Rise of the Planet of The Apes is looking might tight in this film clip where Caesar (Andy Serkis) protects John Lithgow, who plays James Franco’s dad and suffers from Alzheimer. The overall movie takes place in modern San Francisco. Franco’s character goes too far with genetic engineering, which leads to the development of highly intelligent apes. They start a revolution and a war for supremacy. The movie is directed by Rupert Wyatt and also co-stars Frieda Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire) and Tom Felton, obviously known for playing Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies.

Syfy’s newest original scripted series Alphas is an action-packed thriller about five ordinary people brought together to form one extraordinary team. They are known as Alphas — people with the unique power to stretch the capabilities of the human mind giving them superhuman physical and mental abilities — and the impossible is what they do best.

Alphas premiered Monday, July 11 at 10:00PM ET/PT. We held a t-shirt giveaway celebrating the arrival of the new series. Susan Ladd is our lucky winner. She says, “Syfy is my favorite station and [I] hope to win.”  You won Susan, and I hope you wear the t-shirt while watching Alphas.

Alphas follows a clandestine group of average everyday citizens with amazing abilities operating within the U.S. Department of Defense. The team investigates cases that point to others with abilities like theirs, and as they work against the clock to solve this new brand of crime, they must prevent their own personality differences and disparate backgrounds from interfering with their missions.

In addition to David Strathairn, the ensemble cast stars Malik Yoba, Warren Christie, Azita Ghanizada, Ryan Cartwright and Laura Mennell.

Alphas consists of 12 episodes including the 90-minute pilot directed by Jack Bender (Emmy nominated director and executive producer of Lost).

Syfy launches its newest original scripted series Alphas this July.  In the action-packed thriller about five ordinary people brought together to form one extraordinary team, they are known as Alphas — people with the unique power to stretch the capabilities of the human mind giving them superhuman physical and mental abilities — and the impossible is what they do best.

Alphas premieres Monday, July 11 at 10:00PM ET/PT and will be presented by Verizon with limited commercial interruption

Alphas follows a clandestine group of average everyday citizens with amazing abilities operating within the U.S. Department of Defense. The team investigates cases that point to others with abilities like theirs, and as they work against the clock to solve this new brand of crime, they must prevent their own personality differences and disparate backgrounds from interfering with their missions.

In addition to David Strathairn, the ensemble cast stars Malik Yoba, Warren Christie, Azita Ghanizada, Ryan Cartwright and Laura Mennell.

Alphas consists of 12 episodes including the 90-minute pilot directed by Jack Bender (Emmy nominated director and executive producer of Lost).

The giveaway consists of winning a Alphas t-shirt! To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner July 11, 2011.

Information has been very scant regarding the plot of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, due out in cinemas next summer. The best nugget we’ve heard since its announcement is that the story will exist in the same world as the Alien series, which Scott created with the chilling 1979 original. While the majority of Alien sequels and spin-offs were dire, it’s great to see Scott take the reins again. And now we have been told of the plot.

Well, not quite. IO9 were sent a synopsis of a plot, which does give a significant amount of detail about the Alien world. Fans of the original will remember the main characters first encountering the aliens (in the form of face huggers) in a giant crashed spaceship, with the corpse of a huge creature present in the ship. Dubbed the “space jockey”, this creature was never explained in the franchise, the rest of the characters continuing to be tormented by the “xenomorph” we all now recognise.

According to the leaked plot (NO SPOILERS, as you’ll see below), the space jockey is part of an engineer alien species, who actually are responsible for creating humans and the earth. Now that human have finally advanced enough to make contact, our Alien Gods welcome us and display their techniques and power. However, when one human attempts to steal the source of the Alien Gods power, they respond by sending their most lethal weapon to Earth…. presumaly, that creature we’ve known 32 years.

So there you have it, the Space Jockey explained. He’s an Alien God that tried to destroy earth but somehow failed in its mission, and I guess the prequel will deal with that. HOWEVER, Fox have claimed this is not accurate. It’s possibly a summary of an early draft, before the arrival of Lost writer Damon Lindelof who revised the story. That said, Scott and actor Michael Fassbinder have been abstractly suggesting that what we see may involve the “space jockey”, but for now take the above outline with a pitch of salt.

While everything I’d seen about Transformers: Dark of the Moon suggested that it was going to be, in the great Michael Bay tradition, a huge and loud overproduction with plenty of explosions, I wasn’t exactly sure about the quality. Never mind that this was set to be the last in the series; when you’ve got a movie that starts marginally, proceeds to sub-par, you don’t exactly look for the third one to turn it all around. In fact, it reminded me of a line from what I believe was Married…With Children: “Is this how it ends? / As long as it ends.”

Transformers: Dark of the Moon takes us up to the lunar surface, where there’s an old spaceship from Cybertron parked underneath the lunar surface. Those of you recognizing the name are likely very confused: it’s The Ark. Anyway, the United States finds The Ark on their first trip to the moon, and proceeds to attempt to reverse engineer holy hell out of it, with disastrous results. How disastrous? Chernobyl was caused by a Cybertron power cell, that’s how disastrous. But there’s worse waiting on board, and Optimus Prime and the rest of the Autobots aren’t all happy that it’s been hidden from the humans. And the situation only gets worse still when the Decepticons go after it. Turns out The Ark is packing Cybertronian technology sufficient to bring an invading army to Earth.  Now the Autobots have to square off against the Decepticons proper in a bid to save the planet.

As is the standard, Bay’s film shatters continuity all to bits and pieces, and replaces it with a constant string of explosions and some of the most hackneyed dialogue ever. Not to mention a string of logical bizarrities; Cybertronian technology has advanced to the point where they can move a planet thousands of light years with internal battery power, but to rebuild said planet they need the labor of a slave race that is to them the size of your average quarter. And then, despite the fact that they’ve announced to the audience that they need the humans for slave labor, they begin seizing a city full of them and start by killing several thousand of them.

Sometimes I wonder why Bay is even permitted to make movies any more, because most every time he actually makes one, it ends poorly for the audience. This one is no exception. Sure, Bay is an effects genius. A pyrotechnic wizard, even. And if you gave him a good script and had someone else direct, well, you’d probably have a thoroughly fantastic movie the like of which no one has ever seen. But it seems like he never has the good scripts. He never has a skillful director. He’s the guy who’s got continuity-busting chunks of awful featuring hot chicks standing in place watching explosions go off all around them yet never going for cover.

This is all he’s got to work with. It wasn’t without its entertaining points, sure enough–it’s hard not to be entertained by giant robots fighting each other on an epic scale–but it’s no one’s idea of a good movie. It’s beautiful, but it has no substance. It’s all sizzle and no steak.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Transformers Dark Of The Moon a six out of ten: it’s entertaining enough, but it’s entirely too long for what it puts on. Too many explosions, not near enough coherent storyline.

It’s hard to deny Darren Aronofsky is a man with big ideas. Who can forget his trippy sci-fi The Fountain, which may have been derided and a box office failure, but nevertheless remains one of America’s boldest films in the last decade? Or of course Black Swan, in which the director convinced the highly googled Natalie Portman to fiddle with herself and make out with Mila Kunis enough to grab an Oscar. Earlier in the year Aronofsky disappointed fans when it was announced he was to sell his soul and direct the sequel to Wolverine. Fortunately that fell apart and Aronofsky is back working on Noah.

Noah is the telling of Noah’s Ark, the biblical tale of a man who survives God’s “clensing” of the earth by building a giant boat and collecting a pair of each creature on the planet. The fable can been found not just in Christian texts, but also in Islam and Judaism. Aronofsky is currently shopping it around and expecting a budget of $100 million and beyond to tell this tale. In an interview with the IFC Aronofsky said “I don’t think it’s a very religious story [...], I think it’s a great fable, [...] it’s a great story that’s never been on film.”

The project was something he had been working on several years ago, before he took on Black Swan. Feeling he could never get the funds together earlier this year he planned to release it as a comic (you can see some artwork here). With Black Swan‘s success the director is aiming high. How he’ll explain why the lions didn’t devour the gazelles is a mystery to me.

Anyone else see It? You know, that Stephen King opus that spanned two DVDs, and featured several monster movie sequences? That’s about what we’re going to get here. See, Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid–and this is an actual title that I assure you exists because the folks at Image Entertainment sent one out for me to review–is one of those big, cheesy monster movies that have gotten something of a resurgence of late. And this will be fun, in certain conditions.

Featuring 80′s pop diva Tiffany, and 80′s pop diva Debbie Gibson, Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid will send the two titular impossibilities out to a swamp, where several instances of each will be taking each other on in a battle for bizarre monster supremacy. Oh, and by the way…right in the middle of said big monster battle is a well attended charity ball filled with humans that will be the perfect between-round snack for the monsters in question.

See what I mean? Replace “Mega Python” with “Godzilla” and “Gatoroid” with “Gamera” or “King Ghidorah” or anything else to come out of the Toho stable of BRMs (industry jargon for Big Rubbery Monster), and you’ve got a reasonable idea of just what we’re dealing with.

There will be some interesting industry issues here, too, like how Pet Sematary director Mary Lambert got involved in this, or how Image Entertainment got to distributing a David Michael Latt production (Latt seemed to be almost exclusively a The Asylum sort, since it is his company and all. But then the SyFy component likely had a bit to do with that.

But anyway, weird politics aside, you’re going to get a full-on monster movie in the grandest sense. This is the kind of movie that, when you were a kid, would have had you chucking popcorn at the screen. And when you’re an adult, the perfect kind of movie to get quite thoroughly soused to while watching.

The effects are godawful, the plot is a joke, and in all honesty, this thing is lousy from every technical measure. But it’s surprisingly fun, in a low-budget kind of way. It’s a great movie to get your friends together to laugh at; don’t come here looking for a great movie–don’t come here looking for a good movie–but come here looking for some great unintentional laughs, and you’ll be in good company. And some clearly intentional ones, like the Tiffany / Debbie Gibson catfight, for starters.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this dose of good old fashioned monster movie fun a seven out of ten for being nothing particularly special, but very worthwhile in terms a fun time. Frankly, it’s a bad movie, but it’s the right kind of bad movie, and will provide a shocking amount of low-budget fun and laughs.

Back in the eighties, there were a whole lot of Steven Spielberg movies coming out. They had a lot of common themes, especially kids working together to do unusual things or save people from unusual things. And Super 8, which just hit theaters today, is a lot like a taste of summer from long ago.

Super 8 follows a group of kids filming a movie on the titular media, when a surprise train wreck interrupts their filming. And this alone is big enough news for a group of misfits from Ohio, at least until they recover their camera from the surrounding wreckage and discover that what’s on the crashed train is actually bigger news than the train crash by itself. The crashed train contains something that the Air Force desperately wants to keep under wraps, and they’re willing to go to just about any lengths–including kidnapping, murder and arson–to keep their secret project a secret. The only problem is, the secret project isn’t interested in stay secret itself.

Like a strange intermingling of Cloverfield and The Goonies (which makes sense, given that this was produced by Steven Spielberg and written and directed by J.J. Abrams), all the good parts of both are brought into play here. We’ve got the marginally dysfunctional group of misfits (The Chubby Bossy Kid, The Smart Yet Spindly Nerd, The Kid Whose Mom Died, The Girl From The Bad Family, and of course, The Littlest Pyromaniac) who go off on the grand adventure to save their hometown from the evil government agency. And though these are cliches, they’re cliches for a reason, and here they’re executed masterfully and with just a touch of retro irony. Check out the sheriff’s reaction to the kid at the gas station who just got in one of those new Walk-mans, for just a hint of example.

Sure, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops. Some scenes are way too schmaltzy for their own good. Some of it, much like the characters themselves, is a bit awkward and unsure of itself. Some of the explanations were a bit lacking, like where this thing came from and what it’s doing here, but still, what was here was more than passable and a great way to spend a hot summer afternoon, of which we’ve had a few of those lately and it’s still technically late spring.

The Screenhead Ten Scale in turn believes that Super 8 is giving itself its own score, and agrees sufficiently to give this movie a super eight out of ten, because while it’s not the greatest thing I’ve seen recently, it’s good enough to make it very much worth seeing, and is definitely a lot better than some of what we’ve been sitting through lately.

The universe is about to get a little smaller with the final season of Stargate Universe, and you’ll likely enjoy the ride, even if you may not like where it ends up. The folks out at Fox sent over a copy of the five-disc set of Stargate: Universe, and this is going to be a big one.

Stargate: Universe takes us out to the Destiny, a massive ship that’s built with on-board Stargates. Several ships were sent out ahead of it, to seed several worlds with Stargates ahead of its arrival, thus allowing the ship to freely move from point to point via Stargate travel. And now, it’s just been seized by the show’s main baddies, the Lucian Alliance. Now, with the ship being evacuated in rapid fashion, and its human crew now looking for a way to get home, they’ll have to pull together and find a way to survive.

The interesting thing about Stargate: Universe The Complete Final Season is that it’s geared for both longtime Stargate fans as well as those who may not have any more background than the movie. And it does do a pretty passable job of putting up a science fiction epic, though it’s not hard to see why people were comparing this–and often unfavorably, to boot–to the newest installments of Battlestar Galactica. After all, on the surface, it’s pretty similar. Big ship flying around, humans who just want to get home, and so on.

They’ll do a little hopping around here, timestream-wise, with a few flashbacks tossed into the mix, and plenty of action, too. The plot is a little on the garbled side, but it’s still got a lot of exciting elements to it, and that’s better than a lot of shows will provide, especially lately.

The down side here, though, is the ending. Frankly, the ending is catastrophic. It’s a cliffhanger, and worse yet, a guaranteed (at this point) unresolved cliffhanger, so watching this will be an exercise in futility as it will not end.

Still though, it’s entertaining by itself, better in some spots than in others, but that’s how it will always be with any television series box set. And if you don’t mind a whole lot ambiguity in your endings, then you’ll be just fine.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Stargate Universe a seven out of ten for doing the best it could with what it had to work with. It’s not the best end to a long running franchise like Stargate, but, well, it tried. So it won’t be the best, but it will be worth the watch.

Screenhead brings you a rather interesting giveaway that I am sure any science buff will love to own and watch.

The scientific progress in Britain to vivid life, Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World has arrived on DVD from Athena. Presented by an array of distinguished thinkers and broadcast on the U.K’s Channel 4 in May 2010 and available to U.S. audiences for the first time with its DVD release, this five-part series offers an enthralling look at the personalities behind some of the world’s greatest discoveries – from the invention of the steam engine to the discovery of DNA. The DVD 3-vol. boxed set features appearances by leading contemporary figures including Stephen Hawking, David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and James Dyson.

Each episode in this five-part series brings an era of scientific thought to vivid life, with modern-day geniuses examining the legacies of their heroes. Stephen Hawking takes on Isaac Newton, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins discusses Alfred Russel Wallace, acclaimed naturalist David Attenborough profiles Joseph Banks, and many more. Also in the mix: industrial designer James Dyson, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Paul Nurse, and others.

Along the way, learn intriguing facts about famous scientists and discover unheralded people whose revelations have changed the way we live today, paving the path for everything from the steam engine to current thinking about the atom and evolution.

BONUS FEATURES:

• Bonus disc, Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Everything (90 min.), about the search for an explanation of the universe.

• 12-page viewer’s guide with articles on myths and science, lesser-known geniuses, the Royal Society, the steady state theory, and a gallery of evolutionary specimens

• Biographies of the presenters, plus a timeline of British scientific advances, article on Rosalind Franklin, and more at AthenaLearning.com

To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner June 21, 2011.