(Note: some of these scenes contain spoilers and / or some serious violence. Beware!)

Serenity

Serenity is Joss Whedon's sort-of-final-chapter for his much beloved television series, Firefly. But it's also a stand-alone story, offering any new viewers a chance to discover the crew and the world of the show anew. And what better way to throw a new audience into the world than a wandering tour of Serenity herself. In the opening shot of the movie, Whedon uses a long-take to fully draw us into his world. You can watch the first minute and a half of the six minute masterpiece here.

X-Files - Triangle

In this episode of the X Files, most of the on-screen action is depicted in a series of long takes and uncut sequences. There are some edits, but they are disguised to make the whole episode feel seamless. And the effect is pretty impressive.

Oldboy

It's not strictly sci-fi, but the action-filled, vengeance-fueled martial arts epic, Oldboy, has garnered a lot of praise for its unflinching take on violence and anger. That's pretty evident in this fight scene. It includes a hallway, a giant gang, and an enraged man with a hammer. And it's visceral impact is heightened by the fact that it all takes place in one seamless take.

Children of Men

Children of Men is a movie that relies on the long single take for a couple of breathtaking scenes, including the particularly moving one from which the picture above comes. But the one that is most impressive is the roadway assault scene. Watching it, its brilliance isn't immediately clear. It's not until you realize that there's no way a camera could fit inside the car that you realize the casual scene took enormous innovation and patience to pull off.

Contact

The introduction to Contact serves as a quick reminder that the universe could be an empty place that is entirely indifferent to humanity. It's almost like a counterpoint to the rest of the story that follows. And it's accomplished with a tracking "shot." It's technically a visual effect, but the purpose is clear, and it's accomplished relatively seamlessly.

Battlestar Galactica

As with Serenity, Battlestar Galactica needed to find a way to draw in the audience and show them the characters and the world they would be a part of for the rest of the series. In one of the earliest scenes in the miniseries, we get just that: a long tracking shot through the interior of the ship, showing us most of the important players of the rest of the series. A fitting beginning to a show that aimed to do things with space opera that were as-yet untried.

Cloverfield

Cloverfield's main conceit was that it was found footage, mostly untouched, from one long night of filming. As a result, most of the film is meant to look like a one-take sequence. You could choose any sequence from the movie, but this one is particularly terrifying, since being confined to one point of view makes the danger seem even more close and real.

Shaun of the Dead

The beauty of the long take in Shaun of the Dead is not the artistry of the camera movement or its length. It's that the same tracking shot was done twice, once before the zombie outbreak and once after. At the :40 mark in this video, you can see the two takes intercut with each other, showing just how carefully the two scenes were constructed.

This list is by no means exhaustive. What are your favorite long-takes in sci-fi cinema in television? Did we forget any greats?

BSG wouldn't have been nearly as epic if it hadn't included spiritual themes from the beginning. The inclusion of religious elements added a way bigger scope and grandeur to the story of humanity's last remnants struggling to survive - and it was realistic, since you'd expect people to be asking the big theological questions in that situation.

In general, religion and spiritual topics are a huge part of science fiction - if you're really determined to avoid them altogether, you're probably stuck with a few golden age novels, and a handful of Lost In Space reruns. But just like other science fiction elements, like first contact, time travel and space battles, science fictional religion can be done well - or it can be cheesy and weird.

Here are seven mistakes science fiction sometimes makes in handling religion (and I freely admit I was influenced to think about this by all the comments on Annalee's final BSG recap and some of our other posts):

1. The cargo cult. Yes, I know, the gods really must be crazy. But I'm really sick of stories about primitive peoples who discover high technology and start worshipping it. Or the descendants of high-tech people, who have become primitive and started worshipping their ancestors' technology. Like the Ewoks worshipping C-3PO, or the desert people worshipping the spacesuit in Doctor Who's "Planet Of Fire." There's usually an undertone of "See? This proves religion is teh stupid." Also horrible: robots worshipping the people who made them, or aliens worshipping humans. Or aliens worshipping Ferengi.


2. The cheap Jesus. There's nothing wrong with having a messianic figure in your science fiction - I'm not trying to take all the fun out of everything here - but don't just pull the Jesus imagery out of thin air and expect it to mean something. Yes, I'm looking at you, crucified Neo. And I'm looking at you, Jesus H. Baltar. (And even though I love the ending of Doctor Who's "Last Of The Time Lords," I'm also looking at you, floaty cruciform Doctor.) The indispensible TVTropes website has a great list of "random religious symbolism tossed in for no reason" moments.

3. The dumb space gods. Whenever we actually meet a god or gods in science fiction, it's almost always a letdown. (There are exceptions - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine managed to have our heroes meet the timeless Prophets inside the wormhole, without ever losing their mystique.) Usually, though, when we meet a god or a godlike alien, it's a cheesy old guy with a funny beard. Or it's Jodie Foster's condescending dad.

4. The all-purpose patch for lazy writing. And here's where I really took issue with BSG's finale: the Starbuck thing. Battlestar's writers pretty much admitted that they killed Starbuck for shock value, and then they decided at the last moment to bring her back in the third season finale, because they thought it would be cool. They didn't even think about how to explain her resurrection, until they started writing season four. And in the
end... they punted. And it felt like religion was the paper they used to cover it up. (Before Starbuck jumps the ship to the new Earth, we see a voice-over of her asking, once again, what she is. And the answer appears to be: an angel of light.) BSG is by no means alone in this - there are already strong indications that Lost is going to use the "spirituality" card to get out of some of the logical tangles the story has gotten into.

5. Simplistic religion vs. science battles. As anybody who's spent any time in the real world knows, religion and science mostly coexist reasonably well, unless you're Amish or Richard Dawkins. But in some especially cheesy science fiction, every day is Galileo-vs.-the-church day. Sometimes this takes the form of the one guy who dares to realize the world is hollow or god is really a crazy computer. The absolute clunkiest instance of this is in Doctor Who's "Meglos," where the incredibly one-dimensional subterranean culture on Tigella is divided into two groups, the incredibly bad-haired Savants, who believe in Science, and the incredibly ugly head-geared Deions, who believe in Religion. Whenever the planet's "lush aggressive vegetation" gets to them, they get together and argue about whether Science or Religion has all the answers.

6. Simplistic science-bashing in the name of religion. There's only one thing more annoying that a straw-man-tastic debate between Science and Religion, and that's an anti-science message that uses religion as its mouthpiece. And here's the other place BSG's finale really bothered me. When we see the colonists giving up modern technology and medicine, on the heels of an apparently divine intervention that brought them to a new Eden, it's not hard to see that as a weird anti-science bias. Yes, in the New York scene at the end, AngelBaltar and AngelSix say that it's only our vanity and greed with technology that are wrong, but by this point we've been bludgeoned with a weird back-to-nature theme for 45 minutes.

7. New-agey-ness. Really, I can put up with space gods, or people worshipping technology, or science/religion battles... but I just can't handle Enya. Or crystals. Or Native American Visionquests. Or Deepak Chopra. Or any kind of Bastardized Indian/African "spirituality" which has been cleansed of actual cultural context or real religious significance. Yes, I'm looking at you, Usutu from Heroes. If I need to cleanse my aura, I'll eat some bran.

Bebo sponsored a competition to collect 501 photos, drawings, and text messages from its users and had those message transmitted from the RT-70 radar telescope in Evpatoria, Ukraine. But, despite shelling out $40,000 for the transmission, Bebo’s primary interest is not in making first contact:

Bebo's intent was to raise awareness for the concerns that young people have for the future of Earth, and to generate interest in space exploration. Bebo spokesman Mark Charkin said, "A 'Message From Earth' presents an opportunity for the digital natives of today… to reconnect with science and the wider universe in a simple, fun and immersive way."

On the other hand, Dr. Alexander Zaitsev of the Russian Academy of Science, who acted as Bebo’s consultant on the project, believes that these proactive attempts at contact, may be the only way we’ll find other life in the universe:

In his paper "Making the Case for METI [Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence]," Zaitsev and two colleagues wrote, "It is possible we live in a galaxy where everyone is listening and no one is speaking. In order to learn of each others' existence - and science - someone has to make the first move."

Gliese 581c is approximately 20 light years away from Earth, meaning it will be over 40 years before we find out if any lifeforms there want to be Bebo’s friend.

Messages From Earth Beamed to Alien World [Universe Today]

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.

The Organians (Star Trek.) Okay, so Trek is chock full of annoying space gods, from Squire Trelaine all the way up to Q. But the Organians are the worst. For one thing, they're totally passive-aggressive. They're like, "Oh, hurt us, we like it." And then when you get too feisty, they turn around and burn your hands off. And they literally wear tunics and have crappy beards. But worst of all, they're gods with ADD. It's like, "We forbid you and the Klingons to fight ever again. We're going to be WATCHING y— hey, is that a quarter? It was shiny! I think it rolled that way. Where did it go?" And then you never see them again, except for one prequel appearance on Enterprise.

The Guardians (Doctor Who.) They're color-coded deities with birds on their heads: the white one's good and the black one's evil. And they send the Doctor on the wackest quest in history, then come back and pester him. They keep changing the birds on their heads, so the Doctor can't tell which one is good and which one is evil. Oh, and they're all-powerful, but they can't intervene, so they have to recruit cowl-headed skull guys, schoolboys and pantomime pirates to help them. Lame. Here's the Black Guardian, pimpin:

The New Gods (DC Comics.) Yeah, I know, Jack Kirby invented paper, and he is the comix god. But the New Gods weren't among his better ideas. They're a weird fusion of superheroes and mysticism, with a healthy dose of 70s hippie stuff thrown in. You have the evil leader, named Darkseid (pronounced "dark side," I think) and the good leader, named Highfather. Death is personified by a shadowy guy on skiis named the Dark Racer. Everybody faces the "camera" and makes lots of weird speeches about good and evil and the Source Wall and the Anti-Life Equation. It's demented in a good way, but also a little too spiritual for that type of comic-book silliness.

The Hybrid (Battlestar Galactica: Razor.) The echo-y voice, the weird pretentious mutterings about "my children," the mystical-ish mutterings about the apocalypse and how all this has happened before and will happen again. Basically, he fell asleep in the bath and totally lost track of his sponge. In general, there are wayyy too many prophecies on Battlestar. My eyes glaze over any time someone mentions the Scrolls of Pythia or the bathroom graffiti of Hermes or whatever.

The pilots (Dune). Okay, so the idea that drinking worm barf could mutate you into a being who controls space and time is kind of silly. But are they gods? Let's ask famous SF author Norman Spinrad. Here's what he says intro to Dune:

Paul Atreides passes through these three ascending stages on his way to finally employing the drug to achieve the ultimate level, to become the Kwisatz Haderach, the fully Enlightened One, able to view the conventional realm of space and time from the outside, as Einsteinian four-space, a consciousness rendered therefore prescient up to a point, an Enlightenment that turns out to be both a godlike power and a tragic curse.

Jodie Foster's daddy (Contact). Jodie Foster zooms through a beautiful sweaty wormhole and then finds herself in the midst of a lovely, lovely, lovely, gorgeous nebula thingy that makes her go on an ecstasy trip. And then she's floats down onto a beach, in a mid-air fetal position. And then her dad shows up, wearing a really dorky dungaree-type outfit, and gets all condescending, with the "that's my scientist" crap when she asks questions. It gets really sense-of-wonder-y until you feel like you're getting a marshmellow enema, and the god-daddy gives a speech about how amazing humans are, withour beautiful dreams and our icky nightmares. "In all our searching the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." Barf!!!! And then he condescends some more, when she tries to talk sense to his new-age crap. You can see why Penn Jilette hated this movie. Oh, and here's a pukey clip:

The obelisk dudes (2001: A Space Odyssey). An alien monolith comes to Earth during prehistoric times and helps the apes to evolve intelligence. Later, at the turn of the millennium, Dave encounters another obelisk orbiting Jupiter, and goes on a trippy-ass journey to a whole seven-ages-of-man diorama, until he turns into a super-fetus in space. It's zoomy and spiritual, and leaves you with a whole guided-by-divine-ish-beings feeling.

Burg has worked as a concept artist, storyboarder, and matte painter on everything from Buckaroo Banzai to Robot Jox, and has also worked with sci directors like Robert Zemeckis on Contact, and Paul Verhoeven on Starship Troopers. In fact, given that we're going into a Terminator-laden weekend, it's only fitting that he also worked on Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and the T2:3D theme park film.

Burg frequently puts sketches and computer artwork up on his blog for people to check out, and of this spaceport picture he had this to say:

I wanted to capture the feeling of a busy port at dawn, with numerous craft of different shapes and sizes coming and going. The enormous cubes — at least in my mind — contain portals that enable inter-dimensional travel to other worlds. Large ships circle the area, waiting for clearance from traffic control to proceed to their destinations — much like jumbo jets at a modern airport.

Famous names: Jodie Foster John Hurt Matthew MacConaughey Carl Sagan Tom Skerrit

Crunchy goodness: 3

Elevator pitch: Close Encounters of the Third Kind with more math and fewer French people.

Life lesson: Never let Jake Busey near anything expensive.

Deadliest spoiler: Turns out the alien was just her dad.

Contact: Official Site