VIDEO: Oblivion - best of the drone scenes

I loved Oblivion. I know it's not everyone's cup of Romulan Ale, but it was a great "small" scifi flick (tight cast, compact in scope). It owed more to Wall-E, Planet of the Apes, and 2001 A Space Odyessey, than Star Wars and the like.



Here's a cut of the drone scenes from the film. The art and sound design for these killer robo-bubbles was quite slick. They'd make perfect Big Bro villians for any game. Maybe even cool PCs if one was captured and reprogrammed. They're sort of like floating ED-209s from Robocop.

Also, it's fun to watch them bully Tom Cruise who's lot in life is to fix them.

Elysium trailer #2 - Action AND Intelligent Sci-Fi?

YEP. I'LL SEE THAT.

Retro future: Los Angeles, 2013 (as viewed from 1986)

The L.A. times has posted a full-length feature article they ran in a (now defunct) L.A. Times Magazine issue that looked ahead to the year 2013. The Syd Mead-ish cover artwork alone is cool enough for it's own post.

I'm a sucker for these retro/paleo future type articles. Especially when they use nifty architectural renderings of "the future". The article covers how Los Angelenos would commute, do business, and enjoy leisure in a quarter century's time. Fun stuff!

Check out the fully scanned pages at the L.A. Times.

VIDEO: "Oblivion" trailer - post-apoc future, action flick

So here's a Tom Cruise film I'd only heard a few whispers about until now. I'd nearly written it off it had been so long since I'd seen anything, but now this trailer pops up and I have to say it looks intriguing. Especially since there's not a huge cast.

Anyway, looking forward to hearing more. Here's the synopsis, via io9:

Tom Cruise stars in Oblivion, an original and groundbreaking cinematic event from the director of TRON: Legacy and the producer of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. On a spectacular future Earth that has evolved beyond recognition, one man's confrontation with the past will lead him on a journey of redemption and discovery as he battles to save mankind.
Jack Harper (Cruise) is one of the last few drone repairmen stationed on Earth. Part of a massive operation to extract vital resources after decades of war with a terrifying threat known as the Scavs, Jack's mission is nearly complete.
Living in and patrolling the breathtaking skies from thousands of feet above, his soaring existence is brought crashing down when he rescues a beautiful stranger from a downed spacecraft. Her arrival triggers a chain of events that forces him to question everything he knows and puts the fate of humanity in his hands.

Here's the poster:

When is your favorite "era" of the future?

The sci-fu ninjas over at io9.com whipped up this nifty timescale chart showing how far in the future sci-fi (in books, movies, TV, etc.) has been depicted over the decades. Two interesting points (for me, anyway) are the 1930s when it was all about the "far" future, more than 500 years ahead; and in the 1980s when we were obsessed with the "near future" less than 50 years. This timeframe also saw an influx of cheap sci-fi, especially in movies (Blade Runner, Back to the Future II, among others).

And what the heck happened to far future in the 90s? (Let's face it, there's a lot about the 90s that didn't make sense.)

My preferred era (if one can have such) is in fact the far future. I like things whiz-bang, far out, and epic--or crumbling, post-irratiated, newly barbaric.

It's not really a fine line, I admit.

What's your favorite future era?

Image: io9

The Future...From Another Time....

Have you ever visited Paleofuture.com? You should. It's a gold mine of peculiarities and artifacts from "a future that never was," meaning what we used to think the future would be like: flying cars, jet packs, household robots. Okay that last one is kinda true, but you get the picture.

Anyway, a ways back I was on the site and saw this:

Click on images to enlarge

I had this book as a kid and LOVED it. It's a treasure trove of content and pictures that foretold what the future would be like in the year 2000 and beyond. It was published in 1982. In any case, I was able to snag a copy of it on ebay soon after. I was delighted to relive a classic from my youth, but even better were the wacky predictions, covering topics like space colonies; robots in everyday life; the future of education, farmng, and communications--and let's not forget flying cars!

The book is peppered with images of airships, Torus wheel colonies, and other wonderfulness. There's just too much gold in there NOT to post, so I'll be dropping a few scans in now and then. I can't promise the best scan quality (it's basically newspaper quality paper--almost 30-year-old newspaper). The cover is color but the interior imagery is in glorious b/w. Here's a taste of The Kids Whole Future Catalog by Paula Taylor:

More to come....