is basically The Simpsons starring dinosaurs, we follow a whole dinosaur civilization... but the show ends on a downer note. The dinosaurs abuse their own environment and cause the extinction of several species they need to survive... so they try to cool the planet down, seeding some clouds with special rain-causing bombs. This overshoots and causes an Ice Age, wiping the poor dinos out.

A similar fate befalls the advanced dinosaur civilization in the novel Toolmaker Koan by John McLoughlin, according to commenter EllenRose.

They didn't die out after all.

Once again, Doctor Who comes to our rescue. In the stories "The Silurians," "The Sea Devils" and "Warriors Of The Deep," we learn that some of the dinosaurs had a super-intelligent civilization, which left no trace. The super-smart dinosaurs went into suspended animation, bringing some of their regular dinosaur brethren with them.

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle has explorers visiting a hidden land where dinosaurs still survive. Which, presumably, helped to inspire King Kong, Land Of The Lost, and countless others "dinosaurs still hanging out" tales.

And then there's the always-reliable Star Trek: Voyager, which introduces the Voth, a race of super-intelligent hadrosaur descendents in the episode "Distant Origin." Before the extinction happened, the dinosaur people left Earth and wound up in the Delta Quadrant. Here's the end of the episode, with TOS music added randomly:


The cartoon DinoSquad, according to Alasdair, tells of two Velociraptors who decide to wait out the dinosaur extinction by hanging out in a cave... for 65 million years. Just, you know, chillin'. At some point, they develop telepathic powers (like one does) and when they finally emerge, they have the power to convince people they're actually human. Oh, and one is good and the other is evil.

The dinosaurs survive the rise of homo sapiens - who start killing them off, in the Anonymous Rex series by Eric Garcia. So the dinosaurs live amongst us in secret, wearing fake human suits, and carry on their dinosaur culture in secret. (Thanks to ItMoons for pointing this one out!)

And of course, the novel Dinosaur Wars: Counterattack tells the story of what happens when the dinosaurs come back from outer space - and they want their planet back.

Or maybe it really was an asteroid:

That's the theory advanced in Armageddon, where a similar fate awaits humans. Or the novel In The Shadow Of Omen, where an asteroid is directed to smash into Earth on purpose. Or Shiva Descending by Gregory Benford and William Rotsler. There's also the Night Of The Comet explanation, as commenter Se7a7n7 points out: a comet turned the dinosaurs to red dust... and it's coming back.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Donald Sutherland tries to convince an alien intelligence he's the "dominant lifeform," and gets turned into a hulking half-robot for his pains. Jamie Lee Curtis learns that in the battle between cyborgs and wooden chairs, cyborgs will always win.

Gale Ann Hurd (Terminator, Aliens, Armageddon) produced this somewhat muddled alien scavenger-at-sea tale, and you can definitely see the trademark Hurd horror in all the scenes of people's brains getting carved out and bodies getting turned into extra machine junctions. It's directed by John Bruno, who's not surprisingly a special effects expert who won an Oscar for his work on The Abyss. [IMDB]

The adaptation of Robinson's 1992 novel is coming from an unlikely source: Jonathan Hensleigh, the writer of Bruce Willis astronaut disaster movie, Armageddon. Hensleigh, whose other credits include Die Hard With A Vengence and 2004's The Punisher, will be the writer and executive producer of the series which AMC's VP of original programming Jeremy Elice calls more character-driven than you may be expecting: "It's not the spectacle of sci-fi that you typically see." Not that there won't be any spectacle, as Christina Wayne, senior VP of original series and miniseries at the cable channel explains:

This fits in with our bigger vision of wanting series that feel like cinematic one-hour movies... We're always looking for big genres but to do them in slightly different ways so they feel fresh and new.

The series is just one of a number currently in preparation at AMC for a 2009 start, including a series based on Glen David Gold's Carter Beats The Devil.

AMC plans Mars mission [Hollywood Reporter]

This week, the United Nation's Association of Space Explorers (ASE) held a panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation to discuss the threat posed by near-Earth objects (NEOs). An asteroid strike would have devastating and lasting consequences:

A hit by even one of the smaller [asteroid] rocks, say the size of a convenience store, would have the impact of 400,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs exploding at once, he says. The larger varieties (a mile or more in diameter) could hit with as much force as millions of Hiroshima bombs, with devastating planet-wide effects, such as tsunamis, damage to the atmosphere, and radical climate change, with the magnitude of the damage depending on how big it the object is, its composition and if it hits land or water.

Several space programs do currently track NEOs to identify asteroids on a possible collision course with Earth, but these programs are not well coordinated and do not have the funding to track a sufficient number of objects. The ASE plans to deliver a proposal to the UN for a coordinated network of telescopes to better identify and track these asteroids. Although it is not the ASE's role to develop action plans in the event an asteroid threat is detected, its members have contemplated ways to avoid a collision:

In addition to telescopes to detect an incoming rock, that technology could include flying a spacecraft alongside an asteroid that is on course to impact our world. [NEO committee chairman Rusty] Schweickart says the gravitational attraction between the vessel and the space rock would tug on the latter just enough to alter its course and miss Earth. Another, less appealing option would be to shatter or blow up an approaching asteroid.

But is the risk of such an impact real, or is it just movie-engendered hype?

"It's real," says John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, an informational Web site focused on security issues, including space. "It's not a question of whether it's going to happen, it's just a question of when it's going to happen."

What 'Deep Impact' might an asteroid make on Earth, astronauts ask and Will an asteroid destroy Earth? Time for UN to keep tabs, say experts [Scientific American]

Headline: "Stardust Evidence Points to Planet Collision"
Movie Title: Armageddon II: Are you Gettin' It?
Director: Michael Bay
The Set-Up: For reasons that defy logic, Venus has jumped its orbit and is headed towards Earth. Back at the farm, scientists determine that they must detonate the rogue planet before it obliterates the motherland. So NASA turns to a grizzled, retired explosives expert (the best in the world, natch) for an assist. One catch: They must first find a way to pry him away from The Bottle and rekindle the curmudgeon's will to live. Perhaps a visit from his saintly kindergarten-teacher ex-wife will do the trick?

Headline: "U.K. experts say Stonehenge a place of healing"
Movie Title: How to Get to 11—The Nigel Tufnel Chronicles, Vol. 1
Director: Akiva Schaffer
The Set-Up: It's 1973. Having recorded five albums with his band Spinal Tap, guitarist Nigel Tufnel is in a creative funk. Seeking spiritual inspiration, he makes a pilgrimage to Stonehenge, "where a man's a man and the children dance to the Pipes of Pan."* He soon lands in a hospital after contracting a VD from this chance encounter with a Tap groupie who happened to be part of his tour group. (Hey, she looked clean.) And it is there, hopped up on antibiotics and whatnot, that Tufnel starts writing Spinal Tap's no-so-seminal album 1974's Intravenous de Milo.

*Note: The track "Stonehenge" ended up appearing on the band's 1975 release, The Sun Never Sweats.

Headline: "Scientists demonstrate how to make a hidden portal"
Title: The Being John Malkovich Prequel (working title)
Director: John Grisham, in his directorial debut
The Set-Up: Before the employees of LesterCorp got wind of the portal, an oblivious John Malkovich was making troubling career decisions, like starring in Mary Reilly or Con Air or The Man in the Iron Mask. You see, for a brief period of time, his consciousness was inhabited by a schizophrenic. Trapped in the eccentric actor's consciousness by a mad scientist, the mental patient is ruled missing until a perseverant psychiatrist tracks him. A lost cause? Hardly. Ignoring her skeptical colleagues, she embarks on an interdimensional adventure to liberate her fragile patient from the mind of Malkovich, all the while giving him hope with her tough-love maternal instincts.

You can blame EW's Chris Nashawaty for starting the whole thing off with his essay, subtly titled "Superheroes: How They Ruined Summer Movies":

Looking back now, I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell out of love with summer movies: May 3, 2002. I ducked out of work early that afternoon to wait in line for the first screening of the first blockbuster movie of the summer. I remember looking around at the swarm of hooky-playing droolers and fanboys and knowing I was precisely where I was meant to be. I would've taken a bullet for these people. After all, we'd shared some indelible event-movie moments over the years. July 3, 1991: Opening day for Terminator 2. June 11, 1993: Jurassic Park. July 3, 1996: Independence Day. Hell, I'd even saved the ticket stubs. Now it was Spider-Man's turn.

Sitting in the darkness of the theater, beaten numb by the whining adolescent angst of Peter Parker, fighting back a yawn during his schmaltzy rain-soaked smooch with Mary Jane Watson, nearly going into diabetic shock from all of the sugar-spun F/X eye candy that honestly couldn't have looked more bogus, I felt...well, I felt really bored. At some point during those endless 121 minutes, I'd changed. And when the audience started whooping as the end credits rolled, I realized that my beloved summer movies were changing too.

Yes, he's really arguing that Spider-Man ruined the good name of Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. But wait — it gets better:

Just 10 years ago, summer had real movies — the kind without genetic mutants whose tortured origin stories are shamelessly cribbed from Freud 101. In the summer of '98, you could go to a multiplex and see Out of Sight, The Truman Show, or Saving Private Ryan. And if you wanted ear-shattering bombast, there was Armageddon. Don't laugh, Michael Bay's starting to look more and more like Antonioni these days.

Apparently, someone's forgotten to tell Chris that there are actually some other movies coming out this summer besides Iron Man, The Dark Knight and The Incredible Hulk. Either that, or he thinks that Sex and The City was originally created by Stan Lee (Chris, if it helps, here's a list of what's being released this summer).

Television Without Pity's Zach Oat speaks up for sanity:

I feel for you, Chris, I really do, because you seem to have gone to see every terrible superhero movie ever made. I presume it's because of your job as a writer at EW and not out of some assumption of quality, but I'm a long-time comic book fan, and even I knew not to go see Catwoman or Ghost Rider or The Punisher in theatres... My advice? "Just walk away," as the great Humungus said in the summer of 1981. Stay away from the movies that are clearly causing you grief. Don't buy that ticket to Hellboy II (the original made $100 million globally, by the way); instead, go see Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave.

Nashawaty's essay is a strange piece (especially for Entertainment Weekly to run), and it feels like he hasn't thought through his argument, but does he have something resembling a point amongst his bitter ramblings? There are a lot of comic-book related movies this year (Besides the three mentioned above, add Hellboy II and Wanted to the list, and you could potentially throw Speed Racer on there if you squint hard enough as well). Maybe it's not "when did comic movies kill summer," but instead "how many comic movies are too many?"

Superheroes: How They Ruined Summer Movies [Entertainment Weekly]

How Chris Nashawaty Ruined My Summer [Television Without Pity]

The 1970s: 1975's Jaws is widely considered the first summer blockbuster. The original Star Wars came out in May 1977 and grossed about $307 million domestically in its first run. The other big summer blockbusters of the late 1970s were Jaws 2, Animal House and Alien, according to this site.

The 1980s: Science fiction scored about one summer blockbuster per year, or maybe two in a good year. Except for the late 1980s, when science fiction had a bit of a slump. Here's the roundup, by year. (A year with an asterisk is one where no science fiction film hit the top 10 movies of the year, box-office-wise.)

1980: Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back ($209 million)
1981: Superman II ($108 million)
1982: E.T. ($359 million) and Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan ($79 million).
1983: Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi ($252 million), Superman III ($60 million) and War Games ($80 million)
1984: Ghostbusters ($260 million) and Star Trek III: The Search For Spock ($76 million)
1985: Cocoon ($76 million) and Back To The Future ($211 million)
1986: Short Circuit ($41 million) and Aliens ($85 million)
* 1987: Predator ($60 million) and Robocop ($53 million)
* 1988: None. (Although Big and Willow were big summer hits.)
1989: Batman ($251 million), Honey I Shrunk The Kids ($131 million)

The 1990s: The number of science fiction movies in the summer's biggest movies increased slightly, with some ups and downs. Some years, the biggest blockbusters included films with a lot of special effects and action-adventure themes, but no overt science fictional elements.

1990: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ($135 million), Total Recall ($119 million), Back To The Future Part III ($88 million), Flatliners ($61 million).
1991: Terminator 2 ($205 million)
1992: Batman Returns ($163 million)
1993: Jurassic Park ($357 million)
* 1994: None. (Although True Lies, Speed and The Mask were in the top 10, and non-summer films Stargate and Star Trek: Generations were in the top 20.)
1995: Batman Forever ($184 million), Apollo 13 ($172 million), Waterworld ($88 million)
1996: Independence Day ($306 million), Phenomenon ($105 million)
1997: Men In Black ($251 million), The Lost World: Jurassic Park ($229 million), Face/Off ($112 million), Batman And Robin ($107 million)
1998: Armageddon ($202 million), Deep Impact ($140 million), Godzilla ($136 million), The Truman Show ($126 million)
1999: Star Wars Episode 1 ($431 million), Wild Wild West ($114 million)

The 2000s: It's really just in the last five years that we've seen more than two or three big science fiction movies dominating the summer pretty much every year. A lot of these have been franchises, comic-book movies and sequels, or some combination of the three. The box-office take of the top 10 movies has increased dramatically, with every year's top 10 movies each grossing well over $100 million.

2000: X-Men ($157 million)
2001: Jurassic Park III ($181 million), Planet of The Apes ($180 million)
2002: Spider-Man ($404 million), Star Wars Episode II ($302 million), Signs (228 million), Men In Black II ($190 million)
2003: The Matrix Reloaded ($282 million), X2: X-Men United ($215 million), Terminator 3 ($150 million), Hulk ($132 million)
2004: Spider-Man 2 ($374 million), The Day After Tomorrow ($187 million), I, Robot ($145 million)
2005: Star Wars: Episode III ($380 million), War Of The Worlds ($234 million), Batman Begins ($205 million), Fantastic Four ($155 million)
2006: X-Men: The Last Stand ($234 million), Superman Returns ($200 million)
2007: Spider-Man 3 ($337 million), Transformers($319 million), The Simpsons Movie ($183 million), Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer ($132 million)

Note: Data is from BoxofficeMojo.com. Dollar figures aren't adjusted for inflation. I left out movies like the original Indiana Jones trilogy, which is clearly fantasy. (Unlike the new Indiana Jones movie, if all reports are to be believed.) I also left out spy movies that might have a few science-fiction touches aren't really about a science-fictional premise. Feel free to bitch at me in the comments.

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.

Once we've seen Abrams' Star Trek and his new X-Files revamp show Fringe, we'll have a much better idea of whether Abrams really is brilliant — or just a clever hack. But already, there's plenty of evidence for both sides of the argument. Here's our list of reasons to believe either point of view:

Genius:

- Cloverfield. Once you got past the hype, it really was a great ride, and the nihilistic ending was sort of awesome in a Blake's 7-y way. For once, the fact that everything's a mystery didn't seem to matter, because the mystery was just in the background. In the foreground, you had this you-are-there spectacle of the city falling into ruins and Rob struggling to find Beth despite the pointlessness of it all.

- Lost. It's another thing we won't really be able to evaluate yet, because a lot depends on how well it ends, and how much sense it actually makes in the end. But last week's time-travel episode recharged our faith in the versatility of the concept. When the show works, it's intense and Hobbesian. The whole flash-forward tapestry storyline thing has the makings of a compulsive DVD rewatch.

- Mission Impossible III. Okay, so the make-your-own-defibrillator thing was sort of wack. And what the heck was the rabbit's foot that Tom Cruise has to find anyway? But considering this was a movie starring Tom Cruise, with "III" in the title, it was way better than we had any right to expect. It was sort of a goofy extended episode of Alias.

He hires geniuses. This is probably the best argument for J.J. Abrams being a genius — he recognizes genius in others and hires appropriately. Case in point: Drew Goddard, the Buffy scribe who now writes for Lost and also wrote Cloverfield. Another case in point: Brian K. Vaughn, another Lost writer who also created Y: The Last Man.

Hack:

- All the viral marketing. During the long Lost hiatus, we were bombarded with "clues" on viral sites, where you could track down a phone number that led to another web site that led to a riddle. Did any of it add up to anything in the end? Meanwhile, Cloverfield was two movies: the stark masterpiece you saw in the theater, and the over-complicated version all the online fans were privy to, with all the clues about Tagruato and Slusho! and news reports in Spanish.

- Armageddon. Abrams co-wrote the script of this Michael Bay splode-fest. I watched it recently, and it's just as nonsensical and bizarre as I'd remembered... but much slower moving.

- Alias. It was a fun show at first, but after a while all the daddy issues (and then mommy issues) and the endlessly spiraling "everything you know is wrong" plots started to give us a headache.

- Forever Young. I pretty much covered this one yesterday. But the treacly plot, with the nonsensical motivations — why would being in suspended animation make his girlfriend's supposedly impending death easier to handle? — is pretty hard to take. The film pretty much slides into the ick zone the moment two cute kids revive Mel in the present day. And then there's the fact that he starts to age rapidly, as a side effect of cryogenic suspension. Wha huh?

- Just the fact that he's so prolific. Besides Lost, Fringe and Trek, he's got a show about cancer patients, a show about a notary, and Cloverfield 2 on his plate.

So is he a genius or a hack? Decide for yourself, and then vote in our poll.

• Back to the Future 3: The final action sequence in this movie has not one, but two spectacular train crashes. First, back in 1885 as the Delorean gets pushed up to 88 miles per hour, the locomotive takes a header into the ravine and its boiler explodes, kicking up tons of earth in the process. Then, moments (or years) later when Marty arrives in 1985, he almost gets turned into roadkill by a modern day train, which does reduce the time machine to bits and pieces. There's even a little "death scene" as the flux capacitor "dies."

  

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• The Matrix Revolutions: Niobe might be flying a ship that has "a fat ass," but she does a pretty decent job of evading sentinels, crashing through a barely open door, and not getting everyone squashed when she crash lands into the dock in Zion. She's lost about half of the lifters on the ship, and manages to scrape off just about every external appliance on the thing, which means you wouldn't want her to parallel park anything. Plus they must have some pretty decent seatbelts on that thing.

  

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• Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith: While the acting is this scene is a disaster on another level as Hayden Christensen deadpans "We're coming in too hot," the visual effects are nothing to sneer at. Although why a ship that huge has dragfins and flaps on it, I'll never know. Clearly it's not meant to fly in the atmosphere, and it should have burned to a cinder the way they were flying it. He even yells at R2D2! Don't blame the droid for your bad acting, just take it like a man and crash that damn thing.

  

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• Armageddon: Not long after they've already destroyed a space station, the flight crew of the Independence gets nervous about landing on the ginormous asteroid and tries to adjust course. This results in several "OH SHIT!" moments as their shuttle gets riddled with debris, the pilots get sucked out the windows, and it crashes down... fairly intact. There's a great scene when Bruce Willis onboard the Freedom shouts "Is that the Independence?" and a pilot's body smacks into the window. Guess that answers that question.

  

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• Star Trek Generations: The Enterprise separates into two piece, and the back half explodes in a warp core breach, and the saucer section smashes into Veridian III and carves a massive groove of destruction behind it. Technically, crash lands on the planet twice, since Picard hops back in time to stop Soran, although that sadly doesn't mean we get to see Data cuss twice in a row. Is anyone else impressed that the forward viewscreen managed to stay working as long as it did? That's some quality workmanship right there, even if every panel on the ship seems to explode in a shower of sparks whenever the ship hits something.

  

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• Before Charlton Heston entered into acting, he had to change his name to shed his connection to a science fiction classic. Born John Charles Carter, he shared a name with the hero of Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series of books, which featured John Carter as an American Civil War veteran fighting mythical creatures on Mars. The first book, A Princess of Mars, was being developed into a film in the early 1950s as Heston began acting, although it later fell through.
• Planet Of The Apes: While first deemed too expensive, 20th Century Fox eventually shot a $50,000 test scene in the 1960s in order to show that the film had potential. This was Heston's first turn as Astronaut George Taylor, and his star power helped convince the executives to go for it. The resulting film was a success, and led to countless repeatings of Heston's line, "Take your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape!" for years to come.
• Beneath The Planet Of The Apes: Heston agreed to appear as Taylor again in this film, but only in a small supporting role. He also wanted his character to be killed off, and he got his wish in a spectacular way when he was the one who triggered the Doomsday device that destroyed the planet. The series went on to have three prequel films and a television series, but suffered declining ratings. Who knows if Heston would have been able to save the series, but he'd had his fill of monkeyshines.
• The Omega Man: Heston played Robert Neville in this second film adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend novel in 1971. Complete with afro-wearing Rosalind Cash playing it to the nines as a Foxy Brown version of Lisa, Heston sported Ray-Bans and an automatic weapon throughout the film's Los Angeles setting. It's a bit campy, but still considered a classic by fans of science fiction and guns everywhere.
• Soylent Green: Is there anyone left alive in the world who doesn't know what Soylent Green is made out of? Based on the 1966 scifi novel Make Room! Make Room!, the Earth has become incredibly overpopulated and food resources are extremely scarce. The Soylent Corporation aims to tide hunger with their miracle foods, soylent red, soylent yellow, and the ever-popular new flavor, soylent green. Heston plays a detective who unravels the mystery behind the tasty treat, leading to another very popular Heston-quote, "Soylent Green is people!"
• Earthquake: While not exactly science fiction in plot, this Heston disaster flick featured a new process that Universal Studios decided to install in theaters in order to help pump the excitement during the movies earthquake sequences. "Sensurround" involved huge speakers and a 1,500 watt amplifier that could pump out "infra bass" — ass-rattling waves of sound. Supposedly the system caused nosebleeds, cracked ceilings, and destroyed china in nearby shops. The process was also used in the 1979 Battlestar Galactica theatrical film, and later relegated to the trash heap.
• Solar Crisis: Heston's return to science fiction films in 1990 resulted in this god-awful travesty of a movie that features an artificially intelligent bomb named Freddy and TV's Parker Lewis Can't Lose himself, Corin Nemec. The combined might and one-armed pushupability of Jack Palance and Charlton Heston couldn't prevent this $55 million dollar movie about dropping a bomb into the sun to redirect solar flares from flaming out.
• Planet of the Apes (2001): Besides a role on an episode of SeaQuest DSV and narrating Michael Bay's Armageddon, Charlton Heston last science fiction role was an uncredited cameo as a dying ape who hands a pistol to his son in this Tim Burton-directed remake. This film was so bad that I wouldn't have wanted my name in the credits either.