TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS and X-MEN: APOCALYPSE Trailers

Over the last couple days, I've gotten a couple really nice cinematic bones thrown my way. The trailers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and X-Men: Apocalypse have just been unleashed.

If the Turtles are giving interviews to the media (the whole "we're brothers who hate bullies" thing), I'm guessing the masquerade has been broken. Of course, when it looks like there's a straight-up alien invasion happening in New York, I think people would be a lot more tolerant of "freaks" than they would be before.

And enter Casey Jones. Pretty impressive--able to take down a bunch of Foot guys in seconds and even evade a gigantic mutant. If the movie is anything like canon he and April are going to hook up. I imagine her cameraman and Michelangelo are going to be so disappointed. :)

I also like what they did with the Foot this time around. They basically seem to operate like a Special Forces battalion and even dress the part in the scene where Casey rescues April from a bunch of them. They still kept the Shredder Japanese, although with recasting he's now a skinnier guy with a goatee. Did the mutagen we see him keeping at the end of the first film make that happen? It could be a nice in-universe explanation.

My one quibble is it looks like in the trailer April is taking off her clothes in public for no reason. Given how this movie is being produced by Michael Bay (albeit directed by somebody else I think), I suspect there's his typical silly Fanservice going on. And I say this as a Megan Fox fan.

I enjoyed the first one, much to some of my friends' horror. Hopefully this new one will be fun.

I admit Apocalypse was not one of my favorite villains back when I was an elementary schooler reading the X-Men comics and watching the X-Men animated series. However, this trailer succeeds in making him really cool.

And Jennifer Lawrence is back as Mystique. I liked her better than Rebecca Romjin, who played her in the X-Men films that came out when I was in high school. She's a great actress generally, plus Mystique in X-Men First Class and Days of Future Past is a much more complicated character. And in her speech to Cyclops, we have her going full-blown Katniss Everdeen, which is always cool. We also have Sophie Turner, best known for Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, as the young Jean Grey. Interesting...

Hmm...Magneto as one of Apocalypse's Four Horsemen? Never seen that before. Given how in Days of Future Past we see an elderly Magneto lamenting how stupid he'd been as a young supervillain perhaps it's his alliance with (or subservience to) Apocalypse that's his wakeup call.

And it looks like they're bridging the gap between the 1960s/1970s First Class era and the 2000 films both chronologically (this is the 1980s) and thematically (Xavier losing his hair).

I wonder if they'll bring in, or at least hint at, Mr. Sinister? I remember reading in the Age of Apocalypse comics--in Mr. Sinister's death scene specifically--that he'd made a Faustian bargain with Apocalypse to gain immortality and the freedom to pursue his scientific research.

Trailer For "Hands Off This Girl" (WARNING: DARK)

Here's the trailer for the webseries Hands Off This Girl produced by Kiss The Limit Productions. I've been interning for the company since February and I'm doing my bit by posting the trailer here.

Be ye warned. Hands Off This Girl is intended to raise awareness about the evils of sex trafficking. This is DARK (and could be a trigger for those who've experienced sexual abuse).



If after seeing this trailer you want to support the production of the webseries, here's the FracturedAtlas page you can donate at.

An Alternate History Webseries? Video Included.

Here's something I found via the Alternate History Weekly Update yesterday. It's an AH webseries entitled "The Confederation" in which the Confederacy successfully secedes from the Union (as some kind of "butterfly" of the French beating the Mexicans at the Battle of Puebla) set during a Vietnam-esque war in Cuba.

Here's the trailer:



And here's the fundraising video they posted on their Kickstarter page:



I'll probably chip in some money at some point, but they're going to need more than I can provide to get this thing funded. $50,000. Points for ambition at the very least, but that's a lot of money to be raised in $100 increments. I do like how they're offering speaking parts in exchange for money. Find someone with the right combination of cash and vanity and that'd work.

This does remind me of one of my own ideas involving a disintegrating Confederacy with steampunk air pirates. Cuba plays a role in that world, but it's basically a "bridge too far" the Confederates try to cross in the late 19th or early 20th Century and fail massively.

"Santa's Boot Camp": The Movie I PA'd For

Right now, I'm helping do social media for a film entitled Santa's Boot Camp. I got the position after doing some production-assistant work when the movie was being filmed last December/January. Here's the trailer for your entertainment.



If you like what you see, here's the Facebook fan page. Periodically, new interviews with cast and crew members will be posted.

UPDATE: The movie has an official website now and is raising funds to finish post-production.

New "StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm" Trailer: "Vengeance"

This afternoon, a new trailer for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm went online. For your convenience, I'm posting it here:



Jeez, this one looks dark. Among other things, it strongly implies that over the course of the game, Sarah Kerrigan will turn herself back into the Queen of Blades, this time of her own free will. No wonder Jim Raynor sounds upset. There's also a scene where it looks like the Terran Dominion has Raynor's Raiders in a bad spot.

Hopefully the trailer is cut to make things look worse than they are to get attention, but I think there's a pattern than the middle campaign in a trilogy is darker than the rest. In the original StarCraft, for example, the Zerg Swarm invested the Protoss homeworld of Aiur and the Overmind physically nested on its surface, while in WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, the Undead overran most of the known world and physically summoned the Burning Legion.

We'll have to see...

New "Star Trek: Into Darkness" Teaser

Found the new trailer for Star Trek: Into Darkness this morning:



It looks awesome. No Khan*, but so long as they don't explicitly get rid of him (one member of my message-board suggested having the Klingons gratuitously use the Botany Bay as target practice) they can bring him in later.

*Although Khan was widely reported as the new villain, this guy is too white, too British, and way too physically powerful to be Khan. Khan had twice normal human intelligence and five times normal human strength--he wasn't a telekinetic. Furthermore, IMDB describes him as originating from within Starfleet.

I'm pretty sure the villain is Gary Mitchell. The character depicted in the trailer would match his power levels and note the references in the article to an attractive blonde, who appears very prominently in the trailer.

"Pacific Rim" Viral Marketing Begins

Just found this lovely chestnut online this morning. The viral marketing scheme for the 2013 film Pacific Rim has begun...



And this was actually the second one. Here's the first.



Looks cool. I'm not aware of there being any major giant-monster (or kaiju, as the Japanese call them) movies since Cloverfield in 2008. Like Cloverfield, it looks like Pacific Rim is going to be preceded by a viral marketing campaign.

Seven Minute "Hobbit" Super-Trailer

Behold, a seven-minute fan-made super-trailer consisting of all the Hobbit footage released so far.



Although it's a bit disjointed, it reveals some things I haven't seen before, like how the Dwarfs were apparently betting on whether Bilbo would actually go on their adventure, one of the Dwarfs comparing a famous sword (Glamdring) to a "letter-opener," and some discussion about the effects of the fire of the dragon Smaug on its targets.

Enjoy!

Book Trailers from "The Strain"

In late March, I was covering the International Day at NE/Spruill Oaks Library and during some down time, I found a copy of the novel The Strain on one of the tables.

(It's written by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro and attempts to tackle vampirism from a scientific point of view.  Not going to go into detail for spoiler reasons, but it's both icky and very interesting.)

Here are a couple of book trailers.  Since Del Toro's got the cinema background (and presumably lots of money), they're very well-done book trailers.  From what I've heard from more established writers, book trailers aren't necessarily a good idea.

Here's the first trailer:



Here's the second trailer:



The trailers go into a little detail about how the vampires came to be ("dead man possessed by a disease") and how they operate (that nasty tongue thing), but they're not spoileriffic.

I haven't read more than the first 100 pages of the first novel, dribs and drabs of the second two, and the Wikipedia and TVTropes pages for the series, but they look really interesting. Once I finish with some of my library books, I'll request them.

Steampunk War of the Worlds Sequel Coming...

Found this on my alternate-history forum this morning.  It's an animated sequel to War of the Worlds in which the Martians are back for round two and we face them with reverse-engineered Martian weapons.

The animation style seems more Japanese than Western, but not as much as, say, Pokemon or Dragonball Z.  I'd compare it more to the new Thundercats.  Plus it definitely doesn't suffer from the Animation Age Ghetto--we've got people's flesh dissolving off their bones on-camera and between the blond woman unbuttoning her shirt and later the way her head is bouncing, there's probably on-screen sex.

Here's the link to the film's web-site.  The film will be released sometime in 2012 and it will be theatrical, not just direct to video.

Let's hope this works.  Animation is something that could be very useful for adapting large-scale fantasy and science-fiction properties.  For example, if Game of Thrones were animated, you could have all the soap-opera hijinks and large-scale battle scenes.  However, in the United States at least, this hasn't been done much and when it has been done, it hasn't always been successful (Titan A.E. is an example).

I've got a partial script written for Coil Gun.  If this movie proves successful, it could set a useful precedent.

One quibble--this isn't the actual trailer that tells what the story is about, which can be found on the web-site.  Let's hope the film is advertised using the trailer and not a random montage of fight scenes that look cool but don't explain the plot.

"Game of Thrones" Season Two Videos

Here're some videos for Game of Thrones Season Two.

This one is the introduction of Stannis Baratheon making his claim for the Iron Throne.  Very grim and flat and Stannis-esque. 



This one is a more general teaser here, featuring the burning of the idols of the Seven by Stannis after he allies with the priestess Melisandre, Joffrey being the evil brat he is, the riot in King's Landing, Theon going back to his Ironborn roots, Arya Stark at Harrenhal, and I wonder who that woman getting naked and then taking some fellow for a ride is?  I'm guessing it's Jeyne Westerling, since the man she's offering herself to vaguely looks like Robb Stark.



Given how raunchy and violent A Song of Ice and Fire is, only HBO or some other premium network could produce it how it should be.  However, I'm loathe to spend that kind of money on a channel just to watch one show.  Luckily the Season One DVD/Blu-Ray comes out in March.

 

"Prometheus" Trailer

Here's the trailer for the movie Prometheus, which I'd initially heard was a prequel to Alien.



However, based on the Wikipedia article, it looks like it'll be about human scientists searching for alien involvement in the early days of human history.  I think the aliens in question are the "space jockeys" whose ship carried the eggs that caused so much trouble in the first and second Alien films.

As I've said earlier, I'm not a fan of the ancient-astronauts theory, although the aliens-help-humans variant is not as bad as the humans-are-aliens version.  A member of my message-board whose handle is 9-Fanged Hummingbird came up with the following, which points out both how absurd the idea is and the racist implication that certain cultures need alien help:

The ancient aliens hypothesis relies on the idea that these guys who mastered space travel are watching us and helping brown people to build tombs for their kings out of stone for god only knows what reason. Also, the aliens pile up random rocks in other places just because.

Seriously, to a civilization like that of the "space jockey," early humans would be little more than animals.  Why bother with us?

Still, it looks like it'll be an entertaining film.  Between that and John Carter and a bunch of other films slated for 2012, I think I'll be spending a lot more time at the multiplex.

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" Trailer with Comments

Just found this online courtesy of TOR books, and here's the YouTube video...



It looks cool.  The Dwarven songs in which they mourn for the loss of their homeland to the dragon Smaug are nice.  We don't really see a lot of Dwarf culture in the three Lord of the Rings films beyond them living underground and favoring feasting and axes, so this is nice.

One quibble--Thorin Oakenshield looks too human.  He's too tall and slender for a Dwarf.   I remember hearing that there had been some kind of Twilight-induced attempt to make the Dwarves "sexy," although all I could find was this article here.

I'm wondering how they work Rivendell and Galadriel into the story.  Gandalf and the White Council were active at the time in order to prepare the Free Peoples for the return of Sauron--who at this point was operating under the guise of the Necromancer of Dol Guldur--but I don't think the council dealt with him until well after the events of The Hobbit.

A thought I had was that they might work the White Council's defeat of disguised-Sauron into these two films somehow and have them physically destroy the Necromancer.  He would not be killed, since his essence is bound to the One Ring, but this could explain why Saruman told Gandalf in the first film that "he cannot yet take physical form."

"Battleship" Trailer

The trailer looks surprisingly awesome and there's a good chance I'm going to go see it when it comes out.  Yes, I know it's based on a board game that has no plot.  However, it looks like it's going to be pretty entertaining.

However, one objection: The whole "invincible alien energy shields" thing is overdone.  A friend of mine describe this movie as "Independence Day with ships" and the energy shields go a long way to bolstering his point.  Plus both the 1950s and the 2006-ish version of War of the Worlds used them and they weren't even in the book.

It'd be a lot more creative if the aliens had a nearly impenetrable point-defense capability--perhaps using lasers--that is very good at taking out missiles and aircraft but cannot track artillery shells.  In this situation, the mighty aircraft carriers would be all but neutered and the heavy guns of old-school battleships would be what saves the day.

John Ringo's novels Legacy of the Aldenata novels have used this concept with the Posleen--their defensive weapons are murderous on aircraft and missiles but they're useless in dealing with artillery.

In order to have a big human defeat to presage the final battle, perhaps the carriers launch a massive "Alpha Strike" (a large attack by a carrier air wing) bolstered by huge numbers of cruise missiles fired from the other ships.  The attack is stopped cold with minimal damage to the aliens by a laser point-defense system, but some surviving aircraft pilot points out that when he used his plane's guns, they weren't able to counter it.

Then we get the big naval artillery brought in.  :)

Trailer for Disney's New Film "Brave"

Here's the trailer for the upcoming Disney-Pixar film "Brave," which will premiere in summer of 2012.

I like the soundtrack and the whole Celtic thing.  Hopefully they can strike an ideological balance between criticism of society piling restrictions on women (her mother views her interest in archery as being unladylike) and women being passed around for political reasons and being too unsubtle and preachy.

I've taken a look at the links cited by the Wikipedia entry on the film and it seems heroine Merida is intent on avoiding an arranged marriage.  However, her wish for freedom risks bringing war to Scotland.  Given how marriages in those days were used to seal political alliances, her mother's comment about the price that would be paid for her freedom does make sense.

And although the trailer doesn't go into much detail about the consequences of Merida's wish (to undo the problems she might have caused with the arranged-marriage thing), one of the articles the Wiki page links to describes how her mother is turned into a bear.  Given the opening bit in the trailer about how her father fought a dangerous bear that had killed many people, if the macro-plot is that Merida has to find a way to break the spell before her father kills her mother, that's nice and full of pathos.

A Couple of Interesting Movie Trailers...

The other night, I came across the trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman, which can basically be summed up as "Snow White done in the style of Lord of the Rings."



I'd heard about how they intended to remake Snow White with a more overtly-feminist SW who even goes into battle in full armor and I thought that was goofy and heavy-handed.  I have no objection to feminism--see my repeated denunciations of complementarianism--but given how most women aren't as physically strong as most men, medieval-style combat in heavy armor is not something they're especially suited for unless we're talking someone like Brienne of Tarth from the A Song of Ice and Fire novels who is unusually big and strong.

However, having watched the trailer, this actually looks kind of cool.  Epic battle sequences, the evil queen providing a very strong incentive for the Huntsman to kill Snow White, the much spookier Magic Mirror, a reason for the evil queen to want Snow White's heart specifically, monsters, etc.

My friend Korsgaard warned about Kristen Stewart's acting prowess.  I've never seen any of the Twilight films, so I cannot comment intelligently on whether or not she can act.  Let's hope she can pull this off.

And now we're onto the Hunger Games trailer...



I haven't been interested in the Hunger Games novels because I figured they were intended for younger people, but then, so is Harry Potter and that didn't stop me from writing two novel-length HP fan-fics.

However, a member of my writing group and my friend Jamie have both gotten really interested in THG, so writing it off as kids' stuff would be rather foolish.  Furthermore, in discussions of just what genre Battle for the Wastelands would fit into, someone pointed out that young adult fiction is predicated on the protagonist's age, not the content.  THG features teenagers taken as tribute by an evil government and forced to fight to the death, plus YA fiction from my own childhood (Gruel and Unusual Punishment and Weasel) could get pretty disturbing.

Oh well.  We'll see what happens when it's done and polished and sent to publishers.

Bigger "Heart of the Swarm" Trailer

The other day, I found a new trailer for Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm.  Apparently it was revealed at BlizzCon.



Looks like the Dominion has shown itself untrustworthy, on a much larger scale that just sending in a bunch of Ghosts to kill Kerrigan like the earlier, smaller teaser trailer revealed.  Like, attack-by-capital-ships untrustworthy.  And Valerian and Warfield might not be coming out of that treachery alive....

(Sucks for Warfield, as it seemed he was on the level and even made Rayor commander of the entire Dominion force while he was having his arm fixed.  But if Valerian went into this intending treachery from the beginning, to hell with him.)

Some of the promotional material makes what's going to happen in HOTS sound really GrimDark.  Raynor has gone missing, while some artwork on the Blizzard web-site depicts Kerrigan with a reinfested arm. 

I hope they don't kill off Raynor and then have Kerrigan go totally insane and reinfest herself or, worse, have her think Raynor is dead, reinfest herself, and then have Raynor show up alive again and think Kerrigan is truly irredeemable even with the use of the Zerg-purging artifact.  Heck, with the dialogue snippet "the girl you knew is dead," this makes it sound like despite being forcibly de-Zerged, Kerrigan is still evil.

Wings of Liberty was a lot more optimistic than the first Starcraft and Brood War, with the Dominion public rioting upon learning of Mengsk's true evil nature and the Swarm decapitated and Kerrigan returned to human form.  That was pretty refreshing, considering how dark the first games really were. 

One can hope they took the darkest quotes and scenes from Heart of the Swarm out of context and strung them together to make the story sound a lot more GrimDark than it actually will be--some of the promotional material describes Kerrigan only remembering some of what she did as Queen of Blades and not liking it, which shows there's hope for her.  She does look pretty angsty when she's loading her rifle, while the Queen of Blades would have probably been joyfully homicidal.  Raynor is only missing, not confirmed dead.  And the new trailer depicts a lot of human-on-human warfare, including what looks like a military drop on a human planet. 

Ending the Second Great War with Kerrigan's Zerg and Raynor's Raiders holding Arcturus Mengsk to account for his many sins would be awesome, with the Dark Voice and his Protoss-Zerg hybrid army over the horizon.  However, some stuff I've read on Battle.net indicates the hybrids will be entering the sector en masse and they'll put the hurt on the player, so punishing Mengsk might not in the cards for a bit...

BTW, the soundtrack in this trailer is just awesome.

"Red Tails" Movie Trailer

Now this looks cool.  I don't know about the Red Tails specifically, but the Wikipedia article about the movie depicts them as being part of the Tuskegee Airmen.

The air battle sequences look cool and I'm interested in both war and history, so I'll definitely be seeing this one.

Conan the Barbarian (2011) Trailer

Now this looks awesome.  Nothing in the trailer, nor anyone in the list of characters in the Wikipedia article about the film stand out as being based on any particular story or culture from Robert Howard's stories.  IMDB mentions Valeria, but I don't see her in the Wikipedia cast list.

That being said, I don't think I've actually read any of Howard's Conan stories, only about them.  I have read L. Sprague de Camp's Conan stories, but those were written later on, to fill in the gaps in Howard's chronology, and many fans do not regard them as canon.

Also, although Conan objects strongly to being enslaved himself, I don't think he's ever expressed general anti-slavery sentiments ("no man should live in chains").

Some of the material I've read about Howard's work indicates he develops stronger morals and a sense of responsibility that comes with leadership as he ages, leading to him suppressing the banditry he'd started his career in when he became King of Aquilonia, but that would be years later.  In the movie, Conan appears to be a young man, and based on the Wikipedia article, is still in his "make money by violence and then blow it all gambling, drinking, and whoring" phase.

That being said, this looks awesome and I will definitely see it.  It already looks better than the original Conan the Barbarian from the 1980s.

BTW, thanks belong to James R. Tuck for finding this and posting it on his Facebook page.  He's got a three-book deal about a monster hunter and the above link is his author page, so if the phrase "Deacon Chalk: Occult Bounty Hunter" appeals to you, you might want to check this out.

Fifteen Minute Preview of HBO's "A Game of Thrones"

I found this today online and figured I'd post it for my loyal readers.  It's the first fifteen minutes of the first episode of HBO's adaptation of A Game of Thrones (Song of Ice and Fire) that I first found on the E! web-site and later got the embed HTML off YouTube.  For the record, this doesn't belong to me--it belongs to HBO and/or George R.R. Martin.



Although I've read the second book, I haven't actually read the first.  I believe the first book starts out with Lord Eddard Stark executing the deserter from the Night's Watch.  The scene depicting why he deserts is entirely new, although from what I know about the greater world, the evil powers beyond the Wall are stirring.

The costuming looks great and the Wall looks awesome.  It also establishes character pretty early on--thus far, we've got Catelyn Stark's resentment of her husband's bastard son Jon Snow, Arya Stark's tomboy ways (showing up her brother in archery practice), Sansa Stark's girly-girl tendencies, and Eddard Stark's honor.  We haven't yet met Tyrion "The Imp" Lannister (a nobleman with dwarfism whose virtues include compassion for the hurting and broken and military strategy and whose weaknesses include booze and prostitutes), but I fully expect him to be an absolute hoot.

I actually considering getting HBO to watch this, although I figured $10 per month to watch a few shows (it'd be this show, True Blood, and Boardwalk Empire) wouldn't be a good bargain.  The endless movies to watch on HBO would also be a distraction from my personal writing projects.

So I'll wait for the DVD and likely buy it.  I believe the show's already been green-lighted for a second season.  Hopefully it'll do well and pave the way for more adult-oriented fantasy--the series has been described as "The Sopranos in Middle East" and accurately depicts how a medieval-style kingdom would actually work.

(Massacring rival lords' peasants as a legitimate warfare tactic, girls who in our world would be in middle school being married off to middle-aged men for political reasons, and other assorted nastiness.  Lest we forget, the pre-modern era sucked.)