MTV managed to ask Cameron about reports that he and veteran screenwriter Salermo were collaborating on a new film, and he explained that it's not Salermo's Kurosawa-themed unproduced screenplay Doomsday Protocol. Rather, Cameron is producing a Salermo-scripted remake of Fantastic Voyage, in which a team of scientists shrinks themselves and goes inside an assassinated diplomat, on the brink of death, to perform emergency surgery on a blood clot in his brain.

As MTV points out, this remake could have way better special effects than the original — although Raquel Welch surely counts as a special effect. And also the improved special effects could be a double-edged sword, since the temptation to focus on cool animations of leukocytes instead of actual story could be pretty overwhelming. Plus, it couldn't possibly be as great as these gems:

Innerspace is a strong contender for Dennis Quaid's most bizarre SF movie of all time, although it has plenty of competition. After Quaid is injected into Short, he manages to hook himself up to Short's optic nerve and his eardrum, so he can see and hear what Short sees and hears — and he can somehow talk to Short as well. This allows Quaid to give Short advice on how to "dominate" Meg Ryan — which apparently worked well enough that Quaid and Ryan were married soon afterwards.

The other greatest sequence involves Robert Picardo, the holographic doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, playing an immensely hairy Eastern European fence called The Cowboy, who disco dances in cowboy boots (and sometimes not much else.) Short gets the drop on Picardo and ties him up in the bathtub, then Quaid somehow uses his miniature gizmos to convert Short's face into Picardo's. You know it makes sense.

At least, it makes more sense than a guy who's one molecule thick being able to drink normal-sized liquor, as Roger Ebert gleefully points out.

Luckily, molecules that can crawl already exist in nature. Kinesin, for example, is a protein that crawls along microtubules in our cells - hitch a bit of cellular cargo to it, and it'll go along for the ride.

Molecules with "legs" made of DNA can be coaxed into a vaguely similar "walk" on a surface also composed of DNA, while less biological variations could be useful in the computing industry. There are a number of molecular motors that can convert chemical or light energy into motion - getting useful work out of that motion, however, can be tricky.

Not all tiny robots are nano, of course. Dartmouth's "inchworm" is relatively huge at over a hundred microns in length, and this six-legged crab-bot is even larger - the chassis is made of polymer with an engine composed of rat heart tissue. When the tissue contracts, it provides power to crawl the 'bot at about 0.002 miles per hour. Not bad for a ride less than a millimeter long.

When nature provides a convenient source of motility, like heart tissue or bacterial gliding, harnessing it can be a lot easier than building a molecular machine from scratch. The micromotor below harnesses bacteria to turn its rotors.

The bacteria move from the center of A into the channels. When they meet the circle at the end (B, C) , they tend to be going in one direction (D). The rotor (E, F) fits into the circle and is coated with sialic protein which the bacteria stick to and push. It's like the beginning of Conan: The Barbarian, except microscopic, and with better acting.

While true nanobots would have to be even smaller than the crab or this rotor, they do show an interest in producing useful locomotion in increasingly smaller packages. Besides, to produce a useful bot may require a collection of various nanoscale parts that assembled together produce a larger-than-nanoscale 'bot.

If you can't crawl, you're going to have to swim. Again, nature is ahead of us with the flagellum - basically, a propeller for microbes.

The adaptability and motility of these bacteria are a few of the reasons why researchers are using them as inspiration for their own devices and working to modify them to deliver drugs to cancer cells, and perhaps heart disease follow. If it's not bacterial in origin, don't be surprised if the world's first medical nanobot is sperm-propelled.

Building nanoscale machines from scratch that can swim is harder than it sounds (and it ought to sound pretty hard). For one thing, our physical intuition about swimming breaks down at the nanoscale. If you were to shrink, Fantastic Voyage-style and find yourself swimming in water, you'd think the water had turned into a highly viscous liquid like molasses. This has to do with the dynamics of fluids at different length scales, as E.M. Purcell discussed in his Life at Low Reynold's Number talk. Simply shrinking a design that swims well at the macroscale is no guarantee that it'll zoom along at the micro- or nanoscale.

Once you have a nanoswimmer or nanocrawler (or have appropriated one from nature), you're going to have to figure out how to guide it towards your target and either release its payload or do whatever repairs need to be done. As far as heart disease is concerned, it's going to be a race between the nanobots and extensive genetic tinkering to prevent the problem in the first place.

A new Predator movie, with or without a post-governorship Arnold Schwarzenegger? Why not. A new Fantastic Voyage remake? In development. (And it won't be as campy as the original, he promises.) A sequel to Hitman? Maybe. A new Die Hard movie? "Never say never." A third X-Files movie, in spite of the second one's poor showing? It's entirely up to Chris Carter. A stand-alone Silver Surfer movie, building on Fantastic Four 2? It's in the pipeline. Independence Day 2? If Roland Emmerich wants to do it, Fox is on board.

And, as previously reported, Rothman also told IESB he's already thinking of Avatar in terms of "franchise potential," so we could be seeing Avatar 2 or 3, directed by someone else, in a few years. And then there's the Daredevil reboot, which is "something we are thinking very seriously about."

To be fair, at least half of the above-listed projects are probably just being tossed around or just not being "ruled out." But if even half those films get made, and other studios think the same way, our current deluge of contempt-breeding familiarity could look like a trickle by comparison. [IESB]

When I started putting this poll together, I was shocked by how many remakes are currently on the slate. Some of them are more definite than others: Jason Statham in Death Race, Brendan Fraser in Journey to the Center of the Earth and Keanu Reeves in The Day The Earth Stood Still are definitely happening. (Oh, and Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost.)

Less definite: Gerard Butler is supposed to be starring in the remake of Escape From New York, with a director TBA, but some reports say Butler has pulled out. (Butler himself said recently he's still considering doing it.) Peter Berg's Dune is in the early stages, and so is Roland Emmerich's Fantastic Voyage. Robert Rodriguez's Barbarella is in limbo, but he's still trying to get it made with Rose McGowan.

Even less definite: The remakes of Logan's Run and Metropolis seemed so uncertain, I left them out of the poll. Oh, and I forgot to include The Greatest American Hero and Scanners, which are also in the early planning stages, in the poll.

I started to make a joke along the lines of, "next they'll remake Westworld or something," only to realize a Westworld remake is also in the planning stages.

So leaving out the super-iffy Westworld, Greatest American, Scanners, Logan's Run and Metropolis, there are still a lot of forthcoming remakes to choose from. Which one fills you with the most revulsion?

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