Clone Wars comes to theaters this August, and then hits the Cartoon Network next fall. Meanwhile, Hayden Christensen has decided the Star Wars prequels might not go at the top of his acting resume after all:

How those movies are made is very specific, as far as what our jobs are...George isn't looking for us to come in and have script meetings with him and talk about characters. It wasn't necessarily anything you could feel good about creatively, as far as "This is why I became an actor." It's not why you become an actor, to do stuff like [Star Wars].

• David (Davy throughout most of the book) is 17 when he starts teleporting, and 19 when the book ends. In the movie, he goes from age 15 at first teleport, to 25 in the blink of an eye. So much for those formative years.
• There's a lot of clumsy dialogue in the book. It was Gould's first novel, which could account for some of it, but when Davy gets asked he doesn't want to dance with a hoochie mama at a college party, his response makes us cringe: "I feel foolish. You know what you're doing out there. I feel like a clumsy jerk. The contrast is painful. I'm shallow, I guess, but I don't want everybody to know just how shallow."
• Davy may be young in the novel, but he starts dating Millie who attends college in Oklahoma pretty easily, despite their age difference. In the movie, she's a childhood friend who dates the Flash Thompson jock-type asshole. Shades of Mary Jane and Spidey.
• When he needs to kill time in the book, Davy jumps to Disney World and hops on the attractions. Star Tours is his favorite. In the movie, Davy kills time by boning bar floozies, surfing, and having lunch on the head of the Sphinx.
• In the movie, David robs a series of banks and other locations to finance his free-wheeling lifestyle, but in the book he only robs one bank, which nets him close to a million dollars. He lives fairly frugally off of it, since he has close to 800k left near the end of the book.
• David lives in a sleek highrise in the movie, but in the book he has a fairly modest apartment tucked away in a ghetto. He's put in a secret closet to hide his money, and Gould perpetually mentions his "25 inch television." We're assuming that in 1992 that was considered "big."
• In the novel, David jumps to the Stanville Library during his first couple of teleports, but Davy continually returns here throughout the novel where it serves as his "safe" place that he'll revert back to when in danger.
• There are no jumpscars or miniature sonic booms when Davy teleports in the book, unlike the movie. In fact, he doesn't make a sound at all when he leaves. Millie videotapes him doing it, and they have to slow the tape down to frame by frame to even see anything happening. At that point, you can vaguely see through him and into wherever he's going to or coming from, but only for a single frame. Having said that, the visual effects of jumping in the movie were pretty damned awesome.
• He also doesn't carry his momentum with him when he teleports in the novel. In the movie, he'd stay fairly within the laws of physics and stay in motion, but the book nullifies that. In fact, he steps off of many ledges, plummets down, and will jump away just before hitting bottom without any ill effects.
• Davy is the only jumper in the novel, whereas in the movie we're shown at least three of them. Including one with much more skill than David has.
• In the movie a group of mysterious agents called Paladins are tracking the jumpers, but in the book it's just the NSA.
• In the movie the Paladins use devices called "tethers" that utilize electrical shocks and pulses to keep a jumper pinned down. In the novel, they try tranquilizer darts and homing harpoons.
• David's swank apartment is nice in the movie, but in the book once Davy is found out, he builds a remote hideaway in a rocky fortress of solitude in Texas. It's completely walled off and looks like a part of a rock formation.
• In the book, Millie trains Davy to jump to the emergency room whenever she says "Bang," in an effort to keep him from getting seriously hurt. He has to jump whenever she says it, even if he's naked or going to the bathroom. Talk about cruel tricks being played on you by your girlriend.
• In both the novel and the movie, Davy and David record "jumpsites" by physically visiting places. They can't just look at a photo and teleport until they've actually been to the place. David in the movie prefers acres of photos, but Davy uses racks of videotapes. Novel Davy can also spot a place using binoculars, and then immediately jump there.
• Davy's mom leaves in the book, just like in the movie, but it's only to get away from Davy's abusive father. Shortly after Davy reunites with her, she's blown up by a terrorist on a hijacked flight. Davy soon devotes all of his efforts to avenging her death.
• Novel Davy is much less of a pussy then Movie David, breaking terrorist's bones and dropping them off of ledges into a pit filled with water. However, he cries at the drop of a hat. Hayden-bot probably has no tear glands.
• I cannot fucking stand the covers of mass-market movie tie in paperback books. I know the marketing department wants people to go "Oooooh! Bruce Willis is on this cover! Bruce Willis must be in this book!" and buy it, but I can't stand movie covers on my books. I bought this in the lame-o Christensen on the Sphinx cover, but then found the older copy and traded it in later. Phew. How's that for trivia?
• If you enjoyed (or think you might enjoy) the novel Jumper, then check out Fade by Robert Cormier. It's about a boy who discovers he can turn himself invisible. Sweet!

Weirdly, both properties involve Doug Liman, who directed Jumper and executive-produced Knight Rider. We just hope that in some parallel universe there's a kickass version of Knight Rider featuring Jamie Bell as the new driver, with Sam Jackson as the voice of KITT. So where do you stand?

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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.

Based on a critically-acclaimed young-adult novel by Steven Gould, the premise of Jumper is instantly intriguing. A fifteen year old geek with a shitty home life discovers one day that he can teleport out of any situation and into the stacks of his local library. Then he figures out that he teleport into a bank vault, grab several sacks of cash, and teleport back out again into a life of New York luxury apartments and gratuitous surf sequences in Fiji. He can even use his teleportation power to finally beat up the jocks in high school who call him "riceball." (Why that's supposed to be so insulting is unclear.)

All this stuff happens in the first few minutes of Jumper, and there's a fun Spider-Man-discovers-his-powers feeling to these scenes as hero David Rice (Christensen) "jumps" his way into the life every teen outcast has always wanted. The problem is that we never advance much beyond that teen dream into the satisfying payoff of seeing him do grown-up stuff like trying to protect the innocent and fight for great justice. OK, maybe that isn't exactly what all grown-ups do, but it's what a sympathetic hero does. And David doesn't, even after he's become a hunky twenty-something with money and power.

Instead he steals more cash, teleports to London to pick up a chick whom he bangs and quickly teleports away from so he can catch some surf in the morning. So here's what we've learned so far: teleportation is the ultimate fuck-em-and-chuck-em power. Things start to look up when he meets leather-clad British punk Griffin, another jumper (mercifully played by a real actor, Jamie Bell). With Griffin's help, he figures out how to jump with cars and motorcycles and drive through walls at top speed. Sadly, though these powers look awesome, they don't make him a hero either. David spends the rest of the flick acting like a petulant, entitled yuppie who cannot believe that anybody - especially Paladins - would try to stand in the way of his selfish happiness. Even when he tries to grow a soul by finding his long-lost high-school love Millie again, he shows his affection by buying her lots of crap and then treating her like same.

The main plot arc of the movie, if I may be so bold as to call it that, is that David and Griffin are fighting the Paladins who want to kill them. Apparently Roland the Main Dude Paladin (Jackson) is part of a secret group who hunt down and kill jumpers because "they always turn evil." And after watching David in action, you kind of agree with him.

That said, there really is a lot to enjoy in this movie. The jump effects are cool, though not mind-blowing, and the car chases and fight scenes are good, comic-booky fun. Bell is terrific as Griffin, a jumper who lives in an underground bunker somewhere in the remote Egyptian desert and has devoted his life to destroying the Paladins. He even calls his home a "lair." But no matter how many references to Marvel comic books the generally-superlative writer David Goyer (Blade, Batman Begins) throws into the script, you won't come away from Jumper thinking that you've seen a new superhero in the making.

Instead, you'll feel like you've been adequately entertained for a nice 90 minutes - especially if you've only paid a bargain matinee price for admission.

Jumper opens tomorrow in theaters across the United States.

In Stoppard's Jumpers, two astronauts on the moon realize they only have enough oxygen for one of them to make it back to Earth alive. One of them murders the other, claiming that because he's on the moon, Earth morality and laws don't apply. (The murdering astronaut is named after a real-life South Pole explorer who sacrificed his own life to save his fellow explorer.) The assertion that morality is relative and purely local shocks everyone, and people start murdering with abandon back on Earth. Says Dotty (a murder suspect, who swings on a big crescent moon at one point):

Man is on the moon, his footprint on solid ground, and he has seen us whole, all in one go, little, local — and all our absolutes, the thou-shalts and the thou-shalt-nots that seemed to be the very condition of our existence, how did they look to two moonmen with a single neck to save between them? Like the local customs of another place. When that thought drips through to the bottom, people won't just carry on. There is going to be such... breakage, such gnashing of unclean meats, such coveting of neighbors' oxen and knowing of neighbors' wives, such dishonorings of fathers and mothers, and bowings and scrapings to images graven and incarnate, such killing of goldfish, and maybe more — (Looks up, tear stained.) Because the truths that have been taken on trust, they've never had edges before, there was no vantage point to stand on and see where they stopped. (And weeps.)

In Jumper, meanwhile, Hayden Christensen discovers that everything is local, including human laws. He can teleport anywhere on Earth just by thinking about it, and this turns him into a hedonistic yuppie. He can rob banks with impunity, but he can also visit any vacation spot he feels like and hang out. Samuel L. Jackson's Paladins supposedly are hunting Christensen because his "jumping" damages the fabric of space and time, but that sounds like a red herring. Really, they just don't like the fact that normal human rules don't apply to Hayden. He could murder anyone, walk through the mall naked, or teleport into a baseball stadium with a dirty nuke. (In the prequel graphic novel, there's much talk about the corrupting effect of this power. Jumpers always start small, but end up going further and further because there's nothing stopping them.)

Stoppard's Jumpers is a product of the space age, and the sense that humanity was about to transcend all its old Earthbound limitations. And then we'd all be space gods, and we could rewrite all the rules to suit ourselves! Jumper, by contrast, is more a product of the globalization era. It's way easier to visit Thailand or Columbia than it was a generation ago, and you can get okay sushi in Idaho. (And some people do travel overseas to do things they'd be arrested for at home.) Compared to our grandparents, we're all jumpers. And somehow, we haven't all turned into mass-murdering goldfish destroyers. Yet.

(Note: I know that Jumper is actually based on a novel by Steven Gould. Haven't read it yet, hoping to hunt down a copy in the next few days.)

[RopeofSilicon]

Okay, we know that's probably an address reading "109" on the top of that building in the background, but it's fun for us to pretend that they decided to feature our nanotech-grown Tokyo headquarters in this new "teleport your ass everwhere" movie. We wouldn't have taken any product placement dough in return, just the ability to leap through space and leave jumpscars all over the world.

The megaversion of the above photo can be found here, or you can gather the codes and stuff that you need to jump to Tokyo on the Jumper site here.

First of all, Jumper will be visually amazing. The "scar" that teleportation leaves behind is a brilliant effect. And the battle scenes between Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson's teleporter-hating Paladin make awesome use of both the teleportation and the Paladins' grapple-hook/taser weapon.

Secondly, the dialog in the trailer is pretty blah, despite a script by David Goyer (Batman Begins). And trailers usually include the best lines from the movies they promote, so that's a bad sign.

Finally, Jumper looks set to raise all sorts of interesting questions about privilege — and then probably walk away from them. Christensen's character starts out as a nobody, but uses his power to become wealthy and shiny, and bop all over the world leaving messes for other people to clean up. So the teleportation isn't just an escapist fantasy, it's also a metaphor for social mobility in the real world. That probably comes from Steven Gould's original novel, which I haven't read yet. But it also looks pretty likely the film won't really delve into those issues much. Here's hoping I'm wrong.