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Retro Trailer For Roger Corman's 1980 Sci-Fi Adventure Film BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS — GeekTyrant

Retro Trailer For Roger Corman's 1980 Sci-Fi Adventure Film BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS — GeekTyrant

Geek Tyrant2 days ago
This week's retro trailer is for the 1980 sci-fi adventure film Battle Beyond the Stars , which is Roger Corman's ambitious, low-budget attempt to ride the wave of Star Wars mania, and it's essentially a space western version of The Magnificent Seven .
The story follows Shad (Richard Thomas), a young farmer from the peaceful planet Akir, which is under threat from the tyrannical warlord Sador. To save his home, Shad sets off in a sentient starship with a snarky onboard computer to recruit a team of mercenaries from across the galaxy.
The ragtag group includes a weathered gunslinger, a sexy Valkyrie warrior, a hive-mind alien race, and even a pair of reptilian lizard men, each bringing their own quirks to this intergalactic standoff.
What follows is a campy, colorful, and surprisingly inventive space adventure with some truly bizarre characters and alien designs.
What makes Battle Beyond the Stars so wild isn't just its outrageous mix of spaghetti western tropes and pulpy sci-fi aesthetics, it's the sheer audacity of what Corman and his team pulled off with a modest $2 million budget.
James Cameron also worked on the film as a production design and art director, and the score was created by James Horner. The costumes and sets scream pure late-'70s cheese and dialogue flips between deadly serious and hilariously camp.
Battle Beyond the Stars is a glorious example of B-movie excess, a cult classic that proves when creativity collides with low-budget ingenuity, you get something bobkers and unforgettable.
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Scientists Just Witnessed the Birth of a Solar System for the First Time
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Scientists Just Witnessed the Birth of a Solar System for the First Time

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Observations of the young HOPS-315 star system show an environment analogous to what our own nascent Solar System would have looked like billions of years ago. The star is surrounded by a protoplanetary disk, and this disk is the first evidence of debris condensing into what will eventually become planets and other objects. Observing this early phase of evolution around a protostar will allow scientists to learn more about the formation of our own Solar System. If our Solar System had baby pictures from over 4.5 billion years ago, they would look something like the otherworldly swirls of dust and gas surrounding the young star HOPS-315. Nascent planets forming around young stars have been observed before, but until now, what hasn't been seen is the phase of star system formation before that, when mineral particles condense at extreme temperatures from a protoplanetary disk to form what will later become those new planets. The enormous surrounding clouds of gas and dust tend to obscure what was going on. But NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (by making observations at infrared and millimeter wavelengths) has finally revealed chemical signals that are, for a star system, what ultrasound images are for human pregnancies. The sources for these signals were crystalline minerals floating in hot silicon monoxide (SiO) gas in the inner region of the protoplanetary disk around HOPS-315. The star and its disk are located 1,300 light-years away, which means we are seeing them as they existed during humanity's year 700. And because a thousand years is a blink of an eye in cosmic terms, HOPS-315 is probably still a developing protostar. When an international team of researchers found out about the Webb observations, they zeroed in with ESO's Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and captured the moment that minerals (which had sublimated in the intense heat, meaning that they evaporated without turning liquid) started to condense into planetary embryos. 'The first high-temperature minerals to recondense from this gaseous reservoir start the clock on planet formation,' said the team (led by astronomer Melissa McClure of Leiden University in the Netherlands) in a study recently published in the journal Nature. This is what McClure goes on to call a 't=0 moment' in the creation of a new planetary system. When she and her team compared their findings with models of how our Solar System came into being, they found that the formation of solids from cooling gases and mineral dust in the HOPS-315 system mirrored what is thought to have happened in our own stellar territory. The materials that form from the early phases of this process are known as refractory solids, which can survive intense heat without degrading. When our Solar System was forming, the temperature around proto-Earth is thought to have been around 327 degrees Celsius (620 degrees Fahrenheit). Remnants of the first solids that ever condensed in this region of our Solar System can be found embedded in primordial meteorites that have crashed to Earth, taking the form of flecks of minerals. Some of these flecks are even older than the Solar System itself—the presolar grains in the Murchison meteorite, for instance, go back 7 billion years. They are thought to have come from the remains of ancient stars that were swept through the interstellar medium, forming a new nebula that eventually flattened into the protoplanetary disk from which our Solar System emerged. 'Comparison with condensation models with rapid grain growth and disk structure models suggests the formation of refractory solids analogous to those in our Solar System,' McClure said. And if the HOPS-315 system continues to evolve as our own system did, minerals will collide and stick to each other until they form larger and larger rocks, which will accrete into planetesimals and, eventually, actual planets. We'll just have to keep watching and learning. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life? Solve the daily Crossword

12 Ways ‘Alien: Earth' Is Respectfully Reimagining the Franchise
12 Ways ‘Alien: Earth' Is Respectfully Reimagining the Franchise

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12 Ways ‘Alien: Earth' Is Respectfully Reimagining the Franchise

Alien: Earth creator Noah Hawley knows the tables are stacked against him. He knows the Alien franchise is a tough one to crack and that the idea of bringing it to televsion might elicit groans from certain fans. But Hawley is also really good at his job. He somehow turned Fargo into a TV show worthy of the incredible film. He made Legion one of the best comic book shows in recent memory. And he knows he'll never be able to remake or recapture the terror you felt watching the Ridley Scott original, or the exhilaration created by James Cameron's sequel. Instead, he's figured out a way to draw inspiration from those things, but also make it his own. The hope is that it'll create something that's 100% recognizable as Alien, but will also stand on its own as a way to totally flip the franchise on its head. Starting August 12, Alien: Earth tells a story set three years before the events of the first movie. However, while that was in space, this takes place—you guessed it—on Earth. There, a spaceship that was tasked with acquiring deadly aliens from across the galaxy is finally on its way home, when something goes wrong and it crashes. To explore the crash, a team of hybrids—synthetic beings with the consciousness of children—are sent in to explore. What they'll find is not just the iconic xenomorph, but several other species as well. A few weeks back, io9 was among a group of journalists who were able to watch the pilot episode of Alien: Earth (which was awesome) and speak with Hawley, as well as producer David Zucker, about all things Alien: Earth. Here are the highlights. Alien: Earth couldn't exist without the xenomorph, but Hawley knew he had to add new creatures to hopefully capture what makes Alien so special. 'One of the things you can never reproduce in an audience that has seen an Alien movie is the feeling you had the first time you saw the life cycle of this creature in that first film,' Hawley said. 'It's just unreproducible. You know that it's an egg, it's a face hugger, it's a chestburster, and all that. And so that's where the idea for other creatures came from. I want you to have that feeling because that feeling is integral to the Alien experience. But I can't do it with those creatures. So let's introduce new creatures where you don't know how they reproduce or what they eat. So that you can have that, 'I'm out' feeling multiple times a week.' Another intergral part of the Alien franchise is that, yes, the aliens are brutal killers. But the humans who are trying to capture them are often worse. That's why Alien: Earth will feature an equally important story centered on a technological race, personified by those hybrid characters. 'One of the interesting features of the movies, especially Jim Cameron's movie where he has that line from Sigourney [Weaver] to Paul Reiser where she says, 'I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't fuck each other over for a percentage.' Right? And so this idea about humanity and the terrible things that we do to each other, it really opened my mind as to the types of horror that would populate the show, not just body horror or creature horror, but also the moral horror of what people do. And the question is, if you take a girl and you put her into this synthetic body, is she going to choose human or other? And so it becomes about the push-pull between 'Well, why be human if this is what humans do to each other?' But there's such a beauty to the human experience, etc. So that's the tension, I feel like, that elevates it above just who lives and who dies.' Hawley's story is set in the world of Alien, with names and companies you'll recognize, but that wasn't the most important thing to him. 'I've said before but, if I have a skill at reinventing classic movies, it's understanding what the original made me feel and why, and then recreating those feelings in you by telling you a new story,' he said. That new story had to fit visually in the world of Alien. 'I was very adamant that technology-wise we embrace the retrofuturism of the franchise,' Hawley said. 'That is the visual definition for me. There are three classic sci-fi brands. There's Star Wars, Star Trek, and Alien. And none of them look like the other one. You would never confuse one for the other. And so if we want to make Alien, something's got to be dripping. Something's got to be rusty. You have to have those sorts of aesthetics to it. And then the challenge was, well, we're not even focused on the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and we're on Earth. And so how, from an aesthetic standpoint, do you make sure that it feels like Alien to the audience when, obviously, if we're not on a ship, it's just not going to look like that. So that was a long, long process.' Yes, there are other creatures. No, it won't be focused on the life cycle of the xenomorph. 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But he also knows he has to make sure these new creatures can stand up against them. So lots of care has, and continues to be, taken in their designs. 'I will be adjusting the design until they tell me I absolutely can't do it anymore,' he said. 'Every element of it, from the skin texture to sound design, it all goes to the 'Get into your nightmares' part of it. And mostly my hope is that people who watch the show will never do anything comfortably again.' So, yes, this is a new story with new threads and perspectives, but it fits in with the original movies in some fun ways. That's especially driven by the fact this show isn't on a spaceship or an alien planet. It's on Earth, which is something the original films have almost wholly avoided. 'It's the first time we're coming to Earth,' Hawley said. 'I mean, there's a little on Earth in Prometheus, but with no sort of expansion on who rules the Earth, what are the politics, how does that work throughout the galaxy, etc. And so it was a gift to get a franchise this big with very little mythology to it.' 'So that I could say, 'All right, well, what do we know about the next hundred years?' Hawley continued. 'It's going to get hotter. It's going to get wetter. I'm not betting against capitalism so I think the corporations, that power is going to aggregate. And all we really know about Aliens is that there's this corporation called Weyland-Yutani. And for me, I just think that story, that Weyland-Yutani story, is really interesting, but I like the idea also of introducing that there's still a competition. And I also thought, in terms of the moment on Earth. I thought about the moment at the turn of the 20th century where you had Edison and Tesla and Westinghouse, and you weren't sure who was going to control electricity. So I thought if we had that kind of moment in which it's a contest between the sort of cybernetic enhancements and AI and transhumanism—and, like any technology race, you know, you don't remember who the competitor to Xerox was, right? And so that was exciting to me to explore that.' In addition to the opportunity of exploring what's happening on Earth, Hawley loved that the movies gave him a lot of open space to add to the story. 'If you remember the movie, they just get sent to this planet,' he said. 'I mean, clearly somebody knows about these creatures, right? They knew enough to send them there, but their knowledge of these creatures [is a mystery]. Now, of course, [the crew of the Nostromo] has been in cryosleep for, I don't know how many decades or years or whatever. So that's the interesting thing about the lack of mythology is these people who find those first eggs have been out of contact with Earth for who knows how long. And so there is a gray area that we could play in and try to create something with as big a scale as possible to justify the title while still making it credible for the rest of the canon.' 'I've had some conversations with [the filmmakers],' Hawley admitted. '[But], you know, this is not a Kevin Feige Marvel Universe moment. I'm not saying that that in success that that we shouldn't be coordinating or thinking big picture about that. The show [just] has to be a hit before you can really have those conversations.' Hawley doesn't know how far the show will go along but, he has thought about potential links between the show and films. 'I haven't literally calendared it out,' he said, 'But we know that Ripley ends up in an escape pod and is found 57 years later. So we really have no idea what they know on Earth about what happened on the Nostromo. And so is my challenge really figuring what happens in those three years or in the 60 years before she comes back? So those are all active questions that were that we're discussing.' 'Well, it's not up to me,' Hawley said. But, in his mind it's a recurring series that could go on for more seasons. 'We created it as a recurring series, and I have great plans and ambitions for it as such.' For this one, we'll turn it over to David Zucker, the chief creative officer for Scott Free, Ridley Scott's production company. 'In all candor, we were approached many times [about making Alien shows] and there was no interest on our behalf,' Zucker said. 'And frankly, I don't think one could even conceive of delivering something of this kind of equivalency of what one can do [as] feature TV in this sort of modern era. But I think the thing that that also didn't exist before John [Landgraf, chairman of FX] and Noah had this conversation is somebody who could have this kind of vision, this kind of originality. Ridley was really, I think, enthralled by being able to relaunch the franchise. And he's excited about the extension of it, but it really required somebody who could take the essence, as Noah's talked about, and find a way to take viewers in an entirely different experience. And that that was just something we had never encountered before and couldn't have have imagined that that opportunity would exist. So the planets align, as they say.' The planets will further align on August 12 when Alien: Earth debuts on FX. Check back for more soon. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

James Cameron calls Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer "a bit of a moral cop out"
James Cameron calls Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer "a bit of a moral cop out"

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James Cameron calls Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer "a bit of a moral cop out"

Of the very small number of currently working Hollywood directors who could be said to be at, or even above, the level of Christopher Nolan in terms of both producing power and name recognition, James Cameron is almost certainly the one most willing to talk a little shit. Cameron has many laudable traits as both a filmmaker and an interview subject, but holding his tongue isn't one of them—something that became obvious in a recent conversation he had with Deadline, about a new film centered on the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and where Nolan came in for some genuine critique over his blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer. Cameron was speaking at length about Ghosts Of Hiroshima, his planned film adaptation of the book of the same name, soon to arrive from his old buddy (and fellow Titanic and nuclear war obsessive) Charles R. Pellegrino. As with underwater travel, the intricate hair-bonding rituals of the Na'vi, and basically everything else he sets his moviemaking mind to, Cameron has thought and researched about this topic a lot, it is very clear, and he sounds really excited/horrified to tell the story of the bombs dropping. And that includes doing his damnedest to center the conversation in the viewpoint of the people the bombs were actually dropped on, something he (as Spike Lee did a few years back) criticizes Nolan's movie for flinching away from. 'It's interesting what he stayed away from,' Cameron noted of Nolan's film, after being reminded of the implausibility of turning Robert Oppenheimer's life story into a massive box office property. 'Look, I love the filmmaking,' Cameron acknowledges. 'But I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop out. Because it's not like Oppenheimer didn't know the effects. He's got one brief scene in the film where we see—and I don't like to criticize another filmmaker's film–but there's only one brief moment where he sees some charred bodies in the audience and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him. But I felt that it dodged the subject. I don't know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn't want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I'm just stupid that way.' (When told that Nolan felt it wasn't the place of his particular film to tackle the effects of the bombs from the perspective of the people they were dropped on, Cameron quipped, 'Okay, I'll put up my hand. I'll do it, Chris. No problem. You come to my premiere and say nice things.') Cameron has been on this particular topic for multiple decades at this point—this is the man who filmed that sequence from Terminator 2, so take it as read that he thinks about nuclear bombs more than most people—including traveling to Japan with Pellegrino to meet with Tsutomo Yamaguchi, one of the only people to have survived both bombings. (And who ultimately died of stomach cancer in his 90s.) Cameron is, among other things, un-shy about admitting he has limits on the story he wants to tell, too, saying he has no interest in using the film to discus the politics that led to the dropping of the bomb, and simply wants to capture its effects on the people who were at literal ground zero: I don't want to get into the politics of, should it have been dropped, should they have done it, and all the bad things Japan did to warrant it, or any of that kind of moralizing and politicizing. I just want to deal in a sense with what happened, almost as if you could somehow be there and survive and see it… I just think it's so important right now for people to remember what these weapons do. This is the only case where they've been used against a human target. Setting aside all the politics and the fact that I'm going to make a film about Japanese people…I don't even speak Japanese, although I have a lot of friends there. I've been there a million times, and I may need to work with a Japanese writer, a Japanese producer, so that I am not a complete outsider to their cultural perspective. I want to keep it as a kind of neutral witness to an event that actually happened to human beings, so that we can keep that flame alive, that memory. They've only died in vain if we forget what that was like and we incur that a thousand fold upon ourselves and future generations. More from A.V. Club Podcast Canon: Making Gay History is a treasure trove of archival recordings 3 new songs and 3 new albums to check out this weekend NASA Plus launches on Netflix this summer Solve the daily Crossword

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