Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2016 i Empire

PARAMOUNT CEO BARRY Diller called an emergency meeting in March 1979. In attendance were a team of lawyers, a squad of accountants and Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects supremo behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. On the agenda: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film that was careering into disaster. Theatre owners, excited by the possibility of a lucrative holiday-season blockbuster, had paid Paramount $30 million to open Trek on December 7. As Trumbull, under a binding contract to the studio, sat down, Diller explained. They needed his help. The $5 million he’d spent on visual effects had produced no usable footage — Paramount’s holiday-season tentpole was on the verge of collapse. “If we don’t deliver the movie on time, they (the theatre owners)…

MY PERSONAL JOURNEY with Mr. Spock began in 1964, when my father, Leonard Nimoy, brought home some Polaroid photos of himself as the space-age alien he would be playing in a TV pilot. I was eight years old at the time and at night, instead of doing homework and practising the clarinet, I was watching TV shows like The Wild Wild West, Get Smart, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Lost In Space. So when I saw that first picture of Dad as Spock, I thought to myself, “Holy cow, this is awesome!” Of course, NBC, the network of Andy Williams, Bob Hope and Sing Along With Mitch, rejected that Star Trek pilot but gave series creator Gene Roddenberry the green light to have another go at it, with the condition…

BY THE TIME the fourth Star Trek movie came along, the series was in a rut: box-office figures had slumped from the original film’s $139 million to The Search For Spock’s $87 million. Producer Harve Bennett, therefore, was charged with widening the appeal of the franchise. After the heaviness of the third film, The Voyage Home marks a major shift in tone, veering into broad comedy as the Enterprise crew head to 1980s California on a mission to extract a pair of humpback whales. It’s a fish-out-of-water caper, about cetaceans (not fish) out of water. To break the story, Paramount hired Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes, two young writers who had submitted a few romantic-comedy scripts to the studio but weren’t particularly interested in pointy ears. Their brief was to…

DURING THE FINAL decade of their voyages, Kirk and crew had battled an age-old nemesis (Khan), destroyed the Enterprise, saved Earth (and the whales, to boot) and even met God (well, kinda). In 1991, with the series’ 25th anniversary incoming, the stage was set for what was planned as their final farewell, given they really were too old for this shit, and The Next Generation had by now been up and running since 1987. So what could be the final challenge for Kirk, Spock, Bones and the rest? Their greatest yet, it turned out: peace. With the Klingons. Narratively, it made sense. Displaying the kind of wider-universe, joined-up thinking that pre-dated Marvel by almost two decades, the original crew’s space-sayonara set up the events which would allow a Klingon, namely…

DURING THE ’90s, Star Trek was everywhere. The success of The Next Generation led to two further spin-offs set during the same 24th-century time period in different parts of the galaxy, and the unprecedented situation of, for seven years, two Star Trek series airing at the same time. Those seven years were the entire run of Deep Space Nine, which aired concurrently with The Next Generation from ’93 to ’94, then with Voyager from ’95 until DS9’s conclusion in ’99. But with Voyager then Enterprise drawing ever-dwindling viewing figures, time was called on the franchise. Audience fatigue, it seemed, had finally set in. “Four years is still a great run on network television,” says Scott Bakula, Enterprise’s Captain Jonathan Archer. From the start of The Next Generation to the end…

1 For three points, fill in the blanks of this famous quote: “Space: the final frontier. These are the _________ of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore ________ new worlds, to seek out new life and new _______, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” 2 Which Academy Award winner asked for a role, then became a recurring character on The Next Generation? 3 In Voyager, what does “Blue Alert” signify? 4 In Enterprise, who or what was Porthos? 5 What is the Christian name of Lieutenant Uhura? 6 Which Star Trek: The Next Generation regular appears in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country? 7 What colour is Vulcan blood? 8 Which one-time Dracula appeared in three episodes of Deep Space Nine as Bajoran politician Jaro…

WITH HIS ROTHCO messenger bag, “Dammit!” catchphrase and ability to stay up all night without so much as a sip of a Monster Energy, terrorist-battling hero Jack Bauer is synonymous with 24. So when Kiefer Sutherland decided to hang up Bauer’s gun after nine seasons and a TV movie, you may have thought the show had run out of time. Think again. “We felt real-time as a narrative engine was something that still had life in it,” says executive producer Howard Gordon. “It was a matter of finding a really interesting new character to put at the show’s centre.” That character is Eric Carter (Corey Hawkins), a Special Forces soldier who, while serving in the Middle East, was part of a top-secret mission to assassinate a terrorist chief. When 24:…

BUSTER MOON __ MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY “Buster owns a theatre which isn’t doing so well, so he decides to put on a big singing competition. His main personality trait is this unbelievable optimism. Everything’s out of his league, but that does not stop him at all. Which is why I went for a small animal, and [Illumination Entertainment boss] Chris Meledandri and I just flipping love koalas. I wanted Matthew because he’s got this lyrical, colourful voice that I hadn’t heard before in animation. There’s also a lot of energy: he’s a pretty fierce bloke.” ASH __ SCARLETT JOHANSSON “Ash begins the film in a relationship with another porcupine: they’re this punky-goth duo. But her boyfriend is just a jerk who takes every opportunity to crush her enthusiasm. Ash was inspired…

“YOU DON'T HAVE to be an American to understand race,” says Jeff Nichols, “and you certainly don’t have to be American to understand love.” The director’s fifth feature, Loving, features a black Irishwoman (Ruth Negga) and a white Australian (Joel Edgerton) as a mixed-race Virginian couple whose ‘illegal’ marriage in 1958 led to a ten-year court battle, ultimately forcing a change to the US Constitution. Nichols hopes the film’s message will resonate with people around the globe (and it sounds like the stuff of Oscars), but what’s most striking about it is that it refuses to take the usual route: no soaring music, no triumphant speeches. “My goal as a filmmaker is to make an emotional connection with the audience,” he explains. “Y’know, have them feel something specific that I’ve…

YES HELEN O’HARA, EDITOR AT LARGE THE END OF X-Men: Apocalypse finally gave us a classic X-Men line-up: Cyclops, Storm, Jean Grey, Beast and Nightcrawler, with Professor X as player-manager off the pitch. But it also created major problems for the next film. We now have an untried cast, and we’re still stuck with a period setting, which offers no particular narrative advantage and loads of drawbacks. So what now? Move too far forward in time and you have to recast the young stars again, as well as inducing Stewart and/or McKellen to return. But move only as far as the ’90s — the plan screenwriter Simon Kinberg has announced — and you are, absurdly, looking at McAvoy and Fassbender playing men in their late fifties (mutant genes notwithstanding), not…

WHEN MAT WHITECROSS was approached to direct the forthcoming Oasis documentary, Supersonic, he had one question: would Noel and Liam be involved? Whitecross knew the only way to properly tell the story of the band who reshaped the landscape of British music in the 1990s was to have the Gallagher brothers, with all their wit, feuds and fury, at its centre. The siblings fell out when Oasis split in 2009 and now only communicate via barbed potshots on Twitter and in the press (in late May, Liam tweeted a photo of Noel with the caption “Potato”). But, when Whitecross got in touch, both agreed to participate. “They were both very keen that it be about the music,” the director says, “and not just the shenanigans.” With the Oscar-winning team behind…

OUT 22 JULY CERT. PG / 117 MINS. DIRECTOR Steven Spielberg CAST Mark Rylance, Rebecca Hall, Bill Hader, Ruby Barnhill, Jemaine Clement, Penelope Wilton, Rafe Spall PLOT In an anachronistic London, young Sophie (Barnhill) is snatched from her orphanage bed by a giant (Rylance), who takes her back to his land. Sophie learns he is a Big Friendly Giant, but that even bigger giants are hungry for human ‘beans’. The pair try to protect the world from them, using the BFG’s talent for storing and delivering dreams. ADAPTING ROALD DAHL has become easier since 1990 — the year the author died. When he was alive he was famously opinionated, raging at filmmakers for altering plot details or casting actors he didn’t approve of, then publicly campaigning against the films if…

OUT 15 JULY CERT. 15 / 88 MINS. DIRECTOR Max Adams CAST Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Claire Forlani, Bruce Willis PLOT To get his ex Karen (Forlani) out of trouble with Mob boss Eddie (Willis) after a heist goes wrong, career criminal Jack (Gosselaar) gets together a crew to pull off a daring heist to lift valuable gems. Can he do this and keep his new relationship with nice vet Jenna (Lydia Hull) intact? MORE AT A HOME in a Runcorn video shop circa 1994 than on a big screen in 2016, Precious Cargo is a compendium of DTV action tropes masquerading as a movie. Based on his short, Max Adams’ debut feature pitches — for the first time — Saved By The Bell’s Mark-Paul Gosselaar (he was Zack Morris) against Die…

OUT 1 JULY CERT. 15 / 105 MINS. DIRECTOR Florian Gallenberger CAST Emma Watson, Daniel Brühl, Michael Nyqvist, Richenda Carey PLOT When Chilean president Salvador Allende is overthrown in 1973, Lufthansa stewardess Lena (Watson) poses as a believer to investigate the notorious Colonia Dignidad cult run by Paul Schäfer (Nyqvist). She believes they’re holding and torturing her boyfriend, Daniel (Brühl). GERMAN DIRECTOR FLORIAN Gallenberger faced the wrath of Japanese ultranationalists by exposing, in 2009’s John Rabe, the atrocities committed by the country’s army after the 1937 Battle Of Nanking. Such was the controversy in Japan, the film failed to find a theatrical distributor there, although it was well received in the rest of the world. However, Gallenberger will find few champions for this Chilean-set historical travesty that, in crafting a…

OUT 29 JULY CERT. U / 103 MINS. DIRECTORS Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane CAST Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Hayden Rolence, Ed O’Neill, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Idris Elba, Dominic West PLOT One year after she helped reunite Marlin (Brooks) and Nemo (Rolence), Dory (DeGeneres) is settled into her new life. But when some long-forgotten childhood memories resurface, she sets out to find her parents, with help from her new friends. First stop: the Monterey Marine Life Institute. SPARE A THOUGHT for those wildly successful bazillionaires at Pixar. Yes, the Californian dream factory is one of the most respected studios in history — a virtual byword for a specific brand of boundless creativity — but in recent years, and in anticipation of their 17th feature, they seem perennially to have something…

AMAZON PRIME NEW EPISODES MONDAYS EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 SHOWRUNNER Sam Catlin CAST Dominic Cooper, Joseph Gilgun, Ruth Negga, Lucy Griffiths, W. Earl Brown, Derek Wilson, Graham McTavish, Anatol Yusef PLOT Small-town Texan preacher Jesse Custer (Cooper) is struggling with his Catholic faith when a supernatural entity takes up residence in his body, granting him divine powers. WHERE MANY FILMMAKERS have failed — including Kevin Smith and Sam Mendes — Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Breaking Bad’s Sam Catlin have succeeded. They’ve finally managed to bring Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s comic book series — a mix of killers, lunatics, freaks and rogue deities — to the screen. The obvious thought initially is: surely it can’t work. But, somehow, it does. At least, for the most part. Eschewing what would probably…

THE MOST STRIKING thing about the Star Trek Beyond trailers — aside from the U.S.S. Enterprise getting blasted to smithereens (again) — is Sofia Boutella. Yet you can’t even recognise her. As Jaylah, a fearsome warrior who allies with the Enterprise crew against Idris Elba’s Federation-hating Krall, Boutella is plastered in moon-white make-up, with bright yellow irises and jagged black facial tattoos. With apologies for the mental image, she looks like what might be the result from the mating of Darth Maul and one — or both — of the twins from The Matrix Reloaded. Out of the prosthetics, Boutella isn’t exactly fearsome, although despite being very friendly, she is sort of intimidating. She’s extremely… still. She has an uncommon economy of movement thanks to 23 years of dance training.…

AMID THE SNOW-CAPPED MOUNTAINS and sprawling pine forests of Valdez, Alaska, in May 1993, Steven Seagal was taking charge. For the first time in his career, the martial artist-turned-action star commanded his own crew, having been handed the reins to a $50 million Warner Bros. picture, On Deadly Ground. This was a passion project for Seagal: an action movie with an environmental conscience, combining the martial-arts aggression for which he had become renowned, with a political cause that was close to his heart. It was also an ambitious balancing act, involving an arduous five-week location shoot requiring explosions, gun battles, oil fires and sled chases. The locations were remote, often inaccessible by road and in a subarctic environment where the snowfall averaged 300 inches a year. Seagal and his crew…

01.16 GREEN GIANT __ The film has two notable references to Ryan Reynolds’ other superhero role, Green Lantern — this not-canon trading card, and a line about an animated costume — but Miller says there could have been more. “Green Lantern stuff came up frequently,” he says. “That comes out of Ryan’s deep emotional scars. I felt there was a percentage of that you could get away with.” › 07.34 TOTAL CAR-NAGE __ The fight inside a car which opens the movie is an expanded version of the test footage which leaked onto the internet in August 2014 and, such was the public’s enthusiastic response, prompted a previously tentative Fox to finally greenlight a Deadpool film. “The test footage was me pulling from the script and condensing it,” says Miller.…

GIVEN THAT 95 per cent of 10 Cloverfield Lane takes place in an underground bunker, director Dan Trachtenberg and production designer Ramsey Avery knew they had to create a set that would be easy to shoot in, crammed with memorable details, and function as — yes — its own character. Built as a complete entity on a New Orleans soundstage, here they talk us through some of the bunker’s key features, and a few hidden extras... BUNKER BACK STORY __ Avery worked out a history for the bunker, surmising that Howard started building it around the early ’90s, after the birth of his daughter, Megan. “The twist is that it gets stuck somewhere around 2000, when his family abandoned him,” he says. “Nothing’s changed since then. You get a sense…

FIFTY YEARS AGO the world was first introduced to the crew of the Starship Enterprise, their five-year mission, and the various forms of new life (both friend and foe) they met on their celestial travels. And over that time William Shatner, the star and captain (no matter what else he did in film, television or music) has been, and will forever be, best known to millions as James Tiberius Kirk. A privileged position? He certainly thinks so, as he happily told Empire when we spoke to him about the franchise reaching its half-century. Does it feel like 50 years since you first sat in the Captain’s chair? I’ve been in a multimedia extravaganza for 50 years and it’s gone by so quickly that it’s unimaginable. And it’s also a major…

HYPOSPRAY Anyone who’s scared of needles, rest easy — Star Trek tells us by the 23rd century you won’t have to worry about them. Instead the Enterprise doctors use a ‘hypospray’, imagined for The Original Series because NBC had banned showing hypodermic syringes being used. And the good news? It already exists. The jet-injector has been around a long time, but isn’t used widely because of the risk of spreading infection. But in 2012 MIT unveiled a device that delivers a jet as thin as a mosquito’s proboscis, can extract fluid from the body, or deliver medicine in powder form. So why do hospitals still use needles? Conspiracy! TRACTOR BEAM Don’t get too excited, we’re still some way off capturing passing spaceships. But if you’re satisfied by scientists moving tiny…

GENE RODDENBERRY spent two decades in the wilderness after Star Trek was cancelled, punctuated by the personal disaster that was The Motion Picture. He made his living on residuals, on failed pilots, on lectures and conventions. But everywhere he went he was hailed as a visionary — the man who created Star Trek. Paramount, when it shunted him out of any controlling role in the films, gave him a corner office on the studio lot befitting this public status, where he would sit and drink as he corresponded with fans. Even as Star Trek films succeeded at the box office, there seemed no prospect that the franchise would live again on the small screen. But by the show’s 20th anniversary, The Voyage Home was in cinemas and Paramount had a…

JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK BY IAN FREER, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR James Kirk is many things — a lover, fighter, nerd (he was once called “a stack of books on legs”), commander, joker. Kirk is the people’s captain, a space cowboy who packs three lifetimes into one mission. By comparison, Jean-Luc ‘Never Leaves The Bridge’ Picard is a crushing bore. When Picard was 37, he was captaining a small-fry freighter, The Stargazer. When Kirk was 37, he was captaining the STARSHIP FUCKING ENTERPRISE. Kirk is a leader, not a follower. Loyal to a fault, he has a strong moral centre — his hero is Abraham Lincoln — but is not above flouting the rules, cheating his way through the Kobayashi Maru test in Wrath Of Khan. He is a tactical genius, beating Vulcans…

IOOK WHO’S BEAMING down,” Eddie Murphy says to Halle Berry during a romantic Star Trek-watching interlude in 1992’s Boomerang. “Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and Yeoman Johnson. Now, doesn’t Yeoman Johnson know he’s going to get killed? If I was Yeoman Johnson I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m not going!’” It’s a succinct explanation of the plight of the expendable crew members who accompany Star Trek’s major stars on away missions and end up meeting an untimely end to up the dramatic stakes. There never was a Yeoman Johnson: in the episode Murphy and Berry are watching it’s actually Crewman Watson who buys it. But names are irrelevant. Watson and his ilk have come to be known by the collective moniker of the redshirt. Redshirts — named for the colour of Starfleet’s operations, engineering…

MEL GIBSON HAS played just three leading roles in the past ten years. You can put that down to a conflation of events — several very public meltdowns, an ugly divorce, ageing — but his grizzled, kick-ass performance in crime thriller Blood Father suggests he has lost none of his mojo. Directed by Jean-François Richet (Mesrine Parts 1 & 2), the super-brutal film stars Gibson as John Link, a recovering alcoholic and ex-con. He’s living a quiet life, until estranged daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty) crawls out of the woodwork, having accidentally killed Mexican-gangster boyfriend Jonah (Diego Luna). Pursued by Jonah’s henchmen, the two go on the lam, looking up some (craggy) old faces from Link’s criminal heyday along the way. In a world of digital effects and superheroes, John Link…

FROM YOUTUBE TO Hollywood: director David Sandberg’s rise to the studio big leagues could be the movie underdog story of the year. After test-screening audiences screamed the roof off, Warner Bros. shifted his feature debut from September to a summer-holiday release, and with justification: Lights Out is a frighteningly original nail-scraper with a monster to die for. “It’s any filmmaker’s dream to make a short and see it turned into a feature,” Sandberg tells Empire. “But this has been like Super Mario Bros., when you get to the Warp Zone and jump to the final level.” He’s not kidding. A year ago, he was still uploading horror shorts, shot in his Gothenburg flat with wife Lotta Losten, onto YouTube. Entered into the Bloody Cuts contest, Lights Out was inspired by…

FIRST LOOK EXCLUSIVE THE ACCOUNTANT OUT 4 NOVEMBER “I’M TERRIFIED,” ADMITS Gavin O’Connor. “I’m honestly terrified.” His concern: how people will react to his new movie, The Accountant. At first glance, it simply seems like a thriller with a cracking hook: Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, mild-mannered accountant by day, deadly assassin by night. But when you consider that Christian is autistic, the reason for the director’s trepidation becomes clear. And even though he and Affleck spent months researching autism, he’s aware there could be a storm coming. “Any time you’re dealing with sensitive subject matter, someone’s going to take issue, and that’s okay,” he says. “We wanted to make sure we got this right.” The project had been in limbo since 2011. “There were a lot of cold feet,”…

OUT NOW CERT. 12A / 120 MINS. DIRECTOR Roland Emmerich CAST Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, William Fichtner, Angelababy PLOT Twenty years on from the global devastation wrought by the alien nasties of Independence Day, Earth has united to adapt and adopt all the leftover technology to prepare for the retaliation. On S July, naturally, it comes. And it comes hard. AS DUBAI’S BURJ Khalifa lances down from a fiery sky into the London Eye, tossed like a used popsicle stick amid the gravity-churning fury of a 3,000 mile-wide, claw-shaped alien mother-of-all-battles-ship, Jeff Goldblum tiredly absorbs it all and deadpans: “They like to get the landmarks.” If his David Levinson — one-time computer guy, now Director of the Earth Space Defense — exudes a wonderful,…

OUT NOW CERT. U / 91 MINS. DIRECTORS Chris Renaud, Yarrow Cheney CAST Louis CK, Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart, Ellie Kemper, Lake Bell, Jenny Slate, Bobby Moynihan, Steve Coogan, Albert Brooks PLOT When home-loving pet Max (Louis CK) and his owner’s new dog Duke (Stonestreet) get lost in New York, the rest of the animals in their apartment block then head out into the city on a rescue mission. A FEATURE-LENGTH animation in which a favourite pet takes a dislike to a new arrival and contrives to get them both lost in an inhospitable world. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. And, if you think not — replace the word “pet” with “toy”, then think on it some more. The similarities to Toy Story, beyond even that initial…

OUT 8 JULY CERT. TBC / 110 MINS. DIRECTOR Nicolas Winding Refn CAST Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Keanu Reeves PLOT Sixteen-year-old Jesse (Fanning) arrives in Los Angeles with dreams of being a model. Encouraged by make-up artist Ruby (Malone) she becomes the It Girl among high-end fashion photographers, her youthful freshness spiking the jealousies of models Gigi (Heathcote) and Sarah (Lee). It can only end in tears. Or cannibalism. IT BARELY SEEMED possible, but Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is an even more extreme exercise in high style, ponderous pacing and stomach-churning grue than Only God Forgives. And, unsurprisingly, it became the most divisive film of Cannes 2016, prompting both boos/walk-outs and standing ovations in roughly equal measures. Imagine America’s Next Top Model written by…

OUT NOW CERT. 12A / 123 MINS. DIRECTOR Duncan Jones CAST Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell PLOT After the death of their own world, a race of Orcs pass through a magical portal into the land of Azeroth. Led by a despotic mage, the Orcs try to conquer Azeroth, but one among their number wants to broker peace. WHERE DOES ONE even start in turning the phenomenon of World Of Warcraft into a movie? The game, played by millions but a mystery to millions more, has countless characters of all sorts of fantastical races — dwarves, elves, werewolves, ghouls and anthropomorphic pandas. It has no specific plot and no end point in sight. That Duncan Jones, who handled complex narratives in Moon and Source Code,…

SKY LIVING STARTS 9PM , 12 JULY EPISODES VIEWED 1-13 SHOWRUNNER Adi Hasak CAST Jennifer Lopez, Ray Liotta, Drea de Matteo, Warren Kole, Dayo Okeniyi, Hampton Fluker, Vincent Laresca, Sarah Jeffery PLOT Harlee Santos (Lopez) is part of a corrupt New York vice squad. Busted by the FBI, she is forced to turn informant on some of her oldest friends. THE INITIAL SIGNS for Jennifer Lopez’s new police drama are good — it’s plotted like a mixture of The Departed and Serpico, and looks to GoodFellas and The Sopranos in its casting. Sadly, it can’t live up to its promise. Packed with tired clichés, there’s very little in Jennifer Lopez’s new police drama you haven’t seen before. However, if you’re a fan of cop shows where grizzled detectives are asked…

OUT NOW FORMATS: PC, PS4, XB1 DIRECTORS Tom Keegan, Rasmus Højengaard CAST Karen David, Faye Kingslee, Tim Russ PLOT Ex-con Faith Connors takes up residence on the rooftops of the city of Glass. There she carries out missions for a cabal of Runners, working to pay off a debt to crime boss Dogen. THE RUMOUR GOES that humans experience a curious calm in the expansive seconds after falling from a great height, before striking the ground below. It’s an idea that DICE, the Swedish creators of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, reject. Misjudge a leap from one of the game’s stratospheric towers to the next and lithe, freerunner protagonist Faith will flail her arms in terror while the scenery zips past. The camera fades out before she lands like a spilled purse,…

FIVE HUNDRED Star Trek fans are crammed into Stage 31 on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles, a space that’s been gussied up to look like part of the U.S.S. Enterprise. They’re visibly excited, showing off tattoos of obscure quotes in a variety of languages (both Earthly and alien), comparing vintage Trek T-shirts and clutching each other for selfies. Some have travelled more than 5,000 miles to be here. Tonight — 20 May, 2016 — is a big deal. Two months ahead of the release of Star Trek Beyond, Paramount has brought them together to watch a selection of footage, meet cast and crew, and hopefully disseminate hype. The fans are thrilled, but nervous. A man next to Empire lists all his disappointments with the last movie, Into Darkness…

AS A WISE man once said, never say never again. Advice Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass clearly didn’t take to heart. After the second and third parts of the acclaimed Bourne trilogy, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, the star and director said “never” quite a bit. Never to making a fourth Bourne. Never to bringing back superspy Jason Bourne. Never, never, never, again and again and again. Yet, on a sunny day last September, Damon and Greengrass were once again together on set, about to roll on a brand new Jason Bourne movie. So what happened? “I didn’t spend the last seven or eight years thinking I would make another Bourne film,” admits Greengrass. “I was always proud to have done them, but it had slipped…

“NOW HERE COME two words for you: Shut the fuck up.” You can keep your Tarantino or Sorkin or Diamond wit; this is the greatest line of dialogue in film history. And if you think that’s hyperbole, wait for this: Jack Walsh is Robert De Niro’s best-ever performance. Yes, he’d been the almighty’s lonely chap Travis Bickle, blubbered up for doughy rageball Jake LaMotta and would go on to quietly terrify as the face of psychotic capitalism Jimmy Conway, but in Martin Brest’s Midnight Run he’s something you’d think would elude him: the everyman. In extremis, sure, but still recognisably human, amid the insanity which engulfs his character. A bounty hunter is the exotic way to describe Walsh, but really he simply picks up petty thieves who have skipped bail.…

GOATS WILL EAT anything — movies included. If you’d laid a bet on the identity of the breakout star from Robert Eggers’ chilling horror The Witch, you’d have been given short odds on its beguiling young star, Anya Taylor-Joy. Or maybe even Ralph Ineson, finally finding a role that should help him escape the long, shoe-throwing shadow of Finchy from The Office. You would certainly have been given ridiculously long odds on Black Phillip, the headstrong family goat that, in the film’s horrifying finale, turns out to be so much more. But that’s exactly what’s happened. Black Phillip has become not just the poster-goat for Robert Eggers’ Puritan chiller, but an unlikely horror icon with an ever-growing, mega-baffling variety of tributes. There’s the Black Phillip toy from Kinder Trauma (“He…

WEAPON I love weapons, so it’s tough to really pick a favourite. There are some pistols that I’ve loved, but man… Machete’s machete. It’s such a close weapon, and so much a part of him. I did a French movie called Le Jaguar, with Jean Reno and Patrick Bruel. I had to throw this spear, and it was a lot harder than we thought. The damn thing weighed 60 lb. Not my favourite, but still fun! AUDITION I walked into Robert Rodriguez’s office when I first met him, for Desperado. He said, “Wow, you remind me of the bad guys in my high school!” I said, “I am the bad guys in your high school!” That was the start for us. I’ve done 11 films with him and I’m an…

ENTER “WHAT’S THE best Star Trek film?” into Google, then click on one of the articles. Any one, it doesn’t matter, they’ll all tell you the same thing — the best Star Trek film is The Wrath Of Khan. But 34 years on from its release, strong challengers have emerged. Is it better than the knockabout comedic charm of The Voyage Home? Better than The Next Generation’s obvious high point, First Contact? Better than the glossy blockbuster thrills of the 2009 reboot? Better than the one where they search for God? (Okay — it’s definitely better than that one.) Screenwriter Roberto Orci, a huge Trek fan and co-writer of the two films J.J. Abrams directed, certainly believes so. He summed it up in a 2008 interview when explaining why it…

IN JULY 1987, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry sat at his typewriter to write. But not a script. Instead he wrote letters to noted sci-fi authors. Their subject? The plot of the planned fifth Star Trek film and his distaste for it. He wanted their support, in writing, to help him dissuade the studio from going ahead. He got it. Isaac Asimov wrote back agreeing with Roddenberry that the film dealing with God “breaks with the rationalist tradition of Star Trek”. He believed evangelical preacher Sybok would “move the more educated audience to embarrassed laughter”. He bemoaned the “lack of scientific intelligence” and worried it would “offend nearly everyone”, concluding it would be “an out-and-out disaster”. William Shatner, the film’s star, co-writer and director, disagreed. But then, he would; it…

SARAH SILVERMAN AS SEEN IN: ‘FUTURE’S END’ (VOYAGER), 1996 ON SCREEN: Scientist Rain Robinson, who spotted Voyager travelling back in time. She had a love of made-up sci-fi B movies with titles like Orgy Of The Walking Dead. OFF SCREEN: “I wanted to change one word in the line and they got the cell phone out,” recalled Silverman. “They called the producers. They called the writers. It was wild.” SETH MACFARLANE AS SEEN IN: ‘THE FORGOTTEN’, ‘AFFLICTION’ (ENTERPRISE), 2004, 2005 ON SCREEN: Ensign Rivers, an engineer on the Enterprise. He was crucial in recalibrating the injector assembly in order to reduce the Columbia’s field matrix down to 0.3 microns. OFF SCREEN: The 2009 Family Guy episode ‘Not All Dogs Go To Heaven’ featured a Trek convention with The Next Generation…

STAR TREK DOESN’T do supervillains. Not really. The Next Generation crew had Q, of course, who could be relied upon to turn up to regularly throw an existential spanner into the works of the Enterprise, although he was more playful than psychotic. Otherwise, Trek’s major menaces tend to be entire species — Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi — a collective causing havoc, rather than an individual. Except for Khan Noonien Singh. Trek’s true supervillain. Which is surprising, really, as Khan doesn’t have that many appearances under his belt. He appeared in only one original Trek episode — ‘Space Seed’ — where he was played by Ricardo Montalbán as a genetically engineered tyrant whose evil plans to rule all mankind force Kirk to abandon him and his people on a deserted planet. Nowadays,…

ONE EVENING IN October of 1965, Gene Roddenberry, former World War II bomber, airline pilot, California cop and now jobbing writer and aspiring TV producer sat down in front of the television set to watch the latest show from the mighty American television network CBS. And Roddenberry, ‘The Great Bird Of The Galaxy’, as he would later come to be known, as well as many other less flattering epithets, had more than a passing interest in the network’s new show. An hour later, as the end titles to Lost In Space flickered across the screen, the Great Bird was in a full-on flap. The show was, in his opinion, total crap. A melange of clichés and cuteness — hokey robots, camp stowaway scientists, ‘space pie’ — it was exactly the…

FIRST LOOK JACK REACHER: NEVER GOBACK OUT 21 OCTOBER FOR ALL THE jokes about Tom Cruise (5’ 7”) being too small to play Lee Child’s man-mountain Jack Reacher (6’ 5”), Cruise had the last laugh. Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher, the 2012 adaptation of the novel One Shot, grossed more than $200 million worldwide, and when cameras rolled last year on Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, there wasn’t a height joke in sight. “People have begun to accept the new reality,” says the sequel’s director, Edward Zwick. Never Go Back, based on the 18th book in Child’s hugely successful series, sees Reacher, a military policeman-turned-drifter, blow back into his old army HQ, only to be immediately arrested and drafted back into service. His solution: to go on the run with Cobie…

ON-SET EXCLUSIVE INFERNO OUT 14 OCTOBER ON A SCORCHING May afternoon in Florence, Empire, along with hordes of Italian teenagers held back by Carabinieri officers, watches Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones flee for their lives through the beautiful Boboli Gardens. It’s the longest scene of Hanks running since Forrest Gump pulled on his Nikes. “The real scoop here is not so much that I’m running,” Hanks tells us, taking a well-deserved breather. “The scoop is I have to wear a pair of quite dreadful Hush Puppies shoes, with no arch support, on the cobblestones and gravel steps of Florence. I am at least running in flats. Felicity has to run in high high heels…” “Which is effing hard,” chimes Jones. “It’s great we get our fitness done while we work.”…

SOME DIRECTORS, HAVING released a film that made over $1.6 billion worldwide, would be filling their pool with champagne and buying a robot butler. Not Colin Trevorrow. The man who steered Jurassic World to glory watched as the cash piled up, then calmly returned home to Vermont with his family. “We had a quiet summer,” says the 39-year-old. “David Oyelowo gave me a great piece of advice right after we had that big opening weekend. He said, ‘Keep being who you are. Don’t stop because of this.’” Trevorrow was suddenly the hottest name in Hollywood, the recipient of a flood of mega-budget movie offers. But the director, who knew he would soon be throwing himself into making Star Wars: Episode IX, an experience he refers to as “three years of…

HALLOWEEN IS BEING remade. Again. Nine years after singer-in-awful-band-turneddirector-of-horrible-horror-movies Rob Zombie rebooted John Carpenter’s stalk ’n’ slash classic to less than universal acclaim, Michael Myers — cinema’s premier masked maniac — is getting another new lease of life. This one is more promising. Not least because Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions has been a conveyor belt for low-budget, high-quality horrors such as the Insidious and Purge movies, is involved. But mainly because John Carpenter, the director who created Myers and reinvented horror all those years ago, is also on board. Carpenter, who’s more musician than moviemaker these days, won’t direct the new film, but will act as executive producer and creative consultant. “Halloween needs to return to its traditions,” he said. “Michael is not just a human being; he’s a…

1 The movie is based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by Ben Fountain that came out in 2012. “I’m an avid reader and loved the book,” says producer Marc Platt. “It has a satiric edge, while being very compelling and moving.” 2 The titular character is a young Texan soldier, a member of the Bravo unit being honoured at an American football game. “They had an incident while they were fighting in Iraq, where our hero performed a heroic act,” Platt explains. “It’s captured on a video, which goes viral. The movie takes place on one day: the unit are at the centre of the halftime show, and we cut back and forth between the celebration and the reality of what Billy went through.” 3 Billy is…

ON-SET EXCLUSIVE HIDDEN FIGURES OUT 24 FEBRUARY, 2017 TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS list of great movie mathematicians — Ian Malcolm, Will Hunting, Han Solo (watch him calculate 2,000 plus 15,000 equals 17,000 in the Cantina) — you can soon add Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. In 1961, working in an African-American-women-only computer division in the bowels of NASA, they were vital in making John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Yet their impact has been overlooked — until Hidden Figures. “It shocked me that there is never any mention of all these women who were part of the space programme,” says Octavia Spencer, who plays Vaughan. “One could be bitter about it. But I think bringing this story to life is much more powerful.” Joining the shoot…

OUT 4 JULY CERT. TBC / 115 MINS. DIRECTOR Jon M. Chu CAST Jesse Eisenberg, Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Lizzy Caplan, Michael Caine, Dave Franco, Daniel Radcliffe PLOT World-famous magic act/thieves The Four Horsemen — now with a new member, and under the auspices of über-magician, FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Ruffalo) — find themselves up against a formidable enemy, who seems to know their every move... THE PROBLEM WITH magic tricks is they have a natural end. Once the big reveal has taken place, there’s nowhere left to go. And that’s the issue — an unassailable one, as it turns out — at the heart of Now You See Me 2. At the end of the first movie, a charming and surprise sleeper hit, came the big reveal:…

OUT 8 JULY CERT. 15 / 99 MINS. DIRECTOR Rebecca Miller CAST Greta Gerwig, Julianne Moore, Ethan Hawke, Travis Fimmel PLOT Determined to have a baby despite her single status, Maggie (Gerwig) decides to go ahead using a sperm donor. But a meeting with a married man (Hawke) makes her rethink her plans. FRESH FROM THE sly, charming one-two of Frances Ha and Mistress America, you can imagine certain Hollywood soothsayers advising Greta Gerwig to run a mile from the next role as a kooky millennial struggling through life in modern New York over fears of typecasting. More fool them. Yes, at first glance her turn in this offbeat comedy as the titular Maggie is close enough to her work in those previous successes to almost spark a new Netflix…

NETFLIX OUT NOW / 133 MINS. DIRECTOR Rob Burnett CAST Paul Rudd, Craig Roberts, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Ehle PLOT Newly qualified carer Ben (Rudd) begins working for a teen with muscular dystrophy, Trevor (Roberts). The pair slowly form a tentative friendship, and set out on a road trip to visit such dubious attractions as the world’s deepest pit. PICKED UP AT this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and chosen as the closing night premiere, big things were expected of this Paul Rudd-starring comedy drama. But the sad fact is, it feels like a middle-of-the-road effort you’ve seen before, now with the edges rubbed off. Rudd brings his usual hangdog charm to Ben, a man suffering from an initially undefined loss and dodging the divorce papers repeatedly sent by his wife. While…

“IN RETROSPECT EVERYONE goes, ‘Oh sure, that makes sense.’ But on the way there? They thought we were totally insane.” In 1996 Baz Luhrmann had just one film under his belt, 1992’s delightfully absurd dance comedy Strictly Ballroom. That landed him a golden ticket, the chance to pitch anything he wanted to 20th Century Fox and have a fair chance of getting it made. But while his contemporaries Tarantino, Fincher and Singer were pushing the crime genre to the top of the box office with films such as Pulp Fiction, Seven and The Usual Suspects, Luhrmann set his sights on reclaiming Shakespeare for the masses. The result was a poppy, acid-bright race through the tragic tale of Shakespeare’s doomed lovers, with a rising Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and a captivating…

RUSSELL MULCAHY’S BONKERS sword-and-sorcery epic Highlander debuted in 1986, complete with an iconic soundtrack from Queen, Frenchmen playing Scots, Scots playing Egyptians, a loose grasp of coherence, and more severed heads than a David Thewlis box set. It spawned a series of sequels, a TV spin-off (and a spin-off of the spin-off ), and more. Yet Highlander remains the deliriously daft, endlessly enjoyable high-water mark. Here, with input from Mulcahy and his stars, Christopher Lambert and Clancy Brown, we look back at six factors that set the film apart. After all, there can be only one… THE CAR PARK FIGHT Highlander’s opening sword fight takes place in a Madison Square Garden car park (actually Earls Court in London) as Lambert’s antiques dealer, Russell Nash aka Connor MacLeod, leaves a wrestling…

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you watch all 20 episodes of the first season of surprise hit Supergirl in one go? Following 900 minutes of highly concentrated loafing, I feel like a bit of a hero myself — Deep Vein Thrombosis Man, maybe, or The Sloth. Supergirl, on the other hand, plays like a show still trying to adapt to its powers. The pilot, which reputedly cost a whopping $14 million, swiftly sets the tone: frothy, earnest and optimistic. Here’s the primer: Kara Zor-El (Melissa Benoist) is Superman’s cousin. She escapes Krypton in a pod, crashes into Earth, gets adopted by the Danvers, grows up, lands a job at media empire CatCo, then saves a flaming passenger jet. This isn’t an episode summary. This is the first 12 minutes. Unlike her act-alone…