Image (Credit): Scene from the film Dune: Part Three. (Warner Bros.)
The final trailer for Dune: Part Three is out. The film itself will be available on December 18th.
It is a long and revealing trailer at 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Combined with the earlier trailers, we now have a broad swath of the film available to us. This will be red meat for all of the fans that want to dissect and explain each frame and compare it to the books.
We still have two more months to prepare for this film and speculate about all of its content. I am fine waiting for the final product without clouding my mind with maybes. In the meantime, I plan to go back and watch the first two films again, and again.
Image (Credit): Tom Skerritt and Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. (Warner Bros.)
Actor Tom Skerritt passed away last week at the age of 93 from natural causes. While he will be remembered for his many roles in movies and television, his role as Arthur Koblenz Dallas, the captain of the Nostromo in the 1979 film Alien, as well as role as David Drumlin in the 1997 movie Contact, based on the 1985 Carl Sagan novel, is how many sci-fi fans will remember him.
In both films his character did not make it to the end of the show, but he was memorable nonetheless. In Contact, he represented an overbearing and skeptical government that is dragged into the reality of SETI. Even today, the federal government refuses to directly fund SETI.
I still remember this line from his character when he is talking to Jodie Foster’s character Dr. Ellie Arroway in Contact:
I know you must think this is all very unfair. Maybe that’s an understatement. What you don’t know is I agree. I wish the world was a place where fair was the bottom line, where the kind of idealism you showed at the hearing was rewarded, not taken advantage of. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.
But it is Arroway’s reply that stays with me:
Funny, I’ve always believed that the world is what we make of it.
Mr. Skerritt did a lot with his talents to make the world a more interesting place. He will be missed.
You can read more on Mr. Skerritt’s life and career at these sites:
Paramount Pictures will soon be bringing the space opera adventures of a celebrated 2014 novel to life, combining the best elements of Game of Thrones and Star Wars in a much-anticipated Red Rising adaptation. Over the years, we’ve seen some incredible adaptations of some of the most thrilling and surprising sci-fi novels in history, including the likes of Dune, Blade Runner, Project Hail Mary, Annihilation, and many more. Red Rising will soon be joining them as a brand-new sci-fi adaptation…Red Rising is set in a dystopian future in which humans have colonized Mars, and follows 16-year-old Darrow, who belongs to a caste of citizens known as Reds, while society is ruled by the mentally and physically superior Golds. The Reds are enslaved, mining helium-3 for the Golds, who stress that their efforts will help terraform the planet for future generations. After his wife Eo is hanged and his own death is faked, however, Darrow infiltrates the Golds to bring them down from within.
Aaron Guzikowski, creator of the Scott Free-produced HBO Max sci-fi series Raised by Wolves, is scripting a new Alien movie for 20th Century Studios, Deadline can confirm. Not much else is known about the project at this stage, including whether it would follow up the most recent installment, 2024’s Alien: Romulus. It’s described as being in very early development. Scott and Michael Pruss will produce for Scott Free, with, J.R. Young overseeing for the studio.
The Martian and Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir is back with a bang (rather an implosion) with a premise so wild that it puts Project Hail Mary to shame. Not literally, but an upcoming audiobook, on which Weir serves as an executive producer, has a highly intriguing premise where the rules of survival are spread across time. The audiobook recently appeared on Audible, with the first teaser trailer launched recently. Written by Benjamin Percy and executive produced by Andy Weir, Exoplanet follows three members of a spaceship who encounter a quantum anomaly. Crash-landing on the same hostile planet but separated between three different time periods, the trio attempts to communicate across centuries in order to escape the hostile planet.
This coming Christmas you can watch the film Artificial about OpenAI’s history involving Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others who are in the news everyday. Here is a link to the official movie trailer.
This film by director Luca Guadagnino provides a glimpse of the earlier Musk as played by Ike Barinholtz, who is probably best remembered from his time with the comedy show Mad TV. Sam Altman is played by Andrew Garfield, a nice choice given his talents as well as it being a bookend to his earlier performance as a co-founder of Facebook in the film The Social Network.
The Hollywood Reporter had this to say about the film:
This ranks among Guadagnino’s best work, its dry humor lulling us into a relaxed state of enjoyment before the sword comes down on the scary reality we’re now facing. Even if AI developments are coming so thick and fast that no movie could possibly keep up, Guadagnino and screenwriter Rich have made a provocative feature that feels precision-targeted for this moment.
If you need to see it earlier, you can check it out at the New York Film Festival until October 12th.
If The Mandalorian and Grogu was not your favorite film this summer, you have plenty of time to prepare for the release of the original Star Wars film on its 50th anniversary. That’s right, it will be 50 years old next year.
The original Star Wars film was released on May 25, 1977. The re-release on IMAX will be available on February 19, 2027. You can sign up here to be notified when tickets become available in your area.
And if that’s not enough, next year will also see the release of Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling. It will premiere on 28 May, 2027, the same week as the original film in 1977. Starflighter was filmed for IMAX screens, so that will be an option as well.
