movies

With the holiday season fast approaching, multiplexes have begun filling up with the Nazi-themed award magnets that always seem to flood the market at the end of the year. However, amidst the plethora of films filled with series English actors in sharp Teutonic uniforms a single high budget, special effects crammed movie squeezed into theaters on December 12th. The Day The Earth Stood Still, a remake of the canonical 1951 science-fiction film, switches out a widowed secretary for an astrobiologist played by Jennifer Connelly, and attempts to earn the science in science-fiction. So, does the science hold up?

James Bond's latest nemesis in the film Quantum of Solace sees more people on Earth needing more water, and he likes it. "This is the world's most precious resource," Dominic Greene says with eyes alight. "We need to control as much of it as we can."

His plan has the ring of truth. Scientists and policymakers continue to warn about water shortages all across the United States and the world.

the Blu-ray format stores and plays movies in high definition—easy for new flicks shot digitally in HD, but what about classics like Metropolis (due out on Blu-ray next year) that were shot on film? The trick is to make a small digital file without losing too much information in the process, which could yield a poor-quality image. Here’s how it works.

Hollywood, in its infinite desire to generate easy profits, has decided to do yet another remake of the Jules Verne classic Journey to the Center of the Earth -- this time in 3-D!. As we can see from the trailer, this movie is going to be a special effects extravaganza. Now, while we all know that the entire idea of traveling to the center of the Earth is pure fantasy, and any "science" represented in the movie is not to be taken seriously, we have so much scientific information about the state of the Earth's interior -- much more than Jules Verne ever could know -- that somehow the premise just falls flat.

We live in interesting TV times. DVD players are as common as toasters. Basic Blu-ray players offer high-def flicks at prices we can (almost) afford. And now, if you can’t bother to go to the store or wait for a disc to arrive, you finally have some enticing download options.

The biggest news, of course, is the recent arrival of Roku's streaming Netflix Player, which is finally giving the company a service to match its name. The Netflix Player joins two other on-demand boxes: Vudu, which premiered last September, and Apple TV, which got upgraded to a movie-playing box in February. So, what’s the best way to go?

The latest cinematic version of The Incredible Hulk is due to hit theaters soon. Now, many people are aware that the most incredible thing about the Hulk is the way his pants always stay on when he expands to ten times his original volume. (If they didn’t it would make for a completely different kind of superhero.) His brute strength, however, is a close runner-up.

In a career that spans the heartrending drama of Schindlers List, the popcorn thrills of Indiana Jones and the flat-out cartoon silliness of Animaniacs, Steven Spielberg has demonstrated a unique cross-generational ability to capture our imaginations and manipulate our emotions. Now hes applying these talents to a new medium, developing a series of innovative videogames in collaboration with Electronic Arts.

The first, Boom Blox (released last month), embraces his fun-for-the-whole-family side. This action-puzzle game challenges players to destroy structures made of building blocks, using the Nintendo Wii remote control to hurl onscreen objects with a flick of the wrist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Its blockbuster season, and that means mad scientists, angry robots and a certain flexibility with the laws of physics. Heres 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 youll know which lines are pure comedy—even if no one else is laughing.

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.

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.

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.