Anyone who is a fan of classic video games knows the familiar story behind Asteroids . . . which is that you are a triangle, and you are shooting a series of geometric shapes. Released in 1979, the game is a perfect example of extremely early and crude computer graphics. And seriously, there was no effort made whatsoever to have a story. Why were you shooting the asteroids? Were they controlled by aliens? Were you trying to break them up so you could mine them for nickel in their cores? It was all an 8-bit mystery.

That's why the story that four studios had a bidding war for the rights to Asteroid seems like it should run in The Onion rather than The Hollywood Reporter. But is is all true.

The movie will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the mastermind behind GI Joe. It is to be written by Matthew Lopez, whose main claim to fame is that he worked on the script for Race to Witch Mountain. He's also done work on the forthcoming flick The Sorcerer's Apprentice. So will this be a kid-friendly film about triangles and blobs, or more violent adult fare? Hard to say.

Obviously, Lopez will be developing this story from scratch. Hollywood Reporter notes:

Universal . . . is used to that development process, as it's in the middle of doing just that for several of the Hasbro board game properties it is translating to the big screen, such as "Battleship" and "Candyland."

Couldn't they just combine Battleship with Asteroids so we could have a plotless tale of shooting that spanned skies and sea? Doesn't that sound awesome?

via Hollywood Reporter

When reviewers (including yours truly at io9) received their screener DVDs of tonight's episode, they also got a note from SciFi Channel explaining "with all due respect" that a "sensitive reveal" had been excised from our review copies. We were asked to review the episode without seeing the entire finished product. While it's normal for studios to send out early screener copies that lack special effects or some sound editing, sending out an incomplete version of an episode to stop spoilers is extremely rare. (UPDATE: This isn't as rare as I originally believed - apparently several studios have sent out incomplete screeners to critics for key episodes in series such as Doctor Who, ER, and for shows winning contestants.)

Obviously the message was that SciFi couldn't trust reviewers to keep secrets to themselves. Or they were worried the excised scene was so lame that they didn't want to risk bad reviews. Either way, the official story was that this weird move was merely a pragmatic precaution. Reps explained that removing the "sensitive" scene was:

an extra precautionary measure to protect the content in the event that this package should become lost or unintentionally delivered to and viewed by someone other than the intended.

Um, what? Are we on orange alert?

A lot of critics noticed the weirdness, and commented. The Los Angeles Times' Mary McNamara mourned the omission of the scene, and the New York Times' Mike Hale grumbled about all the "things you can't know" about Battlestar. Even the Pioneer Press in Minnesota complained about not getting to see the crucial scene. And the Boston Herald's Mark Perigard tried to be nice about it by patiently explaining that as a reviewer he wouldn't want to spoil the ending - but that without seeing it, he basically can't review the whole episode with confidence.

I've been reviewing movies and television now for almost a decade, and I've never been asked to review an incomplete product. Sure, I've been told I can't view a flick until the night before the release, and sometimes studios decline to screen stuff for critics at all (usually a very bad sign). But when you get a review screener, or go to a critic's showing, the studio gives full, unedited access so you can make an honest evaluation of their creation.

I understand why SciFi is worried about spoilers. It sucks when people reveal your "sensitive reveal," but that's a risk whether or not you let critics do their jobs properly. Most leaks come from within studios themselves, not from outsiders who are accidentally delivered a screener DVD. And not from reviewers.

Which leads me back to a point I made earlier, which is that when studios don't want to screen something for critics, it usually doesn't bode well. I really liked what I got to see of tonight's episode, but it looks like we should brace ourselves for a disappointing final cylon.

The Black List, a list of the year's best unproduced movie screenplays based on a poll of 250 film execs, is a fascinating look inside the movie companies' massive slush pile. Every year about this time, a list of dozens of scripts, with tantalizing descriptions, comes out. To get on the list, a script must have won praise from at least four execs.

The most popular unproduced script this year isn't science fiction — I think. It's called The Beaver written by Kyle Killen, and it's a film about a depressed man who gets hope from a beaver puppet on his hand.

Then there's this, which actually has been made into a 2009 film starring Milla Jovovich:

THE FOURTH KIND by Olatunde Osunsanmi. "A fact-based thriller involving an ongoing unsolved mystery in Alaska, where one town has seen an extraordinary number of unexplained disappearances during the past 40 years and there are accusations of a federal cover-up. Milla plays a woman investigating the disappearances in the town."

That screenplay won 11 mentions from execs.

Nine execs thought this seemed like a great movie (and I agree):

JONNY QUEST by Dan Mazeau
“Young Jonny Quest travels the world with his scientist father, adopted brother from India, Bandit the bulldog, and a government agent assigned to protect them while they investigate scientific mysteries.”

Eight execs were as eager to see this Brian K. Vaughan project as I am:

ROUNDTABLE by Brian K Vaughan
“In modern day, Merlin attempts to assemble a bunch of knights to battle an ancient evil.”

Five execs were intrigued by this weird-sounding project:

WHAT WOULD KENNY DO? by Chris Baldi
“A seventeen-year-old high school kid meets a ‘hologram’ of himself at thirty-seven-years-old and benefits from their friendship.”

Four execs were stoked about this project, which we've already blogged about:

BOBISM by Ben Wexler
“A shy college student discovers that life in one thousand years will be based on his blog — and he has to stop aliens from the future who want him dead.”

And four execs were thrilled by this one:

THE HOW-TO GUIDE FOR SAVING THE WORLD by BenDavid Grabinski
“A loser discovers a book on how to stop an alien invasion and is thrust into action to stop a real one.”

[NYMag.com]

SAG members have in fact been working under the terms of an expired contract since June, when the AMPTP made them a "final offer" they didn't accept. A federal mediator stepped in, attempting to repair the damage and restart talks for a new contract, but yesterday's announcement represents the failure of that plan. According to the SAG statement, discussions reached a breaking point at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, so it's a pretty good bet that tensions were high.

Management continues to insist on terms we cannot responsibly accept on behalf of our members. As previously authorized by the National Board of Directors, we will now launch a full-scale education campaign in support of a strike authorization referendum. We will further inform SAG members about the core, critical issues unique to actors that remain in dispute.

We have already made difficult decisions and sacrifices in an attempt to reach agreement. Now it's time for SAG members to stand united and empower the national negotiating committee to bargain with the strength of a possible work stoppage behind them.

In the current weakened economy, "the strength of a possible work stoppage" certainly carries with it no small amount of dread. To approve a strike, SAG will need a yes vote from 75 percent of its 120,000 members, and it's anyone's guess how that will go. Once again, the dispute is payment and union coverage for internet broadcasts of shows; SAG is seeking a better deal than the so-so ones garnered by the WGA and other Hollywood unions, but the AMPTP won't budge. Though SAG has not yet revealed when they will be sending out strike authorization ballots, it's clear that we are steamrollering toward that point. It doesn't seem like anybody is looking forward to a repeat of the writers' strike, or the Hundred Days of Sadness that had me watching Daily Show reruns.

Then again, some good did come out of the writers' strike as far as the viewing public is concerned: Without the buildup of Joss Whedon's frustrated creative energy, we wouldn't have Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. To be honest, though, I'd rather have Dollhouse — and a full slate of other new movies and TV besides, with crews and casts being paid what they deserve.

Hollywood actors guild to seek strike [via MSNBC, Associated Press]
Important Message Regarding Mediation [Screen Actors Guild]

Tomorrow, the group is holding a meeting in Los Angeles that sounds terrific, with lessons from top researchers on everything from plagues and climate change to robots and space travel. We can only hope that Jerry Bruckheimer is on the exclusive invite list. The group is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, which is a very good sign that we can look forward to a day when I'll be able to refer to the "scientific entertainment complex." Cannot wait.

Science and Entertainment Exchange [official site]

The city contained:

Lofty office buildings 250 stories high, canals carried overhead on suspension cables, airplanes that land on a few square feet of flat space on the side of tall structures, streets with nine lanes and nine levels of traffic . . . Although the model city is futuristic, its construction violates no engineering practices. It is really engineering skill carried a bit farther than today.

New York, 1980: airplanes have replaced cars, numbers have replaced names, pills have replaced food, government-arranged marriages have replaced love, and test tube babies have replaced ... well, you get the idea. Scientists revive a man struck by lightning in 1930; he is rechristened "Single O". He is befriended by J-21, who can't marry the girl of his dreams because he isn't "distinguished" enough — until he is chosen for a 4-month expedition to Mars by a renegade scientist. The Mars J-21, his friend, and stowaway Single O visit is full of scantily clad women doing Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers and worshiping a fat middle-aged man. (Jon Reeves, IMDB)

[Modern Mechanix]

But even though we all have twenty nine brains and a stomach that speaks Swahili, we shouldn't condemn Hollywood without considering the evidence. Here's the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Hollywood's unseemly hatred towards mutants.

Just consider the wealth of movies and TV shows about people who start spontaneously converting into something beyond their original human design, thanks to a genetic change or exposure to strange substances. Like the vicious ex-humans in Night Shadows aka Mutant, who terrorize a small Southern town. "Mankind's deadliest threat will not come from the skies," it proclaims.

There are also terrifying mutants in Hell Comes To Frogtown and a number of other movies. And on shows like Star Trek, whenever a character (usually a dweeb like Lt. Barclay on Next Gen) starts developing a super-mind — or evolving into a super-lizard — it's always portrayed as a bad thing.) Not to mention the murderous disease-altered mutants of movies such as 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, Omega Man and many others. (These aren't as well known as Night Shadows, of course, but they still have an impact on our mutant-hating culture.)
Counter-examples: Comic books come to our rescue. Mutants come off quite well in shows like Heroes and movies like the X-Men trilogy, which are either based on comic books or obviously derivative of them. Obviously, we should be using our superior posthuman intellects to boost the comic-book industry.

2. Why does Hollywood persecute cyborgs?

Again with the Star Trek hate: Trek gives us the Borg, who are the most hurtful representations of cyborgs imaginable. My friend Zzarglboz had to hide his swizzle-shaped head implants on the street for a year after First Contact came out.
They're like Frankenstein, only cyber! (And actually, some of our posthuman friends are partially dead, and the Frankenstein story is very unfair to them.) In the original Robocop, being turned into a cyborg makes Officer Murphy into a heartless killing machine. And for some reason, regaining his "humanity" is seen as a good thing. Says Cyberpunk Review:

As Murphy begins to realize who he was, and worse, what he's become, the question asked is what degree of Murphy's humanity remains? Murphy's partner, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen) serves to surface these concerns, as she still thinks that Murphy is inside somewhere. Yet, every aspect of humanity has been taken away from Robocop - he doesn't have a home, but instead returns to a borg-like podchair at night to regenerate. Even if Robocop eventually considers himself human in some sense, it's no longer clear what that even means. At best, Robocop is part of that strange category we call "post-human."

3. Hollywood hates it when we merge with aliens.

In movies and TV, alien creatures that want to merge with poor ordinary humans and uplift them to a higher level of consciousness and ability are never "benefactors." They're always "parasites," or at best "symbiotes." For once, comic-book movie aren't even our friend, either — Spider-Man gets an awesome boost from the inky black creature in Spider-Man 3, but it's still portrayed as a terrible thing. Even though it makes his hair so much better! Plus in The Invasion, the alien "parasites" are horrible and awful, even though they clearly make Daniel Craig the most James Bond-esque he's ever been. The same goes for The Puppet Masters. And it's hard to find happy representations of people inter-breeding with aliens, either — it's always nasty and fatal, like in the Alien films or the Species films. When everybody knows that in real life, merging or interbreeding with aliens often works out great. (It's just like marriage, though — don't get hitched until you try living together for a while first.)
Counter-examples: Star Trek has one of the few I can think of, with its happy Trills, the symbiotes that make Dax and the other spotted-neck people all cheerful and ageless with the wisdom and the cute "old man" nicknames.

4. Movies and TV spread the hate against genetic engineering.

Just look at this hall of shame of genetic engineering movies and TV shows. You have your GATTACA, where genetic engineering upgrades the human race, but poor Ethan Hawke gets discriminated against because he's genetically inferior. (Which anybody who saw Reality Bites already knew.) And then there's the dark future world of Dark Angel, where people practice genetic engineering on humans, including the super-killer main character. And of course the aliens in the X-Files are practicing genetic engineering on humans. Not to mention, TV shows are always full of genetically advanced superhumans — including Khan's superior people in Star Trek and the subtly named Nietzscheans in Andromeda — who are all evil and intent on conquering everybody else. And in the forthcoming movie Splicers (or Splice), Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley create a scary-sexy human-animal chimera that turns out to be too much to handle. Why, oh why, can't movies and television ever celebrate the specialness of our genetically hacked brothers and sisters?
Counter-examples: Star Trek is the frenemy of the genetically upwardly mobile. On the one hand, there's Khan's gang and their whole Ceti-Alpha-Two keeping it real craziness. On the other, Trek does offer us Deep Space Nine's doctor Julian Bashir, who's a bit smug and obnoxious but otherwise a pretty decent upgraded human. So we'll call it even.

What can you do to stop the posthuman hate?

1. If you have mental powers as a result of mutation or some kind of alien implant, then use them on the producers and "suits" in Hollywood. Maybe if the blood vessels on their foreheads start swelling to the size of cantaloupes and everything tastes like bad salmon to them, they'll rethink their anti-posthuman prejudice. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the posthuman revolution happens, and then all of the regular humans will be tasped encouraged to treat us more fairly.

2. Support books. Books have been way more favorable to those of us who have moved beyond our human limitations. We'll have a post tomorrow detailing the pro-posthuman books that you as an aspiring posthuman, should read and support.

Top image adapted from photo by Lampeduza.

At only a $79 million dollar budget, a major studio could just buy this project out and turn it into a shot at box office gold. In the Hollywood version, the spacecraft would wake up a dormant alien being, long buried underneath the lunar surface, or they'd start a chain reaction that would cause the moon to break up into a billion pieces, which would begin raining down on the Earth. Then NASA would have to hire a maverick space jockey — Eric Bana? — to either deal with the alien menace, or the falling debris.

Or what if the moon turned out to be a deep space probe that's been orbiting the planet for eons? Silently biding its time. Then, a rude awakening comes in the form of us crashing things into it and the bot pilots running the probe try to send down big guns to mete out some stellar justice. It feels like the start of a bad Dimension Films plot, we know. But, there's probably a good idea buried in there somewhere. Just as long as it doesn't dislodge the moon from orbit and force us to watch the only good scene in The Time Machine again.

NASA Takes Aim at Moon with Double Sledgehammer [Yahoo News]

Image from the 1902 George Méliès film A Trip To The Moon.

These crimfighters have their own MySpace pages, an online costume shop that builds their custom wear (whatever happened to people sewing it themselves, like Spidey did?), and are seriously into the gig, including the long hours of doing nothing. Like "Superhero" who patrols the highways of Florida in his 1975 Corvette, ""What I do is 80% boredom punctuated by 15% helping and 5% terror."

So you've got your crazy characters who try to fight crime on their own, deluded by the existence of comic books and heroes in the movies. Give them sort sort of baddie to go up against, like the couple who were inspired to become criminals by their goth books, have them go toe to toe. In the end, someone learns a heartwarming lesson about life, and that everyone is a hero on the inside, yadda yadda yadda, and bang, there's your movie.

Actually, we're surprised none of these people have ended up dead in an alley somewhere and splashed on the local news. Then the studios and comic book publisher could just brace themselves for the slew of lawsuits that would inevitably pop up with people saying, "Gee, Batman did it in a movie, so I copied him and lost my arm in the process! You owe me a million bucks!" So beat 'em to the punch already, Hollywood. Put them in your movie.

"Real" Villains In Need of A "Real" Superhero [Hardcore Math User]

Actually, The Brave One did way better than Kevin Bacon's competing revenge flick Death Sentence. Maybe the problem is with War-On-Terror gun porno?

You can spend hours dissecting Robinov's idiocy, but the fact is it's bad for science fiction. As Slashfilm points out, the danger is that we'll end up with characters like Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four movies, who's a bride and not much else. Science fiction needs well-rounded, interesting women in challenging situations — not just mindless fluffers for the male hero.

Warner Bros. Says "No More Female Lead Characters" [Slashfilm]