Yes, there are some great robot fight scenes, nefarious villains, a few human interest plotlines, even characters that seem like genuine people, but the new movie Iron Man is really about the lab, and its ridiculously cool toys.

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All of you SAW III aficionados take note (and quickly, before something bad happens): entombed within this embodiment of evil is a small digital voice recorder just ripe for the hacking. And the price is right, too.

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When we spoke with Peter Segal—director of the upcoming film Get Smart—for our Sci-Tech Summer Movie Guide, he knew straight off that he had to play up the technology in the comedic spy caper. "We knew getting into this that the gadgets are really important," he says. He couldn't tell us about all the tech tools in the film, but there's a clever update of the infamous "cone of silence," and the movie features exploding cuff links and dental floss, plus a tooth radio.

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No, you can't hike or spelunk or even tunnel down to the center of the Earth, even if movies like The Core or this summer's 3D adventure flick, Journey to the Center of the Earth, suggest otherwise. To find out about our planet's insides, scientists rely on very different tricks. And, apparently, a little luck.

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It’s blockbuster season, and that means mad scientists, angry robots and a certain flexibility with the laws of physics. Here’s our guide to movies made especially with PopSci fans in mind. In it, a roundup of the season's best (and worst) geek candy, along with our “expected gibberish quotient,” so you’ll know which lines are pure comedy—even if no one else is laughing.

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Filming conventional high-speed action fare is hard enough, but to bring the classic cartoon Speed Racer to life, the Wachowski brothers had to contend with 300mph racecars sporting fanciful features like robotic reconnaissance pigeons and wheels that can rotate 180 degrees. With 2,300 visual-effects (VFX) shots—twice as many as last year’s eye-popping 300—it heralds the future of summer-blockbuster fare: The entire movie, aside from the human actors, exists only in a computer.

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So it's not happening quite as quickly as we'd been told in previous stories on the subject, but the 3D revolution does seem to be coming. One of the hold-ups has been convincing theater owners to upgrade to projection and display systems that can handle this new wave of 3D tech—it takes around $75,000 to switch over an old theater. But the 3D companies have been arguing that this upgrade enables theaters to become more than just movie houses: They can show concerts, sporting events, even operas in 3D, and charge more per seat.

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The convergence Consulting Group has just released a report stating that Web-based TV viewing is on the rise. By 2010, the group predicts that 23 percent of the content produced by broadcast and cable TV will be viewed online—up from about 9 percent today. At the same time, since advertisers haven't moved too many of their dollars over to the new medium yet, you have to expect that the big networks won't let a full transition happen too quickly—the money has to be there first. In other words, old-fashioned commercial-heavy programs aren't going away just yet.

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Did anyone really expect 10,000 BC to be scientifically accurate? The reviews of the critically-condemned movie are fun to peruse, but the ones focused on the science are especially entertaining. Because, well, the science (as we all should have guessed) is way, way off.

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New York City has just been destroyed by a 40-foot-tall deluge. Pirates battle around a giant, violent whirlpool. Without years of work by the 2007 Scientific and Technical Oscar winners, none of those images would have made it to a computer—and then a multiplex—near you.

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