Video: Adam Savage Talks About His Obsession With Recreating Movie Props

When Adam Savage isn’t busting myths, he keeps busy with a peculiar hobby: recreating props from his favorite movies. These days, his replicas often end up even more detailed than the ones seen on the silver screen.

At WIRED by Design, our recent live magazine event, Savage recounted how he fell in love with prop-making as a kid. Some of the first fictional objects he tried to recreate were gizmos from the Mission Impossible TV show. Since then, his replicas have only become more ambitious; recent projects have included the mecha glove from Hellboy, a maltese falcon, and three (three!) versions of the Harrison Ford’s gun from Blade Runner.

Savage’s current fixation? A meticulous recreation of Major Kong’s survival pack from Dr. Strangelove, complete with Cold War necessities like a Russian phrasebook, a hundred dollars in gold, and three pairs of nylon stockings (you know, just in case you need to go undercover). Like all of Savage’s cinematic recreations, the project has involved a tremendous amount of research. “It took me six months to figure out how gold would’ve been packaged,” he says. But for Savage, being able hold a piece of beloved fantasy in his hands is worth the effort.​

For more about WIRED by Design, visit live.wired.com.

This High-Tech Greenhouse Tests What Crops Will Survive Climate Change

Jeremy M. Lange

Jeremy M. Lange

Glass | The roof has two layers, separated by an inch of argon gas to help keep the hot rooms hot and the cool rooms cool. And because perfectly clear glass creates hot spots and shadows that can interfere with experiments, a hazy coating on the interior layer diffuses the incoming rays. Jeremy M. Lange

Glass | The roof has two layers, separated by an inch of argon gas to help keep the hot rooms hot and the cool rooms cool. And because perfectly clear glass creates hot spots and shadows that can interfere with experiments, a hazy coating on the interior layer diffuses the incoming rays.

Jeremy M. Lange

Food and Water | A system of computer-controlled tubes sends precise amounts of water and nutrients to each pot. Syngenta has 13 types of fertilizers it can mix up and deliver with the fertigation system (yes, that’s what the company calls fertilizer plus irrigation) to simulate varying soil conditions. Jeremy M. Lange

Food and Water | A system of computer-controlled tubes sends precise amounts of water and nutrients to each pot. Syngenta has 13 types of fertilizers it can mix up and deliver with the fertigation system (yes, that’s what the company calls fertilizer plus irrigation) to simulate varying soil conditions.

Jeremy M. Lange

Climate Control | Researchers can tweak humidity, oxygen, and CO2, even mimicking hour-by-hour weather patterns based on historical (or projected) data. They can also control temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius—ducts circulate the air for an ultra-­uniform distribution. Jeremy M. Lange

Climate Control | Researchers can tweak humidity, oxygen, and CO2, even mimicking hour-by-hour weather patterns based on historical (or projected) data. They can also control temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius—ducts circulate the air for an ultra-­uniform distribution.

Jeremy M. Lange

Lighting | Corn requires 12 to 16 hours of daylight to grow properly, but it can’t always be summer. Thousands of wide-spectrum lights keep sunshine constant across the seasons. Jeremy M. Lange

Lighting | Corn requires 12 to 16 hours of daylight to grow properly, but it can’t always be summer. Thousands of wide-spectrum lights keep sunshine constant across the seasons.

Jeremy M. Lange

Rooms | Scientists can carve an acre of floor space into as many as 76 programmable chambers. The smallest possible room is 300 square feet—perfect for testing the same crop, like a sturdy soybean, in separate rooms at higher and higher temperatures. Jeremy M. Lange

Rooms | Scientists can carve an acre of floor space into as many as 76 programmable chambers. The smallest possible room is 300 square feet—perfect for testing the same crop, like a sturdy soybean, in separate rooms at higher and higher temperatures.

Jeremy M. Lange

It may have a glass roof and be filled with plants, but the Advanced Crop Lab at the Durham, North Carolina, headquarters of agricultural biotech firm Syngenta does a lot more than a typical greenhouse. Scientists can program its dozens of rooms with individual climates in order to test new crops that might flourish in our sweltering, drought-filled future. Which means that Nebraska corn can grow at 87 degrees right next door to Brazilian sugarcane at 95—no sweat.

Alvin dives to new depths

With the completion of the new Alvin, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s storied deep-sea submersible, 50 million square miles of previously inaccessible seafloor real estate is now open to scientific investigation. Before its upgrades, Alvin was rated to dive to 15,000 feet, but a new titanium personnel sphere means it can now dive as deep as 21,000 feet—and that depth rating opens up 98 percent of the seafloor to Alvin’s robotic fingertips.

For the first time, scientists will be able to experience and sample vast realms of the unseen from inside an American submersible. We don’t know what we’ll find with the re-vamped Alvin—that’s the point of science, after all—but with a substantial fraction of the seafloor newly accessible, the possibilities are alluring. This month, Alvin will be exploring the East Pacific Rise hydrothermal vent field, studying the growth rates of massive, tentacle-like Riftia tube worms.

But those hydrothermal vents—where scalding fluids with abundant electron-rich iron, manganese, and sulfur chemicals create chimney-like “black smokers”—are just one of three distinct flavors of seafloor chemotrophy, oases of life driven by the chemicals streaming out of the seafloor. Methane seeps are less flashy, but the bizarre microbial partnership that metabolizes methane and supports the food pyramid of clams, mussels, crabs, and fish represents a key control point for climate. And most recently, a new class of chemosynthetic system was found in the North Atlantic at Lost City, where destabilizing mantle minerals generate carbon-rich emissions that lead to towering formations of carbonate rocks.

With Alvin’s improved depth rating, scientists may be well on their way to identifying even more geochemically unique underwater worlds. (The current depth rating remains 15,000 feet, but as improved power sources are incorporated over the next couple of years, the 21,000-foot benchmark will be within reach.) And the array and connectivity of the sub’s new instruments will help researchers investigate when they do. Nimbler arms allow Alvin pilots to deposit sensors or collect specific pebbles with improved dexterity. Electronic re-wiring gives users the option of including their own instruments, turning the sub into a more customizable roving laboratory.

On one of the new Alvin’s first dives, a brand new sensor—plugged into the sub the night before—made some of the most detailed in situ pH measurements to date of seafloor methane seeps. The integrated result is a functionally enhanced sub that makes the underwater realm easier to access than ever before—and each new investigation of these unseen worlds can dramatically change the way we view life in the universe. By uncovering new forms of chemotrophic life surrounding other types of seafloor venting—a very real possibility given how little of the seafloor we have studied—our library of biological possibility may well expand once more.

Why We’re Just Now Getting the 1960s Batman TV Show on DVD

DC Entertainment

In 1998, a man named John Stacks formed a company, Johnny Resin, that sold model kits to a niche audience. His specialty was a line of sculpts bearing the likenesses of actors from 1966′s Batman television series: Adam West, Burt Ward, and an assortment of villains, all in costume.

This was a dubious enterprise. Though Stacks had the permission of the actors, he did not have permission from Warner Bros. or DC Entertainment, which own the characters, or from Fox, which held distribution rights to the show. Predictably, DC unleashed its battalion of attorneys. The matter was settled when Stacks apologized and claimed it cost more to license Adam West’s likeness than he earned selling it.

Stacks didn’t mind, thought. His struggle with DC launched a mission that would help clear the way for a more highly prized bit of Bat-ephemera: full, commercial-free, non-bootlegged DVD and Blu-ray collections of the entire 1960s Batman series—something held up for years by rights disputes between the show’s many parents.

“Everyone who’s a fan of the show wanted it on home video,” says Stacks. “But we never thought we’d see it this century.”

The wait is over. Next week, Batman hits retail in all its kitsch-laden glory just in time for the holidays. After decades of rumors, corporate wrangling, and the foresight of an actor who recorded his commentary early in case he dropped dead before the collection materialized, the series finally escapes legal purgatory. But don’t give much credit to corporate lawyers. Instead, it’s due to a tireless, clever campaign by a small band of fans that started when Stacks started digging into the show’s archived paper trail.

“That’s when one fat guy in Florida shook the whole thing up,” he says.

From the Most Byzantine Beginnings

Batman’s troubles started early, enmeshed in a thicket of contractual obligations before it ever got on the air. ABC bought television and film rights to the character from DC precursor National Periodical Publications for $7,000. (National, which saw its comics sales tanking, was happy to get it.) To produce the show, ABC relied on 20th Century Fox and Greenway Productions, a company headed by former CBS executive William Dozier. Fox and Greenway split ownership of the series, with Greenway owning the footage and Fox owning the exclusive right to distribute. (Greenway would get 50 percent of profits after expenses had been deducted.) When he died in 1991, Dozier’s share of the Batman property was split among his daughter Deborah Dozier Potter, his son Robert Dozier, and Greenway’s lawyers, Jacque Leslie and Barry Rubin.

For those of you keeping track, that’s a lot of Bat-pieces in a lot of Bat-places.

“My father produced it, owned it along with Fox, the characters were owned by DC, and Warner eventually owned DC,” Potter says of the legal pile-up. “He didn’t think it would amount to anything. It wasn’t even in his will.”

The show ran from 1966 to 1968, becoming a cultural phenomenon that boosted National’s sagging comic sales and resonated with the ironically detached “camp” movement of the era. “In the ’60s, it was the Beatles, Batman, and Bond,” says actor Mark Hamill, a devotee who would later provide the voice of the Joker in animated and videogame Batman properties. “There was nothing else like it on television. Adam is so underrated as an actor. He walked the line between sincerity and parody and set the tone.”

Hamill used his post-Star Wars celebrity to convince Fox to make videotaped copies of all 120 episodes for him. It was the only “official” collection any fan would see for the next 35 or so years: home-video distribution didn’t exist when the series was produced, and when outfits like Columbia House—the service that promised 10 CDs or VHS tapes for a penny and a commitment to get a lot of mail—wanted to solicit the show in the 1990s, it found Fox and Warner Bros. at odds. Neither wanted to navigate the legal morass or hand off distribution to any other party—especially not to each other. (According to one source, a Warner Bros./DC executive once vowed Fox would release the property “over my dead body.”)

courtesy Warner Home Video

Then came Stacks’ case over the model kits. He was collecting piles of cease and desist letters from DC; in an effort to assess their claim, he paid a University of Wyoming student $250 to collect and copy a vast collection papers William Dozier had donated to the school in the 1980s. “It was his whole library,” Stacks says. “Pictures, contracts, all the originals. Dozier kept notes on everything. If the lights on set were turned off at two o’clock, he’d write it down. I went through 400 pages of paperwork.”

He’d dug up Dozier’s papers for his own case, but the documents turned out to be pivotal in the effort to bring Batman to home video. The files, some of which Stacks forwarded to Potter and her husband, revealed a curious provision in the Fox/Greenway deal that became effective 21 years after the show went off the air: a “Dutch agreement” that allowed for one party to make an offer to buy out the other’s share. If the offer was declined, the rejecting entity could buy the other’s share for the same price. In either case, the agreement required a sale that would give the copyright to the show (though not the DC characters) to a single entity.

This detail, among other profit-sharing language, was noticed by Reed Kaplan, a DVD content producer (The Real Ghostbusters, Underdog) who had been introduced to the Potters by Wally Wingert, a voice actor and friend of Adam West. Kaplan, Wingert says, had experience navigating difficult content deals. More importantly, he had worn a Batman T-shirt for school picture day in third grade.

“Reed did some real forensic work,” Wingert says. “You’re dealing with a series that wasn’t supposed to have an afterlife beyond syndication.”

Kaplan was struck by the Dutch agreement language and differences in valuations in royalties versus a buyout, but talks with Fox and Warner Bros. amounted to the same thing. “Everyone thought I was on to something,” Kaplan says, “but they all said, ‘We had our lawyers look at this for years, there’s precedent now, and we’re not putting any more energy into it.’ So what I needed was to find someone to come up with the money to buy out the Doziers and then execute the buy/sell agreement with Fox.”

Kaplan went to Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video, Time Life, and film producer Lawrence Bender, among others. “I spent many years and a great deal of money on lawyers to back up my reading of it,” he says. “I can’t tell you the number of meetings I had. It’s easy to get people to listen when you mention Batman. But everyone would hear the details and go, ‘This is never going to happen.’”

In 2006, Kaplan turned to Classic Media’s Eric Ellenbogen, a content acquisition specialist whom Kaplan knew to be tenacious. “Eric was the first person to agree with me,” Kaplan says. “And so did his lawyers.”

Ellenbogen bought Deborah Potter’s portion of Greenway’s assets without knowing if her brother would be amenable to selling. Robert Dozier was older, in declining health, and preferred the regular checks from syndication over rocking the boat. Ellenbogen convinced him, and went through the same process with Jacque Leslie and the estate of Barry Rubin. Leslie was nearly 100 and died less than a month after completing the deal; Rubin’s share was split among numerous family members.

It took three years for Ellenbogen to sort out the frayed contractual threads. But by January 2010, the Doziers officially were out of the Batman business. Classic Media was a proud part owner, having consolidated Greenway’s interests in one easy-to-swallow package.

“It just became necessary to sell the series to Eric,” Potter says. “There had to be one owner [of Greenway's portion] in order for it to be worth the trouble to get Fox and Warner to agree. It would be a lot less complicated.”

That was the idea, anyway.

Getting Past the Stand-Off

According to a source privy to negotiations, Fox was not impressed with Classic’s legwork. It first argued Classic had no right to present the Dutch ultimatum, which would force Fox into action, because it didn’t share 50 percent of the revenue after deductions and therefore weren’t equal partners. At some point between 2010 and 2012, Fox and Classic went to private arbitration, which ruled on appeal that Classic had the right to act on the original contract.

Classic offered Fox a seven-figure sum for its stake in Batman. Per the contract, Fox had to sell or buy it for the same price. Kaplan’s strategy had made it a no-lose proposition for Ellenbogen: either Fox sold its share, allowing Classic and Warner Bros. to proceed, or Fox would pay roughly three times what Classic had paid for the rights. In the end, Fox decided to buy, which consolidated the series under one banner. (Classic later sold its content library to DreamWorks, sans Batman, for $155 million.)

What happened between Fox and Warner Bros. over the next few years is unknown: both declined to comment on negotiations. But in 2012, the two were able to square away a licensing deal for collectibles based on the series. While fans took that as foreshadowing, the DVDs never materialized. Whoever distributed the series would get the lion’s share of the revenue, and neither company wanted to acquiesce to the other.

“It meant a lot,” Kaplan says, “to both companies to be the one to have Batman come out under their own name.”

Ultimately, Fox had a decision to make: sit on the property and be satisfied with syndication revenue or try to recoup the money they spent securing ownership from Classic. They seemed no closer to a decision until the 2013 Comic-Con International in San Diego, which gave convention-goers a Warner Bros. tote bag with West’s Batman and Ward’s Robin. Rumors spread that an announcement was pending—if for no other reason than that West, who just turned 86, didn’t have all that much time left to promote the set.

The two studios were still at loggerheads, but the ensuing excitement may have convinced the companies there was enough interest in the show to reach a deal. In January 2014, Conan O’Brien (whose talk show appears on Warner-owned TBS) tweeted a photo of himself straddling the Batmobile, announcing to his millions of Twitter followers that the show was coming to home video. Warner Bros. confirmed the announcement. Fox, which is now sole owner of the series, will receive a share of profits, while Warner Home Video will be the distributor of record. In 2014, the studio screened the cleaned-up footage for a packed house at Comic-Con.

“They had a side-by-side comparison,” Wingert says. “You could see every grain of sand in the hourglass to ensure Robin’s impending doom. It was fantastic.”

A Word on Last Week’s Failures

In May 1968, during its first run in theaters, the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey captured my six-year-old imagination. A few months later, in the real world of spaceflight, Apollo 8 orbited the moon. I watched in wonder on Christmas Eve as an overexposed Earth glared from the black & white TV screen in our kitchen. So began a love of spaceflight that has now spanned 46 years.

I didn’t know as I listened to the astronauts taking turns reading from Genesis that not everyone was as enthralled by spaceflight as I had become, nor that we had already begun to retreat from the moon before we landed there for the first time. Four years after Apollo 8, Apollo 17 returned to Earth, and the era of piloted space exploration drew to a close.

The Space Shuttle always made me a bit suspicious. I suppose that was because it looked too much like an airplane to be a proper spaceship. I cheered, of course, when it detached from its 747 carrier aircraft for the first time in August 1977. I knew that it would soar into space in a year or two, but the fact that it fell to Earth instead of soaring into space right then left me cold. Still, Nova programs on PBS and many articles in magazines promised me that the amazing Space Shuttle would be so capable that to keep its payload bay filled NASA would have to build giant solar power satellites and space colonies.

Like many space fans, I was thoroughly primed when at last the Space Shuttle Columbia flew in April 1981. Sure, that first flight was three or four years late. Sure, there were technical problems even as Columbia soared aloft. NASA would beat those, though, and soon amazing things would happen. We might even launch humans to Mars in the 1990s.

The delays and problems continued. Die-hard space fans defended the Space Shuttle, pointing out that space was hard and that the Shuttle’s new way of doing business was bound to prevail. President Ronald Reagan even went so far (in January 1984) as to call on NASA to build a Space Station by 1994. As 1986 dawned, we looked forward to a teacher and a journalist in space. We would see launched from the Shuttle’s payload bay the Galileo Jupiter Orbiter and Probe on a mighty Centaur-G’ upper stage, unprecedented views of the cosmos from the Hubble Space Telescope, and numerous satellite servicing missions and money-making commercial payloads and satellites.

Of course, none of that happened quite as planned. On 28 January 1986, soon after I started graduate school, I arrived home from my office hours to learn that the Space Shuttle Challenger had been destroyed a little more than a minute after launch.

The Challenger accident was attributed to “NASA ‘can-do’ culture,” but the fact was that the fundamentals underpinning the Space Shuttle were flawed from the start. It could never fly routinely. It could not operate more cheaply than expendable rockets. It could not launch the Space Station as then designed.

The decisions that dictated the Shuttle’s capabilities could be traced back to 27 January 1967, when the Apollo 1 fire undermined confidence in NASA. That led Congress to make big cuts in funding meant to give the space agency a future.

The Nixon Administration and Congresses during the 1970s filled the gap those cuts created with the Space Shuttle, which had been proposed originally as a Space Station crew rotation and resupply vehicle. They refused, however, to pay for the Space Station that gave the Shuttle its purpose. The Shuttle instead got a new purpose: to do “practical” things in space that would “benefit” Americans and do them for less than the cost of expendable rocket launches.

The Space Shuttle should have taught us a lesson: if one seeks to travel into space, one must avoid cutting corners. Space is indeed hard: one must spend the money necessary to develop the means to reliably travel to and from space and to operate there. Furthermore, because space is hard, spending enough money to avoid the foreseeable problems will not fend off all disasters. The cost of losses will have to be added to the operating cost of spaceflight systems.

At the moment we are engaged in what feels like a repeat of the Shuttle experience. Commercial crew and cargo are seen as revolutionary. They have captured imaginations. New companies will open up the space frontier as never before by bringing to bear the forces of entrepreneurship – or so it is said. Tourist hotels in space and Mars colonies are right around the corner. We will spend less to develop and take advantage of these revolutionary capabilities than we spend to fly proven expendable rockets and spacecraft; even proven expendable rockets and spacecraft that long ago amortized their development cost.

It is, apparently, a beguiling vision for many. I believe that it is naive at best. The failures we witnessed last week are not one-off events; we have witnessed others and will see many more. I can state this with confidence because commercial crew and cargo and Branson’s space tourism scheme are relying on new spaceflight systems, which always experience problems.

If we acknowledge that failures happen even when entrepreneurs are involved – as we now must – then we must tailor our programs to accommodate those failures. It is not enough to declare that we will not be stopped. It is important to investigate whether we should stop; that is, whether the accidents have revealed anything that undermines our basic assumptions.

I believe that it is time to end the commercial crew and cargo competition. That is not to say that we should end commercial crew and cargo flights. We must, however, adopt a realistic attitude toward them. Inexperienced companies flying barely proven systems are not superior to established companies and space systems. If established systems cost more, then we should be prepared to admit that there could be a really good reason; that those systems have worked through their teething troubles, which is bound to cost money.

We should seek to use the best available systems, and never put low cost ahead of safety or our program objectives. In fact, I would argue that cost should be a minor factor in the development of crew systems. Space is too important for it to be otherwise. We should not make the shortsightedness that manifested itself after the Apollo 1 fire a continuing element of U.S. space policy.

Were I to be appointed King of Space, I would award Boeing the ISS crew contract and SpaceX the ISS cargo contract right now. I would divert the funds presently being spent on multiple crew and cargo alternatives to those two companies strictly for those purposes. I would forbid SpaceX to test reusability during taxpayer-supported ISS cargo flights; the company could, however, proceed with a reusability test program on their own dime and, if they enjoyed success, I might allow reusability to become part of the ISS cargo delivery system.

I would require that Boeing build its CST-100 crew vehicle so that it could be converted into a cargo vehicle. It could thus serve as a back-up for SpaceX Dragon. I would also start work on a “Block I Orion” which could back up both CST-100 and Dragon.

Ultimately, I might do away with redundant systems, or systems that did not perform as hoped. So, for example, if the “Block I Orion” suffered recurrent failures that would require costly modifications to rectify, I might simply scrap it. Or, if I found that the CST-100-based cargo spacecraft performed better than Dragon, I might terminate the cargo contract with SpaceX.

The SpaceShip Two test failure requires special treatment here. I have long assumed that space tourism will fail as an industry. I anticipated a scenario like this: a cargo of billionaires burns up during reentry, the lawsuits fly, and most everyone cancels their reservations.

No one needs to fly a suborbital hop with five minutes of weightlessness, any more than they need to ride a roller coaster. It is important to acknowledge that roller coasters that kill their riders do not last long – even if some people persist in wanting to ride them.

I do not know if the SpaceShip Two crash on Halloween will kill space tourism. I do believe that it shows that the current SpaceShip Two design is flawed. It is too complicated, for one thing. Complicated piloted space systems suffer more trouble than simpler ones (no piloted space system can be truly simple). I have often wondered why Sir Richard Branson did not opt for a capsule design.

After Challenger, we made bad choices. We put band-aids on the Shuttle’s flaws and settled for much less than we were promised. We did not initiate work toward a Shuttle replacement, so that even now we have none. We behaved as though space is far less important that it is. It is probably asking too much – one still has the sense that we grossly undervalue space – but I hope that, in light of last week’s failures, we will find the wisdom to look long and hard at our present course and make whatever changes are required.

Epic Furious 7 and Hunger Games Trailers Top This Week’s Roundup

The final trailer! Less than a month until our Mockingjay rises! Huzzah!

Pause at: 0:24 for sad, scared Peeta. Natalie Dormer is in the background at 0:43, but we can feel her glare all the way over here. If that’s not a One True Pairing at 0:49 we don’t know what is.

Essential Quote: “I have a message for President Snow: If we burn, you burn with us!”—Katniss Everdeen

The Other One Everyone Is Talking About: Furious 7

For obvious reasons, there is a heavy sadness hanging on this trailer. Paul Walker died in a car accident nearly a year ago, and here we see him suiting up for his final turn as Brian O’Conner, the role that broke his career wide open 13 years ago in the first Fast and the Furious installment. No one could have anticipated the initial or enduring success of this franchise, but it gave us a steady drip of Walker’s SoCal good looks and easy charm for more than a decade. Here’s to you, Paul. May so many cars be raced, and so many more sequels be produced in your honor. In addition to the usual suspects, Furious 7 also welcomes Jason Statham, Djimon Hounsou, Tony Jaa, Ronda Rousey, and Kurt Russell into the action. And thank goodness, because the fastest film series in history didn’t have nearly enough of an Expendables edge to it before.

Pause at: 0:09 for our favorite Furious badass. Stop again at 0:19, 0:45, 0:53, 1:22, 1:28, 1:37, 1:56, 2:00, 2:14, and 2:18 for everything you’ve ever wanted.

Essential Quote: “Just when you think it couldn’t get any better, huh?”—Brian O’Conner

The One You Wish Everyone Would Talk About: Ex Machina

This project is exciting from 360 degrees. It’s directed by Alex Garland, the writer behind 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Dredd; it stars Oscar Isaac, and it’s scored by Geoff Barrow, the founder of Portishead. That is just nuts. Issac plays Nathan Bateman, the reclusive genius CEO of a major Internet search company, and a programmer in his employ named Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) has just won a competition to spend a week at his palatial mountain home. Upon arriving, Caleb learns he is to be the human component in a Turing test to evaluate, well, the humanity of Bateman’s latest AI project—an absolutely gorgeous droid named Ava (played by Alicia Vikander). Obviously, this movie exists because Ava’s capabilities and emotional/intellectual acumen exceed anything Bateman or Smith are prepared to confront. It’s man versus man. It’s man versus woman. It’s man versus machine. It’s man versus self! Ex Machina looks and sounds as seductive as Ava herself, and the notion of a psychological thriller love triangle between two guys and a stunning robot woman who’s more powerful than both her “suitors” combined sounds like every kind of awesome.

Pause at: 0:49 and 1:07 to meet Ava. Stop again at 1:20, 1:30, and 1:35 to see the haunting realization of a wickedly real AI being.

Essential Quote: “One day, the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossils.”—Nathan Bateman

The Next Netflix Project: Marco Polo

So this spot doesn’t give us a crazy amount of plot for Neflix’s next series event, but it sure does make it look enticing. Marco Polo focuses on the famed explorer as he makes his way through (and probably just tries to survive) the court of Kublai Khan, the 13th century Mongolian warlord and emperor. From the looks of this it will be brimming with dimly lit opium dens, sex, fighting, mysticism, and all the things we’ve come to expect from sword and sandals programming—except this time in China! The Mediterranean nations don’t get to have all the fun.

Pause at: Netflix is getting its HBO on at 0:22 with some majorly sweeping period set design. Ew at 0:26. Wethinks this is Kublai Kahn at 0:32. Casual naked cartwheeling at 0:45? Casual opium den hangout at 0:49? Really getting their HBO on at 1:01.

Essential Quote: “Marco, the blood of an adventurer courses through your veins, like a sickness. You will enjoy the greatest adventure of all.”

The Sci-Fi Adventure One: The Last Scout

Fifty years from now humanity has obliterated Earth via a nuclear war between China and the United States. Those who could afford to get off the planet through either private or commercial means have survived. Then things take a sharp turn towards Battlestar Galactica when the human remnant sets out for a new home world. It looks Boom! Pow! Space! Explosions! Ending worlds! Good enough! And it’s also a feel good story in that the whole project was funded via Indiegogo. A little science fiction survival story that could!

Pause at: 0:12, 0:18, 0:31, 0:57—way cool.

The Love Story: Comet

Wow. Considering the emotional impact of this trailer hit with the weight of an entire movie, Comet will either be a wondrous visual feast of well-executed romance or just an emotional death sentence. It follows the story of Dell (Justin Long) and Kimberly (Emmy Rossum), a couple who meets at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to watch a meteor shower. And that’s where it stops making a whole lot of linear sense. The narrative jumps across time, and seemingly a little bit of space, too. We see Dell and Kimberly alternately as head-over-heels for one another and on the brink of emotional ruin. And we would love to tell you more about it, but really that’s all we’ve got. One thing’s for sure: It’s great to see Justin Long broadening his range with this and the recent nightmare of Kevin Smith’s Tusk. He couldn’t just be a version of the Mac vs. PC guy forever

Pause at: 0:33, 0:47, 0:53, 0:56, and 1:41 for snaps of some of the luscious art direction happening in this movie.

Song: Tom Rosenthal, “It’s OK”

Essential Quote: “There are parallel universes out there where you are with me, and whatever universe that is, that’s the one my heart lives in.”—Dell

The Trippiest: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

This is an Iranian vampire western that takes place in a town called Bad City. Excited yet?? Bad City is home to all sorts of unsavory elements: streetwalkers, junkies, gangsters … and a lonely vampire that is quietly stalking the residents of this hopeless ghost town. This trailer looks a bit like if Robert Rodriguez directed Let The Right One In and set it in the Middle East. But instead, it’s the first movie from director Lily Amirpour, and it draws inspiration from horror, graphic novels, spaghetti westerns, and the “Iranian New Wave.” We didn’t realize it before, but now that we’ve gotten a taste this is obviously a soup of inspirations we can’t live without.

Pause at: 0:19, 0:27, and 0:44 to see a girl who can most definitely protect herself on the mean streets. Stop at :49, :50, 1:03, and 1:15 for more unique creepies.

Essential Quote: “I’m bad.”—The Girl (Sheila Vand)

The Quirky One: Zero Motivation

Ever wish there were more send-ups of the boring day-to-day operations carried out by women in the Israeli Defense Force? Us too! And our wishes have been granted in the form of Zero Motivation, the first directorial effort from Israeli filmmaker Talya Lavie. It zooms in on the fake lives of several women stationed at a remote desert base with nothing much to do but play Minesweeper and shoot each other with staple guns until their two year term of service is up. It’s sort of like Office Space meets Sgt. Bilko, but with a more acutely sharpened satirical sensibility. Sounds like fun!

Pause at: 0:19. Hard at work. The thrill of service at 0:24, 0:37, 1:26 and 1:48.

Essential Quote: “We’re laidback around here.”

The Small Screen Standout: Babylon

Perhaps one of the greatest elements of this Golden Age of television is the influx of international influence on our domestic shows, and direct access to imports from other countries—mainly the UK. Another great externality? Top-notch film directors and performers making the jump to small screen because juicy roles in serials are as compelling—if not more so—as the movie scripts getting thrown at them. And thanks to all that, here we have Babylon. It’s helmed by Danny Boyle and stars, Brit Marling (swoon), James Nesbitt, Jesse Armstrong, and Paterson Joseph, among others. It’s a comedic drama, but because it’s British, still looks a lot more Luther than Brooklyn Nine-Nine in it’s sensibilities—consider, perhaps, the underrated 2009 one-season wonder The Unusuals for reference. The London police force is suffering a serious image problem, and Chief Constable Richard Miller (Nesbitt) has hired new media whiz kid named Liz Garvey (Marling) to bolster its public relations arm. Unfortunately, a massive outbreak of violence erupts right as Operation Goodwill is set to take effect. This six-part series looks lean, mean and well-worth investing in.

Pause at: 0:27. Street riots are just so bad for business. Look at that Nesbitt scowl at 0:30 and 0:34!

Essential Quote: “Adolph Hitler would sometimes appoint two people to do the same job just to see who was best.”—Liz Garvey, drawing inspiration from all the right places

The Scary One: Starry Eyes

It’s that old familiar story: Girl goes to Hollywood with dreams of making it big … only to sell her soul for fame and transform into a perversion of nature. You know, normal stuff.

Pause at: 0:52. Run away, Sarah! Then at 0:54—we said run away, Sarah! 1:09, 1:20, 1:41, and 1:53 are what happen when you don’t just run away!

Essential Quote: “Sarah, if you can’t fully let go, how can you ever transform into something else?”

A Word on Last Week’s Failures

In May 1968, during its first run in theaters, the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey captured my six-year-old imagination. A few months later, in the real world of spaceflight, Apollo 8 orbited the moon. I watched in wonder on Christmas Eve as an overexposed Earth glared from the black & white TV screen in our kitchen. So began a love of spaceflight that has now spanned 46 years.

I didn’t know as I listened to the astronauts taking turns reading from Genesis that not everyone was as enthralled by spaceflight as I had become, nor that we had already begun to retreat from the moon before we landed there for the first time. Four years after Apollo 8, Apollo 17 returned to Earth, and the era of piloted space exploration drew to a close.

The Space Shuttle always made me a bit suspicious. I suppose that was because it looked too much like an airplane to be a proper spaceship. I cheered, of course, when it detached from its 747 carrier aircraft for the first time in August 1977. I knew that it would soar into space in a year or two, but the fact that it fell to Earth instead of soaring into space right then left me cold. Still, Nova programs on PBS and many articles in magazines promised me that the amazing Space Shuttle would be so capable that to keep its payload bay filled NASA would have to build giant solar power satellites and space colonies.

Like many space fans, I was thoroughly primed when at last the Space Shuttle Columbia flew in April 1981. Sure, that first flight was three or four years late. Sure, there were technical problems even as Columbia soared aloft. NASA would beat those, though, and soon amazing things would happen. We might even launch humans to Mars in the 1990s.

The delays and problems continued. Die-hard space fans defended the Space Shuttle, pointing out that space was hard and that the Shuttle’s new way of doing business was bound to prevail. President Ronald Reagan even went so far (in January 1984) as to call on NASA to build a Space Station by 1994. As 1986 dawned, we looked forward to a teacher and a journalist in space. We would see launched from the Shuttle’s payload bay the Galileo Jupiter Orbiter and Probe on a mighty Centaur-G’ upper stage, unprecedented views of the cosmos from the Hubble Space Telescope, and numerous satellite servicing missions and money-making commercial payloads and satellites.

Of course, none of that happened quite as planned. On 28 January 1986, soon after I started graduate school, I arrived home from my office hours to learn that the Space Shuttle Challenger had been destroyed a little more than a minute after launch.

The Challenger accident was attributed to “NASA ‘can-do’ culture,” but the fact was that the fundamentals underpinning the Space Shuttle were flawed from the start. It could never fly routinely. It could not operate more cheaply than expendable rockets. It could not launch the Space Station as then designed.

The decisions that dictated the Shuttle’s capabilities could be traced back to 27 January 1967, when the Apollo 1 fire undermined confidence in NASA. That led Congress to make big cuts in funding meant to give the space agency a future.

The Nixon Administration and Congresses during the 1970s filled the gap those cuts created with the Space Shuttle, which had been proposed originally as a Space Station crew rotation and resupply vehicle. They refused, however, to pay for the Space Station that gave the Shuttle its purpose. The Shuttle instead got a new purpose: to do “practical” things in space that would “benefit” Americans and do them for less than the cost of expendable rocket launches.

The Space Shuttle should have taught us a lesson: if one seeks to travel into space, one must avoid cutting corners. Space is indeed hard: one must spend the money necessary to develop the means to reliably travel to and from space and to operate there. Furthermore, because space is hard, spending enough money to avoid the foreseeable problems will not fend off all disasters. The cost of losses will have to be added to the operating cost of spaceflight systems.

At the moment we are engaged in what feels like a repeat of the Shuttle experience. Commercial crew and cargo are seen as revolutionary. They have captured imaginations. New companies will open up the space frontier as never before by bringing to bear the forces of entrepreneurship – or so it is said. Tourist hotels in space and Mars colonies are right around the corner. We will spend less to develop and take advantage of these revolutionary capabilities than we spend to fly proven expendable rockets and spacecraft; even proven expendable rockets and spacecraft that long ago amortized their development cost.

It is, apparently, a beguiling vision for many. I believe that it is naive at best. The failures we witnessed last week are not one-off events; we have witnessed others and will see many more. I can state this with confidence because commercial crew and cargo and Branson’s space tourism scheme are relying on new spaceflight systems, which always experience problems.

If we acknowledge that failures happen even when entrepreneurs are involved – as we now must – then we must tailor our programs to accommodate those failures. It is not enough to declare that we will not be stopped. It is important to investigate whether we should stop; that is, whether the accidents have revealed anything that undermines our basic assumptions.

I believe that it is time to end the commercial crew and cargo competition. That is not to say that we should end commercial crew and cargo flights. We must, however, adopt a realistic attitude toward them. Inexperienced companies flying barely proven systems are not superior to established companies and space systems. If established systems cost more, then we should be prepared to admit that there could be a really good reason; that those systems have worked through their teething troubles, which is bound to cost money.

We should seek to use the best available systems, and never put low cost ahead of safety or our program objectives. In fact, I would argue that cost should be a minor factor in the development of crew systems. Space is too important for it to be otherwise. We should not make the shortsightedness that manifested itself after the Apollo 1 fire a continuing element of U.S. space policy.

Were I to be appointed King of Space, I would award Boeing the ISS crew contract and SpaceX the ISS cargo contract right now. I would divert the funds presently being spent on multiple crew and cargo alternatives to those two companies strictly for those purposes. I would forbid SpaceX to test reusability during taxpayer-supported ISS cargo flights; the company could, however, proceed with a reusability test program on their own dime and, if they enjoyed success, I might allow reusability to become part of the ISS cargo delivery system.

I would require that Boeing build its CST-100 crew vehicle so that it could be converted into a cargo vehicle. It could thus serve as a back-up for SpaceX Dragon. I would also start work on a “Block I Orion” which could back up both CST-100 and Dragon.

Ultimately, I might do away with redundant systems, or systems that did not perform as hoped. So, for example, if the “Block I Orion” suffered recurrent failures that would require costly modifications to rectify, I might simply scrap it. Or, if I found that the CST-100-based cargo spacecraft performed better than Dragon, I might terminate the cargo contract with SpaceX.

The SpaceShip Two test failure requires special treatment here. I have long assumed that space tourism will fail as an industry. I anticipated a scenario like this: a cargo of billionaires burns up during reentry, the lawsuits fly, and most everyone cancels their reservations.

No one needs to fly a suborbital hop with five minutes of weightlessness, any more than they need to ride a roller coaster. It is important to acknowledge that roller coasters that kill their riders do not last long – even if some people persist in wanting to ride them.

I do not know if the SpaceShip Two crash on Halloween will kill space tourism. I do believe that it shows that the current SpaceShip Two design is flawed. It is too complicated, for one thing. Complicated piloted space systems suffer more trouble than simpler ones (no piloted space system can be truly simple). I have often wondered why Sir Richard Branson did not opt for a capsule design.

After Challenger, we made bad choices. We put band-aids on the Shuttle’s flaws and settled for much less than we were promised. We did not initiate work toward a Shuttle replacement, so that even now we have none. We behaved as though space is far less important that it is. It is probably asking too much – one still has the sense that we grossly undervalue space – but I hope that, in light of last week’s failures, we will find the wisdom to look long and hard at our present course and make whatever changes are required.