For those of us who think of Philip K. Dick as the most important and influential writer of science fiction in the twentieth century, one of the more exciting movie projects announced last year was The Owl in Daylight, a biopic that promises to interweave an account of Dick’s life with elements of his fiction. Starring Paul Giamatti in the role of Phil Dick and with a screenplay by Tony Grisoni this project has a lot of credibility. Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) would seem to be a good choice to capture Dick’s complex life and ideas.

There is, of course, a quite different perspective on this project: how do Phil's family and friends feel about it? These are not distant spectators, and they aren’t characters in the story of his life, but participants with their own lives, and while some are clearly supportive, one at least has reservations. In an SFFMedia exclusive, Tessa Dick, Phil’s wife until 1977, revealed her concerns.

“This biopic promises to present another fantasy of drug-induced paranoia sprinkled with peppery females who drag the great author down into the gutter," she said.

"Philip K. Dick spent months working out the plots for his novels, and the fastest he ever typed one out was one week. The typing, however, is not the writing. He agonized over every detail of every character and the events through which his protagonist must struggle. Someone reminded me that I was interviewed for this film about a year ago, but that conversation was so brief and so directed that they learned very little. The interviewer simply wanted to confirm his own theories, not to gather facts. I shudder at the thought of such a complex personality, as Phil really was, being condensed and portrayed as a caricature of himself.”

The Happening is awful. The writer and director of the science fiction and fantasy classics Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense, along with the enjoyable Signs and The Village, has hit rock bottom. With plot holes as wide as the Grand Canyon, acting that is disturbingly bad, miscast actors and scenes of supposed horror that are incredibly funny rather than disturbing, M. Night Shyamalan’s touch appears to have deserted him entirely.

A reviewer who read the original shooting script called it dreadful, but the actual movie is so much worse. After walking out of the cinema I felt I’d witnessed an excellent director artistically implode. What was he thinking? What was the studio thinking? Did anyone edit the script? Did anyone notice how bad the performances were and try to correct them?

The dialogue is clunky, obvious and at times ridiculous. The story’s premise that “the trees are out to get us”, causing everyone to commit suicide, never gets off the ground (or makes much sense either). Everyone keeps saying “it’s happening” every three minutes and there is so much plot exposition you wonder if the actors mistook the scene descriptions for dialogue.

Mark Walberg as a teacher just doesn’t work. His opening class room dialogue where he asks his students “where could the bees have possibility gone?” is so kooky and unbelievable I got the impression he was supposed to be playing a teacher on the edge of some type of nervous breakdown.

The French production company Celluloid Dreams has obtained the movie rights to Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel Ubik.

Ubik will join a growing list of Philip K. Dick novels and short stories that have been adapted into big screen movies (some badly, others brilliantly). Past movie adaptations include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Imposter, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly.

While a movie version of Dick’s masterwork Ubik is excellent news for fans of quality science fiction, its themes of regression and restoration, death and decay, the real and unreal, are likely to present challenges for any director hoping to capture the novel's complexity.

First published in 1969, Ubik tells the story of Joe Chip, a debt-ridden technician for a telepathic organisation that employs people with the ability to block certain psychic powers so they can secure other people's privacy. The novel is set in a world where psychic phenomena are commonplace.

Glen Runciter, the head of this telepathic organisation, is assisted by his deceased wife Ella, who is kept in a state of "half-life", a form of cryonic suspension. Someone in "half-life” has limited consciousness and communication ability, which slowly fades over time. Glen Runciter’s main adversary, Ray Hollis, heads another organisation of psychics.

Jaded consumers and reviewers that we are at SFFMedia it’s not often that movie news gets the heart beating fast. Now and then it does, and it’s been racing since we learned of plans to bring Dan Simmons’ multi award winning Hyperion Cantos and Michael Moorcock’s Elric to the big screen. If you’re familiar with either of these icons of science fiction (Hyperion) and fantasy (Elric), you’ll probably understand our excitement.

Then again you might be terrified by the prospect of what Hollywood will do to them.

The Hugo Award winning Hyperion (1989) and its sequel Fall of Hyperion (1990) are intelligent, literary SF at its best. For sheer imaginative force and an abundance of literary and philosophical references Hyperion has few peers. Perhaps most notable of these nods to literature was Simmons use in Hyperion of the formal structure of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: in the far future a group of travellers are on pilgrimage to the Time Tombs of the planet Hyperion, where they will make a request of the mysterious and monstrous Shrike. The Shrike guards the Time Tombs and likes nothing more than to impale pilgrims on iron thorns on the Tree of Pain: only one pilgrim is ever spared and their request fulfilled. Within this framing story, each pilgrim tells their tale, adding something more to our understanding of why they have undertaken this seemingly suicidal pilgrimage. By the cliff-hanger ending of Hyperion we are left with more questions than answers, many of which are resolved in Fall of Hyperion. It is probably for this reason that the movie will attempt to cover both books.

Director Roland Emmerich regularly tries to wipe out the human race. Three of his movies have been big budget apocalyptic extravaganzas where a natural disaster or an external force tries to kill everybody. What’s wrong with the guy?

It looks like his genocidal tendencies have got the better of him again with the upcoming apocalyptic disaster movie 2012, which, according to Reuters, will star John Cusack and co-star British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor.

In Emmerich's Independence Day aliens came to visit and they weren’t playing nice, a global winter nearly froze our brains in The Day after Tomorrow, while an irritated lizard creature called Godzilla went nuts in the movie of the same name. Fortunately, on all three occasions the human race managed to scrape through. Now we’re in for it again, this time in the year 2012 (so brace yourself, 2012 is not very far away).

“It will be very expensive,” said Emmerich of 2012, “you see the whole world go to shit".

Which doesn’t sound good, does it?

Due out 12 December 2008, Keanu Reeves’ big budget remake of the 1951 science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still has all the right ingredients to be his biggest hit since The Matrix. First announced in February 2007, the production is hotting up.

"It's looking good," Keanu recently told Stuff.nz while promoting his latest movie Street Kings.

“It's a great cast: Jennifer Connolly, Kathy Bates, myself, John Cleese, Jayden Smith, and I think we did a great job.”

He said he had finished filming his scenes a month ago and the rest of the filming was completed in April.

So what’s this new version about? Are we looking at another classic or a disastrous Hollywood star studded remake? And how will it differ from the original 1951 science fiction classic directed by Robert Wise?

Reeves told Stuff.nz that he had a lot of input into the script. He said he had worked with the writer and director for almost two months to get the movie right. He also praised the original.

"If you haven't seen The Day The Earth Stood Still I recommend it. I didn't jump into a remake of a classic".

Keanu Reeves stars as the extraterrestrial visitor “Klaatu”, along with his giant 8-foot robotic pal called “Gort”. Contrary to some early Internet rumours they haven’t removed Gort from the remake. Possessing dazzling technological power, Gort was a mysterious and eerie presence in the original movie.

"Gort's there,” Keanu said. “You gotta have Gort. That's like making a peanut butter sandwich with no peanut butter."

A trailer for the second X-files movie, X-files: I want to believe, has been released.

The first thing you'll notice is that Billy Connolly appears to have a major role in the new movie. While X-files creator Chris Carter hasn't released many plot details, we do know that Connolly plays a priest at the centre of a supernatural occurrence. He helps FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in their investigations. At first glance you may also believe that Daniel Craig of James Bond fame has joined the cast, but unfortunately its Callum Keith Rennie. He does look like him though. Perhaps that was the idea?

It will be great to see Connolly in another major movie role. He’s underrated as a serious actor, probably because he's such a great comedian. The trailer shows Connolly's character leading a team of FBI agents through the snow. At one point he cries out: "I know she's out there!".

As we previously reported, there’s no sign of the alien elements that were so dominant in the first X-files movie, this one will be strictly Earth bound. According to Chris Carter the movie will focus on Mulder's internal struggle with his faith.

Despite claiming that Revenge of the Sith would be the last big-screen production set in the Stars Wars universe, George Lucas will be releasing another big screen movie titled The Clone Wars in August this year. However, this one’s an animated movie. Does that count?  The new movie will be followed immediately by a new animated TV series with the same name. According to the Star Wars website each episode will be a 30-minute "mini-movie", with Jedi Knights battling villains such as Count Dooku and General Grievous.

"I felt there were a lot more Star Wars stories left to tell," Lucas said in an official press release. "I was eager to start telling some of them through animation and, at the same time, push the art of animation forward."

Key characters such as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala, Yoda, along with R2-D2 and C-3PO return in cartoon form to battle dark forces once more.

For those who weren’t aware, William Gibson’s seminal work of Cyberpunk, Neuromancer, is being filmed. This is great news!

Except, of course, it’s neither news nor, when you weigh up the facts, is it great.

An announcement last year named Peter Hoffman as producer and Joseph Kahn as director, with another announcement this year that Haydn Christensen would be in the lead role as Case, the novel’s washed up hacker protagonist. A budget of US$70 was pulled out of the hat, which is neither ridiculously high nor ridiculously low, giving the whole thing a ring of authenticity. IMDB lists the movie as in pre-production with a 2009 release, but here’s the thing: nobody involved with the project has a word to say about it. Not the producer, director or leading man.

I don’t know about you, but that seems mighty odd to me. You’d think that participation with this groundbreaking classic of SF would warrant some noise by those involved: how many novels win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award? But there’s no mention of it on Kahn’s website, nothing on any of the many sites dedicated to Christensen and not a word from Hoffman. William Gibson, who like most authors (with the notable exception of J.K. Rowling, it seems) relinquished any say in the matter when he sold the rights to the novel, is suitably philosophical about it: “Myself, I'll be willing to entertain the idea that Neuromancer is really ‘headed for the big screen’ when I'm watching it being shot. As the old saying goes, I'll believe it when I see it.”

There's been little news on the second X-files movie of late, but series creator Chris Carter has now confirmed that the official title is "X-files: I want to believe".

With a release date of 25 July this year, X-files: I Want to Believe comes a decade after the first movie grossed US$189.2 million worldwide, and reunites David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

"I Want to Believe" is a slogan on a UFO poster in Fox Mulder's basement office in the original X-files TV show upon which the movies are based. The original show ran for 9 seasons and produced a massive cult following worldwide.

As usual, studios try to keep story details as secret as possible (and what would you expect from an X-files movie?) but Chris Carter did reveal that the new movie would not focus on the original show's alien mythology. Instead of aliens, it will be a stand-alone story that represents a battle between faith and science. FBI agents Mulder and Scully play an older pair of FBI agents investigating a human rather than alien conspiracy. In the original series Fox Mulder wanted to believe in aliens and the supernatural, while his doctor partner, Dana Scully, was the practical, rational science based character he bounced his ideas off. Their conflicting personalities were one of the key elements that made the show so engaging.

"It's a story that involves the difficulties in mediating faith and science. I Want to Believe — it really does suggest Mulder's struggle with his faith," Chris Carter told CBCNews.

Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio has acquired the rights to the Japanese animated science fiction classic Ghost in the Shell, a cyberpunk police thriller that tells the story of Motoko Kusanagi, a member of Section 9, a covert section of the Japanese National Public Safety Commission. Section 9 specializes in fighting technology-related crime.

"Ghost in the Shell is one of my favourite stories," Spielberg told Variety, "It's a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks".

This is excellent news for fans of 3D and science fiction alike.

Ghost in the Shell's setting is cyberpunk, similar to that found in William Gibson's novels Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

First released as a manga comic book by Masamune Shirow in 1989, Ghost in the Shell has already spawned two additional manga editions, three animated movie adaptations, an animated TV series, and three video games. The second animated movie, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, was released by DreamWorks in 2004, which makes sense given Spielberg’s enthusiasm for the original story. Apparently Spielberg had to fight off Universal and Sony for the adaptation rights.

Although there were doubts about whether Paramount would obtain the rights to Frank Herbert's science fiction classic Dune, it does look as if a big budget movie with Peter Berg directing is going ahead after all. This will be the second big screen adaptation of arguably the greatest SF novel of all time, a formidable tale set on the desert planet Arrakis, where water is precious, giant worms roam freely, and Great Houses fight for access to a life extending substance called spice.

Most promising of all is that the producers are apparently looking for writers to create a faithful adaptation of Dune. In David Lynch's 1984 adaptation there were numerous differences with the novel; some would probably go as far as to say that the plot was mangled. While I thought there was a great deal to like about Lynch's version, it would be great to see a big budget, big screen version that was faithful to the text.

According to Variety, the movie's producers believe the theme of finite ecological resources is timely given the increasing threat of global warming. Perhaps this will be the start of a series of movies based on Herbert's books? If so, let's hope they can give them the royal movie treatment they deserve.

If I told you exactly what I discovered about M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming supernatural thriller The Happening, you would understand the reason for this article’s title. A reviewer who read the shooting script at Gone Elsewhere claimed The Happening demonstrated that “M. Night had hit rock bottom,” adding that the movie features “the most moronic environmentalism in cinema history”.

He went on to say that the script contains numerous unintentional laugh out loud moments and that "The late night comedy guys are going to have a field day. It will be Christmas in July for the Shyamalan detractors of the world."

Unfortunately, after reading exactly what the movie was about in the script review, I'd have to agree. Given that M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed what I think are two of the best science fiction and fantasy movies of the last decade, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, this wasn’t what I was hoping for.

Starring Bruce Willis and Toni Collette,The Sixth Sense arguably featured the best twist in movie history, while the underrated Unbreakable pitted an indestructible Bruce Willis against a fragile Samuel L. Jackson in an expertly crafted comic book tale with an equally surprising ending.

Confused about what’s happening with New Line’s remake of Escape From New York? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. This project has been plagued by complications, assertions and contradictions from the start.

Judging by the reaction of many fans of the original movie however, it’s hard not to feel that for them, at least, this uncertainty about the future of the remake is far better than any confirmation that the project is actually going ahead!

Still, in the interests of clearing up some of the confusion, the following is a summary of what’s been happening (as far as we at SFFMedia can tell).

Early last year New Line announced that Len Wiseman would direct a remake of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, and although the news was not greeted with jubilation by many fans of the original, Wiseman’s involvement was some consolation. Wiseman is responsible for the very stylish Underworld and Underworld: Evolution, and more recently the action-packed Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard and, it was felt, could do the project justice. Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down) wrote the screenplay and Gerard Butler (300) was to star as Snake Plissken, the iconic character brought to life by Kurt Russell in the original.

A teaser trailer for the upcoming Star Trek prequel directed by J. J. Abrams has been released. You can watch the teaser trailer on YouTube here. The trailer shows construction work being undertaken on what will presumably be the first Starship Enterprise and features a voice over by Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Mr Spock in the original Star Trek TV series.

I've just watched J. J. Abram's new flick Cloverfield and it's given me a massive headache. The Blair Witch-style camera movement is claustrophobic, non-stop, and at times unbearable. Just imagine a film you've recorded on your camera equipped mobile phone and then spliced together pretty much randomly on your PC's video editing software, and you'll get the idea. With a running time of only 90 minutes it's very short, perhaps because test audiences were getting extreme motion sickness and had to be sedated. Or maybe the mobile phone's memory card ran out of storage space? When something dramatic happens, which after the first 20 minutes is pretty much the entire movie, the camera goes nuts. The camera operator has probably been locked up by now.

Apart from the odd special effect here and there, Cloverfield would have been very cheap to make (after all, mobile phones are quite inexpensive nowadays).

So does this mean I hated the film? Has my headache tainted my viewpoint? Is the rest of this article going to be a rant about how motion sickness can wreck a movie going experience? Perhaps surprisingly, no. While I still have a headache (the tablet hasn't kicked in just yet) there are a lot of things Cloverfield gets right.

After two flawed versions, the first by David Lynch in 1984, and the second by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2000, the possibility of an entirely new, big budget production of Frank Herbert's Dune novels is welcome news.

In October, Byran Merritt, grandson of the late Frank Herbert, commented in a Dune forum that "Although only a rumour, I've heard that 'someone' at the studio wants Dune really badly and has been a fan of the novel for 'years'. They're not saying who this is (and it might just be hype) but I'm holding out hope that whoever this might be is a big enough fan that he/she will do the book justice. Supposedly it's some director."

Later MTV Movies followed up with the news that the Director in question is Peter Berg (Director of The Kingdom) and the studio is Paramount.

Peter Berg has been quoted as saying that his involvement was a "done deal" and that if not for the Hollywood writer's strike "we'd be in it right now". He called himself a massive fan of the books and called the plans for his version of Dune "big, big, big".

However, responding to a post on 27 December asking whether a release date of 2009 on Peter Berg's Wikipedia page was in any way accurate, Byran Merritt wrote: "None whatsoever. The attorneys are still in negotiations..."

After 25 years since its original release, a definitive version of Ridley Scott's science fiction masterwork Blade Runner, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, has arrived.

So what exactly has changed? And is it worth all the fuss?

After attending a recent screening I can report that there are significant differences, mainly improvements, between this new version and Ridley's first Director's Cut released in 1992.

First off, the unicorn dream sequence, originally introduced in the Director's Cut, has been extended. Deckard's daydream of a unicorn galloping through a forest in slow motion is a pivotal scene, clearly suggesting that Deckard, like Rachel, is a replicant. In a recent article in Wired, Ridley explained why.

“Gaff, at the end, doesn't like Deckard, and we don't really know why,” said Ridley, after being asked whether it was on paper that Deckard was a replicant. “And if you take for granted for a moment that, let's say, Deckard is Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human. Gaff, just at the very end, leaves a piece of origami, which is a piece of silver paper you might find in a cigarette packet. And it's of a unicorn, right? So, the unicorn that's used in Deckard's daydream tells me that Deckard wouldn't normally talk about such a thing to anyone. If Gaff knew about that, it's Gaff's message to say, ‘I've basically read your file, mate.’”

Physically, Blade Runner has been altered to take advantage of the latest improvements in film and audio technology. The quality of the print and the audio has been significantly enhanced. A new digital print of the film was created from the original negatives, while the special effects were updated and polished. Special effects footage was scanned in at 8,000 lines per frame, which is four times the resolution used in most restorations. The dystopic Los Angeles landscape of 2019 is now more stunning than ever before. Watching flames leap skywards as a spinner flies through the darkness during the opening sequence is mesmerising.

Christian Bale will play John Connor in the fourth Terminator movie, Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, rumoured to be the first of a new Terminator trilogy that will take the franchise in a new direction. Rather than following directly on from the previous Terminator movies however, reports suggest that a new character will take centre stage with John Connor playing a secondary role.

This shift in attention and direction makes sense given that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was not as successful as the previous two Terminator movies. Which is not to say that it wasn't highly profitable; all three movies combined have made over US$1 billion since the first release in 1984.

Even in a smaller role, Christian Bale is a welcome addition. He played a major part in reinventing the Batman franchise with a staring role in Batman Begins in 2005. He also stars in the follow up, The Dark Knight, to be released in 2008.

McG, whose directing credits include Supernatural, We are Marshall, and Chuck, has been hired to direct T4. The screenplay is by John Brancato (The Net) and Michael Ferris (Primeval). Luckily it was completed before the recent Hollywood writer's strike. The same writers also wrote the screenplay for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Let's hope they've done a better job this time around.

Plot details are hard to come by: multiple reports suggest that the story will focus on John Connor leading the remainder of the human race in a rapidly deteriorating battle against the machines, but this is vague to say the least, and contradicts the rumour that the new film will take the franchise in a new direction. What were the other three films about if not John Connor battling against the machines?

James Caviezel clearly has a thing for playing extraterrestrials. Best known for his role as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s gruesome The Passion of the Christ (2004), Caviezel will star as Kainan, a humanoid alien, in Howard McCain’s Outlander (2008).

Set in Norway, circa 709 AD, Outlander is a hybrid of two genres: ancient epic, Beowulf in this case, spliced with a science fiction rationalisation for the prowess of its hero and the existence of the monster, Grendel. Written by Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, Outlander originated as an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon epic; in their version the hero is a humanoid alien and Grendel a monster from the stars. With time the screenplay became increasingly distant from the epic although there are residual similarities with the source material.