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Titanic Director to Make Battle Angel Movie
thelizman writes "Director James Cameron, who gave us the Terminator movies (I, II, III) , Aliens, The Abyss, and brought Dark Angel to the small screen will give us a new treat. According to AP, Cameron will direct a live action + cgi movie based on the Battle Angel Alita (GUNNM) book series. Slated for release in 2005-06, the movie will be available in 3D as well as 2D versions. Cameron will be using 3D technology developed for IMAX films to deliver the 3D versions (and on IMAX maybe?). Another twist is that the lead character will be CG, while other roles will be filled by live actors." Update: 11/25 22:42 GMT by T : Sunny Dubey writes "Terminator 3 was *not* directed by James Cameron. It was directed by Jonathan Mostow."
The Wikipedia entry is 4 paragraphs long but tells you NOTHING about the story. If you've have no clue what Battle Angel Alita is about, read more here.
For a good overview of Battle Angel Alita, see Vaz's take on the main character. You have an ideal killing machine, a cyborg supersoldier discarded after an ancient interplanetary war, who is resurrected with her old skills but without old memories, who fundamentally cannot reconcile her bloodlust with her kindness, who is repeatedly used, abused, and thrown away by greater powers and who accepts it because she has nothing to live for, who repeatedly finds places that she could call home or people that understand her and then loses them immediately, who is forced to learn one-limbed fighting from frequent experience, and who ultimately sacrifices herself to save the people that hate her guts.
Personally, I would be surprised if Cameron can do justice to the series.
Terminator 4? Wow! I wonder what they're going to call that one? Terminator 4: The End of All Credibility?
I can just see the trailer now... animated words flying out at the screen:
"This summer... continuity.... is... history!"
I highly recommend picking up an issue of this month's Wired magazine, which hit the shelves the other day. It's guest-edited by James Cameron, and focuses on exploration, from undersea to subterranean to outer space. There's an interview with Burt Rutan, and also an interview with a renown cave explorer/inventor who's designing a submarine to search for life on Europa.
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Here's an excerpt from Cameron's intro piece, which I found to be quite powerful:
Space is a vacuum. There is, by definition, nothing there. When we talk about exploring space, we really mean exploring the objects careening around in space - planets, moons, the occasional comet. So space is a hurdle, an ocean that must be crossed to reach a destination. Unfortunately, for three-quarters of the space age it has been treated as a destination in and of itself.
The last time humans crossed space to a destination was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. In the 32 years since, no man has seen, with his own eyes, Earth as that beautiful, solitary blue sphere, and - reality check - no woman has ever seen it at all. We've been only to low Earth orbit since 1972, and from that altitude of 220 miles, looking at the 7,900-mile-diameter Earth is like peering at a basketball with your cheek pressed against it. Yes, you'll see curvature, but you're not seeing the whole thing. We've spent 32 years "exploring space" in low Earth orbit. Exploring nothing. To stay in orbit you have to go 17,000 mph, or Mach 25. So we've spent three decades going nowhere fast.
It's taken people a long time to wake up to this fact, but we finally have. Now Exploration with a capital E is in the air again, in what will hopefully become some kind of renaissance. Eleven billion hits to NASA's Web site during the Spirit and Opportunity rovers' exploration of Mars is an astounding groundswell of support. NASA is still blinking in surprise, trying to figure out why people love the rovers yet care less about the construction of the International Space Station than a new interchange outside Cleveland. It is only now sinking in that one is exploration and the other is, well construction.
If the next step is to send humans to Mars, then we must reexamine our culture of averting risk and assigning blame. We don't need any miracle breakthroughs in technology. The techniques are well understood. Sure, it takes money, but distributed over time it doesn't require any more than we're spending now. What is lacking is the will, the mandate, and the sense of purpose.
Something interesting is happening right now as you're reading this. NASA is scrambling, under presidential orders, to prepare for a renewed vision of human exploration beyond Earth. They've generated a plan, and it's a good one. I've sat on the NASA Advisory Council for the past 18 months, which is surely the most interesting period since the Apollo days. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe has fundamentally reorganized the agency. NASA is figuring out post-shuttle solutions to get people into orbit, how to do the heavy lifting to get big payloads (like interplanetary vehicles) up there, and all the other critical tasks to create human exploration space-systems architecture.
The public understandably asks how this will be paid for. The answer comes with some good news and some bad. The bad news is that space shuttle operations and space station construction and operations (in other words, current human spaceflight) is sucking up about $8 billion of NASA's $15 billion annual budget. The good news is that when the shuttle is retired (2010) and the space station completes its mission (2014), $8 billion a year will be freed up without adding a dime to the NASA budget. Over time, one funding wedge tapers, and the other widens. From 2014 to 2024, you've got a cool $80 bil to send folks to Mars.
The problem is that government projects are subject