Gould wrote the young adult novel Jumper way back in 1992. He penned the sequel book Reflex in 2004 and also wrote the movie's tie-in novel Jumper: Griffin's Story. Although he was involved in the original movie's production, director Doug Liman changed the story drastically, deliberately removing all the sympathetic aspects of the protagonist David Rice (Hayden Christensen) to subvert the superhero concept more fully (oh, so that's what he was trying to do).

Though the movie failed to make back its $85 million budget domestically, it made well over $220 million worldwide, enough to warrant sequel talk. Liman has previously stated that he would want to use Reflex as the source material for the second film, focusing on expanding the Jumpers' teleportation powers. The book also focuses on Rice's girlfriend Millie, played by Rachel Bilson in the original film, gaining the ability to jump. Liman also mentioned he wanted to include new abilities like jumping to other planets and traveling through time.

In an interview yesterday, Gould updated what was going on with the sequel, noting what the director is honing in on from the source material:

Liman has expressed a particular interest in an unspecified moment in the sequel Reflex, and I suspect it's this twinning thing that Davy does, where he's jumping to a place and back and forth to the point where he's in both places at once, and a hole opens connecting the two places. So when he's chained to a wall, he jumps back and forth to the ocean and all this water floods out of the hole. If ever there was a cinematic moment, that's it. And then there's this thing from Reflex where you have a very shadow-y Illuminati sort of government agency and they very much want to control jumpers. And that organization showed up in the scripts, but they ended up having to cut it because of budget. So that thread might show up.

OK, I'll admit it - that sounds kind of cool. Utterly nonsensical, but cool. Still, we're talking about the sequel to Jumper here. I'd say cool but nonsensical is a pretty decent level to shoot for.

Meanwhile, Gould also teased his next two books: an adult novel about a terrorist attack using bugs that eat anything metal but leave organic matter untouched - unless you try to destroy them, in which case they turn really nasty. And then he's working on a third Jumper novel (or fourth, if you count Griffin's Story), about Davy and Millie trying to have children.

[AMC Blogs]

Okay, so here are the movies that blew us away and horrified us this year:

BEST:

10. Let The Right One In. This intense, beautiful Swedish movie about a 12-year-old boy's relationship with a vampire did the near-impossible: it almost made us forget the blah Twilight. It's a parable of the world-destroying power of adolescence, that stays with you long afterwards.

9. Teeth. This year saw a boomlet in feminist horror movies, between this film and Zombie Strippers. But the raw satire of vagina-dentata movie Teeth was sharper, and the story of how Dawn comes to realize her toothy mutant pussy is a superpower rather than a curse is a beautiful spin on adolescence.

8. Speed Racer. Pretty much everyone hates this movie except us — Entertainment Weekly listed it twice on its year's worst lists, even as the mag praised the bland Benjamin Button. But we really did love this film, for its crazy, surreal CG vistas and fun follow-your-heart storyline. Racer was the last thing you'd expect from the Wachowskis: a film about family values, in which Speed learns that love for family trumps everything else. (And Susan Sarandon and John Goodman, as Speed's parents, pretty much run away with the film.) This movie is a cult classic waiting to happen.

7. Cloverfield. Of all the movies on this year's "best" list, this is the one I can least imagine wanting to watch more than once. But that's okay, because the one time you watch it, you'll be blown away. At least in the theater, the movie's shaky-camcorder gimmick actually works: it's totally immersive, and you really follow these yuppie dorks as they fight their way through pubic lice and monster debris to save their friend.

6. Sleep Dealer. We called it one of the best small-budget science fiction movies in years, in our review back in October. Set in a future where Mexicans do menial labor in the U.S. via telepresence, Dealer is a commentary on immigration and racism. But it's also a brilliant thought experiment and a character piece. And it has the hottest cyberpunk node-installation scene since the flawed-but-fun Existenz.

5. Iron Man. This movie exceeded our expectations, delivering a mind-expanding story of the military-industrial complex instead of just a superhero punch-em-up. I was so excited, I wrote a giant essay instead of a simple review.

4. City Of Ember. It could have been just another young-people-discover-their-world-is-a-lie movie, but instead it becomes a post-apocalyptic masterpiece. Thanks to Martin Laing's gigantic sets and Gil Kenan's beautiful direction, the subterreanean city becomes a real place. You can actually feel the terror and claustrophobia when the lights start going out. And Bill Murray is in rare form as the corrupt, short-sighted mayor.

3. Synecdoche, NY. Charlie Kaufman gave us Being John Malkovitch and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but this is probably his weirdest, most surreal movie. Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is suffering from a weird, nonsensical ailment that is making his autonomic functions shut down, and meanwhile his daughter is turning into an anemic fetish model. So he creates an ambitious, incomprehensible work of art — a recursive model of New York inside a New York warehouse, complete with actors playing real people. And it's a comedy. I laughed so hard at the stuff about Caden's therapist, and his attempts to make himself cry when his tearducts have shut down, I nearly choked on my popcorn.

2. The Dark Knight. This movie got us so worked up, we reviewed it twice. Sure, it was too long — and did the Joker really have to put explosives in the hospital and the boats? — but its ambition pays off, in the end. The story of Harvey Dent's fall from grace is epic enough to support all of the movie's endless incidents and action set pieces. And we're still debating the movie's politics (Pro-torture? Pro-surveillance? Anti-hero? Nihilistic or just anarchic?) months later.

1. Wall-E The only movie in years that I've wanted to watch again, right away. If I hadn't been starving and late for dinner, I would have watched it two or three times in one sitting. The first half hour, featuring the cute-bot in the post-apocalyptic abandoned Earth, is poetic and slapsticky. But then Wall-E gets into space, and it just gets crazier and more satirical, all without ever being mean or cheap. Plus it's a moving robot love story.

Even though 2008 was a pretty awesome year for movies, I still ended up with way more candidates for the "worst" list than the "best" list, sadly.

1. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. This is one of those movies that I was so-so about at the time, but it's gotten worse in my mind since then. Too much Shia, especially Shia of the Jungle. Criminally underused Karen Allen. Mostly, too much boring retreading of past Indy movies, and CG ants, and a totally crap alien head-melting ending.

2. Hancock. All we could think about were ways it could have sucked less. Like if it was really a comedy instead of a bland romp that turns melodramatic halfway through. It had one joke, and ran it into the ground like... like a drunken superhero who smashes into the asphalt when he flies. A couple of funny moments couldn't rescue this dud.

3. Doomsday. Actually, this one belongs on a special so-bad-it's-great list. You'll be getting drunk/stoned and watching this one on DVD long after most "good" movies are forgotten. Just for the cannibals who dance to Fine Young Cannibals, and Malcolm McDowell's SCA kingdom. Yes, it's pretty terrible, but in a wonderful way.

4. X-Files: I Want To Believe. Wasn't this a show about people who investigate things? Apparently not, or at least the movie turned into a dull relationship drama. Bleh.

5. Jumper. I liked the clips of the "jumpscar" special effect and the whole bus-attack thing, but it didn't make for much of a movie. Even with a script by David Goyer, the whole thing is underwhelming. You keep waiting and waiting for David (Hayden Christensen) to step up and become a hero — or at least become interesting to watch — and it never happens.

6. The Day The Earth Stood Still Unlike my colleague Nivair, I hadn't pre-judged this one. I really thought it could be a good film in its own right, even if it wasn't true to the original. I was horribly, eye-searingly wrong. It starts out great, but then Keanu goes on a boring road trip while droning about the environment and eating at Mickey D's. Giant robot Gort shows up here and there, but he can't stop the movie from standing still.

7. The Happening could have been an interesting film — people start killing themselves in horrible ways, for no reason. But then it had to turn into a horror film about trees trying to destroy us, until they change their minds. People stare in horror and despair — at trees. Ohh kay.

8. Meet Dave. With a script by MST3K's Bill Corbett and a cool concept (a tiny guy lands on Earth in a human-sized spaceship that looks like him), this could have been a fun ride. Instead, it's a showcase for Eddie Murphy doing funny voices.

9. Space Chimps We got one great animated science fiction movie, so of course Hollywood had to punish us with an avalanche of drek. Including this horrific Andy Samberg vehicle about monkeys in space. Probably Fly Me To The Moon belongs on this "worst movies" list too, but none of us saw it. It was too soon after Chimps, and it just looked like pure torture.

10.The Spirit could have been sorta great too — we love Will Eisner, and Frank Miller used to be one of the greats, 20 years ago. But Miller has turned into a self-parody, and he decided to go all-out with the crazy camp in this film. Weirdly, even though this film is a visual maelstrom and features an eyelinered Samuel L. Jackson dressing as a Nazi and torturing cats, the film's biggest problem is that it's boring.

And then there were a lot of movies that were neither "best" nor "worst," they just were. Like, say, Incredible Hulk. It wasn't a great movie, it wasn't a terrible movie, it was just adequate. Call it "the credible Hulk." Or Death Race, which I couldn't bring myself to hate despite the lackluster third reel. Or Wanted, which was as dumb as ten piles of rocks but looked purty. Or Star Wars: Clone Wars, which was a fun, if forgettable, TV show, which got put on the big screen due to George Lucas' hubris.

Variety is reporting that the studio has optioned Asimov's 1955 novel about a future humanity ruled by an overclass called "The Eternity" that changes history to undo disasters that it doesn't approve of - and the one man who could possibly change everything by becoming involved with those who seek to overthrow their time-changing overlords, and plans to get a director on board the project before a script is written.

The movie will be produced by Jumper's Vince Gerardis. No planned release date has been announced.

New Regency nabs 'End of Eternity' [Variety]

For one thing, Chris Evans (Fantastic Four, Sunshine) is a lot more entertaining to watch than Hayden Christensen, and Dakota Fanning does creepy clairvoyant well. So in case you missed our previous Push coverage, Evans and Fanning are superpowered kids on the run from the Division, the secret agency that created them. Evans plays Nick, a telekinetic "Mover," and Fanning plays Cassie, a clairvoyant "Watcher." They're looking for Kira, a "Pusher" who can put fake memories into your mind, in Hong Kong.

Director Paul McGuigan showed some footage for reporters, and Division agents have more wacky superpowers including Sniffers, who can see the history of an object by smelling it. (Ha.) And Bleeders, who can cause massive internal bleeding and attack Nick. Also, our heroes team up with a fourth superkid, Hook, who's a "Shadow," with the ability to mask his ability from Sniffers and Watchers.

Also, we see a flashback to a punk street kid version of Cassie (with pink hair) who wants to rescue her mom, who has been captured by the Division. And Cassie has foreseen that Nick is the key to saving her mom. We see Kira almost get captured by Division agents, but she plants a fake memory in one agent's mind that he had a brother, and the other agent killed him. Later, that agent is tricked into killing himself by his boss, another Pusher who makes the agent believe his gun isn't loaded and then convinces him to put it in his own mouth.

Finally, McGuigan showed off some kinetic fight scenes, including Nick's gun battle with another telekinetic, Victor, who makes Nick's guns go off by themselves and projects telekinetic shields to protect himself. Then there's a huge climactic fight scene on a construction project, with Kira the Pusher shooting a big machine gun and Nick escaping from a car trunk and having a big showdown with Victor. It actually sounds pretty fun. [Sci Fi Wire]

 
 
Meg Ryan And Dennis Quaid:
The two met on the set of Innerspace, the movie about shrinking down a man so he can pilot a teeny tiny plane through Martin Short's body. Nothing says romance like piloted colonoscopy. Unfortunately, after a round of he-cheated-then-she-cheated, the two called it quits, thus ruining my chances for an Innerspace sequel with the original cast.

Tom Baker And Lalla Ward:
Ah, the lovely Lalla, otherwise known as Romana from the late 70s Doctor Who. She eventually married the Doctor (Tom Baker), but they separated after a short period. But the crazy genius fetish was never far from her heart, because she eventually married evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

David Tennant and Sophia Myles:
Poor Sophia Myles, she fell hard for David Tennant's manic Doctor Who acting. Her role on the episode "The Girl In The Fireplace" set everyone's hearts ablaze and the chemistry was undeniable. Plus you got to hear the Doctor say, "I just snogged Madame de Pompadour." These two would date for few years before he dumped her flat, upgrading to his own TV offspring.

David Tennant and Georgia Moffett:
The real-life daughter of 1980s Doctor Peter Davison, Moffett played Tennant's blonde bubbly daughter and this relationship makes us all a little woozy. After watching the Doctor shed tears over his fake daughter's supposed demise, it's a little off-putting to see them hitting the town together. Granted, they're not actually related but still, come on. No worries — we can only assume once she turns 30 she'll be upgraded as well.

Ben Browder and Francesca Buller
Sexy science fiction geekery at its best. He's known for steaming up the screen in Farscape and Stargate (SG-1), and she's known for playing hella crazy war monger Ahkna. Buller also played M'Lee, Ro-NA, and Raxil. The two are still happily married, because Browder is a fox and from watching years of him having almost-sex in Farscape's puppet world, I think we can all assume he knows what he's doing.

Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman:
In 1998, these two were married, a year after they stared in Gattaca, but were splitsville in 2004. I blame their genes. It's too bad because while her career has soared with ass kicking films like Kill Bill, his has taken a turn for the so-so, apart from Training Day.

Jessica Alba and Michael Weatherly:
Who could forget the 12-year age gap in the relationship between Alba and Weatherly? For four years, Dark Angel viewers didn't know whether to be excited or uneasy that Weatherly was taking out someone 12 years his junior. When she was 20 years old, he proposed. Their four-year relationship eventually ended, but not without making Dark Angel just a little bit creepy for the audience.

Jennifer Garner And Michael Vartan:
Jennifer Garner's resume kind of reads like her love life until she started getting better movie deals. This one breaks my heart, because I was all in favor of the wig-rocking Garner, until she dumped poor Scott Foley from Felicity (my high school crush) for Michael Vartan of Alias (my college crush), only to break his heart too, for Daredevil star Ben Affleck. Leaving two lovely men in her wake. I'll pick up the pieces of your hearts, boys.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie:
Argue all you want that Mr. And Mrs. Smith isn't science fiction, but I believe there's enough wild gadgetry and crazy "Father" corporations to make it either a strange not-too-distant future or the seedy scifi underbelly of the present. Either way something about beating the hell out of each other turned on Brad Pitt enough to cast of everyone's favorite Friend for a sexy seductress. As of right now they are still together and popping out Earthlings as fast as they can with a brood of six.
 
 
 

Hayden Christensen And Rachel Bilson:
Perhaps this relationship is the one good thing that came out of the movie Jumper. They are both indie-adorable and if it's her love keeps him from making more scifi films then more power to this fedora favoring couple.

Geena Davis And Jeff Goldblum:
Their love made Earth Girls Are Easy and The Fly even better than they already would have been. While it's hard for me to imagine Goldblum having chemistry with anyone (he's such a strange bird, that Jeff) watching these two hook up on Earth Girls was incredibly sweet. The two were married for a few years and separated. The separation lead to another genre-based hook-up (and later engagement) for Goldblum, with Jurassic Park hottie Laura Dern.

Helena Bonham Carter And Tim Burton:
If there was an award for possibly the craziest couple of them all it's the Carter Burton clan hands down. They met on the set of his remake of Planet of The Apes in 2001, and from then on it was dark and gloomy love all around (the two have two children now).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Rose McGowen And Robert Rodriguez:
I think everyone knows our opinion of the McGowin Rodriguez pairing, but ever since they were brought together on film and in real life with Planet Terror, they've decided to remake all genre films including my sacred Barbarella and for that reason alone, they scare me.

Milo Ventimiglia And Hayden Panettiere:
Ah, young love — okay, half-young love, because Panettiere is 19 years old and Ventimiglia is 31. But hey, Heroes loves knows no bounds, and the Cheerleader and her emo uncle should live happily ever after, until the show in which they met gets canceled at least.

Meet Dave, you may have heard, was originally called Starship Dave, a much better title that actually gives you some clue what the film is about. Rival marketers say Fox ran away from the movie's premise in its marketing as well. "People who saw the ads had virtually no idea what the movie was about," writes Patrick Goldstein in the L.A. Times. "Whenever I quizzed various potential moviegoers about the film, I got a lot of puzzled shrugs." Because most of the movie takes place in New York City, the studio must have thought they could market it as an "earthly delight." This is a rare failure for the marketing department at Fox, which has had 16 movies in a row before Dave that were critically panned and did well at the box office. (Think Alvin and the Chipmunks, Jumper, The Happening, etc.)

The studio's discomfort with marketing a science fiction comedy stems from Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman's belief that "scifi films and films set in the future are box-office poison," writes Goldstein. Fox had been all set to make Used Guys, a scifi comedy featuring Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey and directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers) — but then Rothman killed it. It was too expensive, but Rothman also thought nobody would go for the premise: men living in a women-ruled world. (Honestly, it does sound pretty hideous, especially with Stiller and Carrey as the men.) Soon after the project was axed, Rothman asked Goldstein to name one scifi comedy that had ever made money. (Goldstein didn't think of Men In Black until it was too late.)

Science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster pops up in the comments on Goldstein's article, somewhat scandalized that the studios don't think scifi comedies make money:

Didn't SPACEBALLS make money? THE INCREDIBLES? WALL-E? The genre is replete with wonderful stories that are both hysterically funny and true SF...many perfectly suitable for film adapation (I have two of mine under option right now). Now if the folks responsible for making such decisions only read books, instead of basing all their references on other films....

Now I'm curious: which two Foster books do you think Hollywood has optioned, and would they make good movies? I haven't read his work since I was a kid.
[LA Times]

Project: "Jumper" Posters [Nopattern.com]

• 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!

1) TV and movies show the same pattern. Sarah Connor Chronicles had record-high viewership of 18.3 million for its first episode, but has since dropped to around 8 million. The same thing, more or less, happened to Bionic Woman and the second season opener of Heroes. When this happens to a TV show, it's a disaster. But a movie that makes buckets of cash in its opening weekend and then drops is considered a success. Movies don't have to hold people for future installments, they just have to hook you once and then go away.

2) Movies can afford way bigger special-effects budgets. This one is obviously a no-brainer. But actually, it's the least of the reasons why a TV show would have a hard time winning over audiences. Look at the two most successful scifi shows of recent years: Lost and Heroes. Neither show wears its visual effects budgets on its sleeve, and you could easily mistake them for soap operas or "vanilla" dramas a lot of the time. There's not a lot of bling on the screen in your average Lost episode, compared with, say, Transformers. Or Sarah Connor, which has tons of VFX.

3) Endless plot tangles. Joss Whedon famously said that a television show is a question, but a movie is an answer. That's why Firefly spun out tons of mysteries, like what happened to River in her special school, or what was the deal with the Reavers. And Serenity, the movie based on the TV show, had a self-contained plot and answered all your lingering questions in the course of two-ish hours. TV shows, especially in this era of arc storytelling, spin out endless plots that reward obsessive viewers — and scare away casual ones. (This is why I'm still wondering if J.J. Abrams can do a Star Trek movie that doesn't feel like a tease.)

4) Scifi TV is actually cheesier than movies. The cheesiest SF movies nowadays tend to go straight to DVD, or at most appear in a few festivals. Yes, a movie like Transformers is incredibly cheesy and dumb, but it does feature an A-list lead actor (no matter how you may feel about Shia LaBoeuf.) If Transformers was a TV show... well, it would be Knight Rider.

5) The networks. Sure, there are plenty of things the movie studios and distributors can do to mess up a movie's chances. They can market it horribly, or not at all. They can release it during a packed weekend. And countless amazing SF movies have died in the development "process." But nothing the movie studios or distributors can do could be as horrendous as what Fox and other networks have done to strangle promising SF shows in their infancy.

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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Though Tegmark gives director Doug Liman credit for trying to get the science right, he points out:

I think Liman had in mind that there was supposed to be some kind of wormhole through space-time, and that's how it was supposed to work. The ones we know of in physics don't just appear out of nowhere, and they're very unstable. If you try to fly through them, the whole thing collapses into a black hole. It's still an open problem in physics—whether all wormholes are unstable or whether by putting dark energy in them you can make them stable, and whether or not traversable wormholes are actually possible . . . [Also] as you convert yourself into pure energy, you correspond to many, many megatons of energy. If you unleash that in an uncontrolled way, it would look like a giant nuclear bomb—and you didn't see anything like that in the movie.

Jumper Movie Teleportation [Popular Mechanics]

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.

Judging from the toys at a German toy fair, the uniforms in the new Star Trek look remarkably similar to the original series, except that Uhura's skirt is much shorter and there's much more emphasis on her breasts. Progress! Also, the Enterprise looks much the same, except the warp engines are a bit bigger. And inside, the transporter room has a red floor. Also, there's a weird octopus-looking spaceship that looks like something out of one of the Matrix sequels.

Also at the toy fair, people saw clips from Iron Man and Incredible Hulk. Iron Man tests out his suit and it malfunctions, sending him up into the stratosphere where he runs out of air. Then it goes dead and he nearly crashes on the ground before he regains control. Meanwhile, the Hulk movie includes Edward Norton meditating, escaping from a laboratory and preparing to slug it out with the Voldemort-esque Abomination. [Aint It Cool News]

More spoilers:

• Here's a Japanese ad for the toy version of the Abomination from the Incredible Hulk, who doesn't really look that much like Voldemort. This either gives you a hint of what the character will look like in the movie, or it could just be a toy that doesn't really look like anything. [CHUD]
• In this week's Lost, Kate and Sayid go to the Others' camp to make a truce with Locke and rescue Charlotte, whom Locke has captured. They find Hurley bound and gagged in a closet. [About.com]
• Also this week, Future Sayid becomes a killer for Ben, and gets shot by one of his targets. He goes to a vet's office to get sewn up. We get to see Ben's "off-island house," which is full of suits, fake passports and tons of money in various currencies. Turns out Ben can come and go from the island as he pleases. Meanwhile, Miles, the freighter guy played by Ken Leung, shakes Ben down for $3.2 million and says, "I'm not one of these people. I know who you really are." We discover there's a time difference of about 31 seconds between the island and the rest of the world. [Spoilers Lost]
• And here's a picture of Sayid looking at a piece of jewelry that may be significant in this week's episode. [UGO]
• Finally, in Lost episode five, Desmond experiences weird side effects when he and Sayid encounter turbulence on their way to the freighter. [Hollywood Hot News]
• Torri Higgison, who plays Dr. Elizabeth Weir, won't be back in season five of Stargate: Atlantis. The actress turned down an offer to appear in one episode, which could have launched a new story arc. [Gateworld]
• Samuel L. Jackson may be back as the voice of Mace Windu in the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series. [MTV Movies]
• Some other familiar faces from Doctor Who will pop up on Torchwood this season, besides Martha Jones. Oh, and there's no romantic tension between Martha and Owen, at least at first. [IF Magazine]
• And here are a couple new clips from the Colosseum scene in Jumper. Enjoy!

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.)

A super detailed early review of Jumper has gone up online: Hayden Christensen's character is a "douchebag," who uses his powers selfishly and avoids helping people. And he never has any redemption or becomes someone you'd want to ride an elevator with. He drags Rachel Bilson around Rome on her "dream vacation," ruins her trip for her and then bundles her on a plane home.

Then we meet Samuel L. Jackson's Paladin character, who's sworn to hunt down and kill "Jumpers" who can teleport, like Christensen. Apparently the main reason we're told for the Paladins' anti-Jumper campaign is because they think only God should be omnipresent.

And we meet another teleporting "Jumper" named Griffin (Jamie Bell) who refuses to help Christensen, for reasons that make no sense whatsoever. We're supposed to side with Hayden C. over Griffin, even though Hayden's character is Asswipe City. And the film has a distinct lack of action, apart from a few set pieces that you've already seen in the trailers. Hayden and Jamie Bell have a world-traveling showdown for some reason, chasing each other and falling off high places. Oh, and there's a cool bit with a flamethrower, but then nothing much gets lit on fire. [AintItCool]

More spoilers:

• OMG there's a big fighting tournament in the Dragonball movie! And Master Roshi, Goku and Piccolo win. There's a fight between Chichi (in a red dress) and Mai (in black leather) and Mai gives up. Goku shouts "Well done" to the victorious Chichi, but Mai grins at a knife she's hiding. [Dragonball The Movie]
• Yet another super tenuous toy spoiler: New images have come out of the "wacky wobblers" tying in with the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man movies. Since we don't really have any good images of the new Hulk, this could be considered significant. Barely. [Marvelous News, via Superhero Flix]
• On Smallville, Green Arrow is going to be taking a more laid-back attitude to Clark than he did at first — partly because he senses so many other people are putting pressure on the future Superman. Also, the Smallville producers have a (possibly half-assed) plan to explain how Clark disguises his identity when so many people know him without glasses. The show's end will "feed into the Superman legend." [Comic Book Resources]
• Someone got an advance copy of X-Factor #28, which doesn't come out until next week according to Marvel's site. Siryn is pregnant and Rahne is leaving the team (to join X-Force) despite Madrox's guilt trips. Layla's still gone, but Rahne mysteriously insists she'll be back. And then a sex worker who looks like Layla (but isn't) turns up, and there's a fight with the Purifiers. [Diva Sparkles Activate!]
• And here's a preview of next Monday's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

[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.