Academy Award nominated Ruairi Robinson (Fifty Percent Grey, Blinky) is set to direct his first feature film, the highly anticipated thriller The Last Days On Mars based on a script by acclaimed screenwriter Clive Dawson, with design talents including the extraordinary team at WETA (District 9, X-Men First Class and Avatar) behind the special effects. Qwerty Films’Michael Kuhn (The Duchess, Being John Malkovich) and Andrea Cornwell (The Scouting Book for Boys) will produce the film, with Focus Features International handling international sales and distribution. FFI will commence sales at the American Film Market in November. As their last day on Mars draws to a close, the astronaut crew is on the verge of a major breakthrough - collected rock specimens reveal microscopic evidence of life. Meanwhile, communication is underway with AURORA, the approaching spacecraft that will relieve the crew of their operations. In their last hours on the planet, two astronauts go back to SITE 9, a cavernous valley on the surface of Mars, to collect further evidence of their discovery. But a routine excavation turns deadly when one of them falls to his death and his body taken host and re-animated by the very life form they sought to discover.

The Mars Society is pleased to announce that ‘The Mars Underground’, a documentary film that became an instant classic among space enthusiasts, has been updated and revised by the director and released on DVD. Leading aerospace engineer and Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin has a dream. He wants to get humans to the planet Mars in the next ten years. Now, with the advent of a revolutionary plan, Mars Direct, Dr. Zubrin shows how we can use present day technology and natural resources on Mars to make human settlement possible. But can he win over the skeptics at NASA and the wider world? ‘The Mars Underground’ is a landmark documentary that follows Dr. Zubrin and his team as they try to bring this incredible dream to life. Through spellbinding animation, the film takes us on a daring first journey to the Red Planet and envisions a future Mars teeming with life and terraformed into a blue world. A must-see experience for anyone concerned for our global future and the triumph of the human spirit.

When H.G. Wells’ classic novel “War of the Worlds” was adapted for radio in 1938, its news broadcast format famously fooled many listeners into believing Martians actually were invading Earth. That mistaken history is essentially what Brunswick filmmaker and artist Christian Matzke is running with. Matzke, his wife, Sarah, and Portland artist Graham Meyer are collaborating on the art exhibit “Forgotten Wars,” which opens at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 2, at Sanctuary Tattoo & Art Gallery at 31 Forest Ave. For the interplanetary portion of “Forgotten Wars,” Matzke built anti-Martian firearms, early 20th century-styled recruitment posters, a space-traveling soldier’s uniform and — the piece de resistance — a massive drop pod in which people can actually fit and imagine jettisoning to Mars. The pod, which took two years to piece together and four people to move from the back of a moving truck and into Sanctuary Tattoo on Thursday, is fashioned from an old medical capsule and festooned with brass dials and gaskets.

If you needed one more reason to be jealous of folks who live in Austin, TX, aside from having nearly unlimited access to the best barbecue on the planet, try this on for size: This weekend, Tiger Style's new game will be playable at Juegos Rancheros at The Highball. If that sentence doesn't hold much weight for you, allow me to explain. Tiger Style is the team of guys behind Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [$2.99 / HD], which not only was our 2009 iPhone Game of the Year but also took home several other awards such as the Independent Games Festival's best iPhone game. Juegos Rancheros is an equally awesome monthly gathering of independent game developers that started as a casual thing and since turned into an event that even has attracted the attention of Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward.

Play as an aspiring astronaut in Astronaut:Moon, Mars and Beyond™, the official NASA MMO game. Set in the year 2035, you will embark on an adventure into space, Mars, the asteroid belt, and the outer planets.You will uncover secrets about a threat to civilization as we know it, and build you and your team a high-tech inventory of space gear including a home base, somewhere out there. Our small group of 20 developers have won a contest* held for the best idea for an official massively multi-player online game depicting the future, and signed a "Space Act Agreement" with NASA, who chose our pitch over all others, the start of a project conceived of at NASA Learning Technologies.

Coastal retreat or galatic getaway? If Mars was a place on earth, it would be Herne Bay. Filmmaker Damon Keen has turned the picturesque Sentinel Rd Reserve at Herne Bay into the planet Mars for his sci-fi flick, Last Flight. The Westmere graphic designer's 15-minute movie makes its debut at the New Zealand International Film Festival this weekend. The self-confessed techno-geek spent countless hours editing footage to turn sleepy Auckland reserves and North Island countrysides into harsh Martian landscapes.

At first glance, it looks like a charming independent bookstore, a West Village gem with a window display featuring artful stacks of gleaming hardcovers. But, wait a minute. Is that one book? Like, many, many copies of the same book? Selection isn’t the strong suit of Ed’s Martian Book, on Hudson Street, where you can’t buy “Water for Elephants” or anything by Mary Higgins Clark, but 3,000 or so copies of “Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission” (Pegasus, 2011), by a 32-year-old Brooklyn author named Andrew Kessler, are available for $27.95 each. The book is Mr. Kessler’s account of NASA’s 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander mission, reported during 90 days inside mission control, in Tucson, alongside 130 leading scientists and engineers. Publishers Weekly calls the book a “slightly offbeat firsthand account of scientific determination and stubborn intellect” that “delivers a fascinating journey of discovery peppered with humor.”

The latest motion-capture film from Robert Zemeckis’ ImageMovers studio, “Mars Needs Moms” is an ambitious film that provides impressive visual landscapes at the cost of an interesting or even engaging story. “Mars Needs Moms” has most of the components necessary for a good film, but curiously never finds the rhythm it needs to deliver a truly entertaining final product.

In addition to its fluency in contemporary indie American cinema's styles of storytelling and dialog, Geoff Marslett's Mars is a throwback to the innumerable and often indistinguishable space-race B movies of the 50s and 60s that analogized journeys to distant planets and the iconography of Western settler narratives. The casting of Kinky Friedman as an actual cowboy president and repeated requests that the mission's mostly symbolic leader Charlie Brownsville (Mark Duplass), in his custom-embroidered NASA onesie, behave more like John Wayne, acknowledge the self-conscious Cold War rhetoric of this near-future space rom-com. Propelled by a fictionalized account of 2003's real launch and loss of a Mars rover, we jet forward to 2014, when the Europeans are sending a new robot, A.R.T., while NASA puts together a manned mission with the once heroic Charlie as media figurehead along with kiwi Casey Cook (Zoe Simpson) and pilot Hank Morrison (Paul Gordon).

Today, Disney unveiled the trailer for its new CG-animated family comedy Mars Needs Moms! The film is based on a novel of the same name by Berkeley Breathed and tells of a young boy named Milo who comes to appreciate his mother a lot more after Martians invade Earth and come to take her away. Produced by Robert Zemeckis through his ImageMovers Digital banner (which was responsible for past hits including The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol), the adventure hits theaters on March 11th 2011.

Two years in the making, "Packing for Mars" necessitated visits to aeronautic institutions in various countries, as well as the sipping of her own recycled urine. For research. Asked if it was difficult to get NASA's American astronauts to confess about vomiting or mid-orbit existential crises, she simply says: "Why do you think I went all the way to Russia?" During her Russian trip, it should be noted, she describes touring a museum dedicated to Soviet rocketry, discusses head lice and takes shots of whiskey with retired cosmonauts. All by 11 a.m., Moscow time.

One hundred years ago the first movie about Mars awed audiences. Produced in 1910 by Thomas Edison, A Trip To Mars was a 4 minute sojourn to the red planet. It involved a scientist, magic powders and a giant. Hey, it was 1910. One hundred years later our fascination with Mars remains, although interest in films about the planet waxes and wanes. Much like the moon. But not so frequently.

In conducting research into the physiology of astronauts in space, Mary Roach found out that one man on a Space Shuttle flight wore a sound monitor on his belly for the duration of his voyage. It is Ms. Roach’s style to be less interested in the belly-noise findings than in the freaky-deaky part of the story. “Don’t feel bad for him,” she writes in “Packing for Mars” about that awkwardly wired astronaut. “Feel bad for the Air Force security guy assigned to listen to two weeks of bowel sounds to be sure no conversations including classified information had been inadvertently recorded.” Ms. Roach has already written zealously nosy books about corpses (“Stiff”), copulation (“Bonk”) and charlatans (“Spook”). Each time, what has interested her most is the fringe material: exotic footnotes, smart one-liners, bizarre quasi-scientific phenomena. Yet her fluffily lightweight style is at its most substantial — and most hilarious — in the zero-gravity realm that “Packing for Mars” explores. Here’s why: The topic of astronauts’ bodily functions provides as good an excuse to ask rude questions as you’ll find on this planet or any other.

John Carter of Mars is scheduled to hit theaters on June 8, 2012, one full month after The Avengers arrives courtesy of Paramount, Marvel Studios and, by extension, Disney itself. The first live-action Pixar movie faces some stiff competition in the form of Men in Black 3 at the end of May and the Star Trek sequel later in June.

Mary Roach has made a career writing books that answer questions most people would never think to ask. Having already given readers more than they ever wanted to know about the science of cadavers ("Stiff"), souls ("Spook") and sex ("Bonk"), she turns her inquisitive mind to the cosmos. "Packing for Mars" is a book even the most casual space geek will enjoy. From the race to the moon in the '60s to the current goal of a manned mission to Mars by 2030, the book features chapters exploring everything from vomiting in zero gravity ("Throwing Up and Down") to sex in space ("The Three-Dolphin Club"). It's written in a very casual style, with Roach inserting herself into the story whenever her curiosity demands it. She takes a ride aboard NASA's tricked-out C-9 to experience weightlessness and drinks her own filtered urine — all in the name of research.

Comic Vine received a press release from Dynamite today letting us know that they’re launching WARLORD OF MARS in October for a dollar-priced first issue. The series, spinning out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic pulp series, will be written by Arvid Nelson, drawn by Stephen Sadowski & Lui Antonio and covered by the likes of Alex Ross and J. Scott Campbell. The famous John Carter of Mars will be joining the impressive roster of heroes Dynamite's steadily assembled from the long, crisscrossing tradition of comics, pulp and literature. I’m talking about characters like the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, the Phantom, Buck Rogers and Sherlock Holmes.

The temperature's literally freezing, the air is poisonous and you'll die if you go outside without your space suit. Why would you put your hand up to be on the first space shuttle to Mars? Space tourism may not be a reality yet, but in preparation for the day that it is, Guy Murphy has written a book about living on the red planet, titled Mars: A Survival Guide. Murphy wouldn't say no to a seat on the shuttle but he accepts moving to a Martian neighbourhood would have its downsides. However those problems would pale in relation to what else the planet has to offer.

Preparing for a trip to Mars...

THQ has inked a deal that will allow the Syfy channel to produce a two-hour, direct-to-television movie based on Red Faction. And if things go really well for Red Faction's live-action debut, then it could lead to a full television series. Syfy Ventures senior VP Alan Seiffert explained the agreement to Broadcasting & Cable (via VG247). "It is the kind of content that fits our genre," said Seiffert, "It is a great fit for a big Syfy Saturday movie, and if it really works, it is a great back-door pilot."

The Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab is working to develop social robots that can learn to assist people by observing natural human interaction. Mars Escape is a two-player game designed to gather data about human teamwork, social interaction and communication. Help us out by playing the game, either as a human or a robot! Algorithmic analysis of the data collected through these games will enable us to develop natural autonomous behaviors for our robot Nexi. We will then recreate the game environment in real life and demo our findings at the Boston Museum of Science! The game takes about 10 minutes to play, you will be randomly paired with another player online. Players must be 18 and over.

Google and Virgin Group today announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars. "Some people are calling Virgle an 'interplanetary Noah's Ark,'" said Virgin Group President and Founder Sir Richard Branson, who conceived the new venture. "I'm one of them. It's a potentially remarkable business, but more than that, it's a glorious adventure. For me, Virgle evokes the spirit of explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo, who set sail looking for the New World. I do hope we'll be a bit more efficient about actually finding it, though." The Virgle 100 Year Plan's milestones will include Virgle Pioneer selection (2008-2010), the first manned journey to Mars (2016), a Virgle Inc. initial public offering to capitalize on the first manned journey to Mars (2016), the founding of the first permanent Martian municipality, Virgle City (2050), and the achievement of a truly self-sustaining Martian civilization with a population exceeding 100,000 (2108). “Virgle is the ultimate application of a principle we’ve always believed at Google: that you can do well by doing good,” said Google co-founder Larry Page, who plans to share leadership of the new Martian civilization with Branson and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. "We feel that ensuring the survival of the human race by helping it colonize a new planet is both a moral good in and of itself and also the most likely method of ensuring the survival of our best – okay, fine, only -- base of web search volume and advertising inventory,” Page added. “So, you know, it's, like, win-win." The original contingent of Virgle Pioneers will be selected by numerous criteria, including an online questionnaire, video submission, personal accomplishments, expertise in scientific, artistic, sociological and/or political fields of endeavor, and inadequate Google and Virgin personal performance reviews.

James Kochalka is a bit of a nerd wizard. He’s a renowned comic book artist with a daily strip and several graphic novels to his name, and he’s almost finished designing his first videogame. He’s also a songwriter and musician who fronts his own rock band, called James Kochalka Superstar. Now, the Vermont native can add another gold star to his resume: science fiction film actor. Kochalka plays a supporting role in the new film Mars, an animated feature centering on a love story between two astronauts aboard the first manned mission to the red planet. Kochalka saw Mars for the first time here at the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival, where it had its world premiere last week.

While Bad Religion aren’t technically heading to outer space, the names of the band members, as well as the name of their record label, Epitaph Records, are going to Mars. Apparently, NASA astronaut Jerry Stoces is a big fan of the band, and according to the Epitaph blog, he listened to the group while training for his mission into space, going down next year on the Lynx spacecraft. Stoces also happens to be working on the next Mars Exploration Rover Mission and had the opportunity to add some names to a microchip that will be carried by the Curiosity rover, which goes to Mars next year. Naturally, he picked the dudes in Bad Religion and Epitaph Records as choices for Martians to understand English proper nouns.

One of the notable things to come out of SXSW is the so-called mumblecore movement, which like the word “indie,” has taken on so many meanings that it doesn’t really mean anything. (Check out Paste’s long-winded answer to the question: “Is Indie Dead?”) The term is mainly used as shorthand for micro-budget talking-head flicks and a generation of moviemakers who work on each other’s films.

Mars is the movie SXSW's been waiting for all these years, something so emblematic and representative of everything you could associate with the festival (Mark Duplass, references to enchiladas and beer, Texas iconoclast Kinky Friedman) that part of me wishes it would never show anywhere else and just pop up annually at the festival as a sort of trademark. But that would be doing the movie a disservice: it's broader than that. Rough around the edges, with some not-quite-endearingly-amateurish performances in parts and lackadaisacal plotting, it's ambles along all slacker-like—and yes, the unusual rotoscoping feature does invoke Waking Life.

Check out this exclusive clip from Geoff Marslett and Mark Duplass' strange-looking space romantic comedy Mars. We're still not sure what to make of this indy film — the graphics alone freak us out a bit. The picture, which is premiering at SXSW, is part comic book, part love story and part comedy. You may remember Mark Duplass from his Sundance directing days or his role on The League. Here's the official synopsis: In 2014, the discovery of life on the Red Planet leads to a space race between a robotic expedition and a manned mission. Over the course of this interplanetary animated feature, a lonesome robot and a motley space crew discover that love can flourish anywhere - even on Mars. Told in the playful style of a graphic novel, MARS explores why we explore.

A new live-action movie based on H.G. Wells' seminal science fiction alien invasion novel, The War of the Worlds, is in post production, it was announced by Pendragon Pictures. The new movie, titled War of the Worlds - The True Story, has a planned release date of October 2010. Pendragon Pictures is an independent motion picture company that released a previous movie version of War of the Worlds in 2005. Their earlier production grossed $7 million dollars and sold 650,000 copies on DVD, though its critical reception was tepid. Pendragon producer Susan Goforth states, "This is a complete remake, not a re-working of our previous production."

Academy Award winner Michael Giacchino, who won the Oscar for his Up score a couple of days ago, continues his fruitful relationship with Walt Disney Pictures. The studio has confirmed to MovieScore Magazine that Giacchino will be writing the score for John Carter of Mars, the new film by Andrew Stanton. Interestingly, Stanton’s previous films as a director (Wall-E and Finding Nemo), were both scored by Thomas Newman. John Carter of Mars is based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and stars Samantha Morton, Dominic West, Polly Walker and Willem Dafoe. The imaginative story takes place on the planet Mars where Civil War veteran John Carter is imprisoned by 12-foot tall green creatures, escapes and encounter the Princess of Helium. The film is scheduled to come out in 2012.

During the week or so leading up to the start of SXSW 2010, I’ll be providing a glimpse into some of the films I am looking forward to at the festival. SXSW will feature many great films, many more than I can cover, ranging from narrative fiction to documentary, comedy to horror, foreign to animation, independent to studio films. SYNOPSIS: A new space race is born between NASA and the ESA when Charlie Brownsville, Hank Morrison, and Dr. Casey Cook compete against an artificially intelligent robot to find out what’s up there on the red planet. MARS follows these three astronauts on the first manned mission to our galactic neighbor. On the way they face adventure, self doubts, obnoxious reporters, and the boredom of extended space travel. This romantic comedy is told in the playful style of a graphic novel – using an animation process that director Geoff Marslett developed specifically for MARS. Underneath the silliness it is an exploration of exploration. Why do we want to know whatÕs out there? How do we react when we find it? Is it really that important? And where does love fit into the whole thing?

It’s Libby from Lost as you (and Hurley) have never seen her before – animated! Cynthia Watros stars alongside musician/actor Kinky Friedman (he plays the President) in new indie film Mars, which premieres this weekend at SXSW. Mark Duplass (Humpday, The Puffy Chair) plays an astronaut who goes on the first manned mission to Mars, looking for “life and love.” The whole project is the brainchild of Austin, Texas-based animator Geoff Marslett, who has said he wanted the film to look like a cross between A Scanner Darkly and Sin City. But he also notes the film is more like an indie romantic comedy set in space.

Walt Disney Studios announced the date for another 3D movie ‘Mars Needs Moms!’. The Robert Zemeckis’ produced film will open March 11, 2011. The film is about a young boy named Milo (Seth Green) who gains a deeper appreciation for his mom (Joan Cusack) after Martians come to Earth to take her away. The movie is based on Berkley Breathed’s children story.

Remember the people who said the moon landing was a hoax? A New Port Richey company hopes to create a simulated trip to Mars that everyone will know is fake but will appear as realistic as possible. "This is not Disney World or Universal Studios," said Mark Homnick, 52, one of the managers of NewSpace Center LLC. The company has submitted site plans for a 75-acre lot in Titusville on Florida's Space Coast to build Interspace, a space-themed entertainment and research facility that would include the simulated Martian environment. The men estimated the project will cost about $30-million and said their plans began in 2005. Homnick and his vice president, Joseph Palaia, run the company and its parent, 4Frontiers, out of Homnick's waterfront stilt home.

Come on, Mars. I mean, come on.

Performance Network Theatre announces its production of "It Came From Mars" by local playwright, Joseph Zettelmaier, beginning February 18 and running through March 21, 2010. "Mars," which is a co-production with Williamston Theatre (WT), is a recipient of the prestigious Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, which is granted to only a handful of theatres nationwide. This world premiere comedy stars Wayne David Parker, Sandra Birch, Joseph Albright, Jacob Hodgson, Alysia Kolascz and Morgan Chard. It is directed by WTArtistic Director Tony Caselli (A PICASSO). "It Came From Mars," which is featured in the February issue of American Theatre Magazine, is a hilarious comedy about a troupe of radio actors terrified by Orson Welles'War of the Worlds broadcast. Passions ignite and secret identities are revealed when a washed up director, his diva ex-wife, a German sound effects wiz and a wanna-be war hero believe that they are about to be annihilated by men from Mars!

Disney has released the official synopsis for the movie and also started an official Facebook fan page for the film. Production is under way in London for Andrew Stanton’s latest film, which is set to come out in 2012.

Addy and I are both weeping dusty red-colored tears in honor of the Spirit Rover's new permanent surroundings after reading this xkcd chronicle of his poor little life.

"OFF WORLD. Robin Parrish. Bethany House. $14.99 Softcover. Well, Robin Parrish of North Carolina has written an account set on Aug. 11, 2032, about what happens when a crew from NASA arrives on Mars, has an incredible flight back to Earth - and finds that everyone has vanished. Buildings are empty, cars are lined up at the toll booths with no one in them - the world has disappeared. Eerie? Yes! Could this happen if some terrorists have hidden something with plans to blow the world apart. Is Houston's NASA and Florida's Kennedy Space Center taken by surprise? How will we ever know. Until a woman appears. Her name is Mae. Was she ever really born? Was she murdered?

Walt Disney Pictures announced filming is underway on John Carter of Mars starring Taylor Kitsch (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) as John Carter and directed by Andrew Stanton. Stanton earned Academy Awards for Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and John Carter of Mars marks his first time helming a live-action feature film.

Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars on Saturday delivered BBC America its highest-ever primetime rating and delivery in total viewers and adults ages 25-54. It was the first of three Doctor Who specials airing three straight Saturdays on the network, the finale to David Tennant's era as the Tenth Doctor. More than 1.1 million viewers watched the program on Saturday, ranking BBC America 13th in coverage rating during the premiere among ad-supported cable nets for adults 25-54, the network said, citing Nielsen live plus same day DVR data.

Avatar, the new 3-D blockbuster from director James Cameron, represents a quantum leap in movie-making technology. The truly impressive part of the production was the real-world technology that powered the stunning special effects. How did they do it? For over a decade, James Cameron has been fascinated with the prospect of using 3D in his movies. His first aspiration for the technology was to create a movie about Mars exploration that would symbolize NASA’s Mars ambitions. At the time, stereoscopic 3D camera systems were the size of refrigerators and could weigh close to 500 pounds. Cameron issued a challenge to one of his partners, Vince Pace: Develop a quiet, lightweight 3D camera for a movie I want to do. That was seven years ago, and the result is stunning – the new Fusion Camera System. Considered the most advanced camera system ever designed, it was used to “run the stitches” between live action scenes and computer generated scenes.

Today we're happy to announce the winner and runners up of our fourth annual Medical Sci-Fi Writing Contest. Medgadget's editors and Dr. Allen Roberts from GruntDoc would like to thank everyone that submitted their stories because they were fun, thought provoking, and in many ways very inspirational. And now we'd like to congratulate Evan Perriello, this year's winner of the Amazon Kindle reader, for his short story "HeartPlus". The runners up are James H. Dawdy for "Mars Rescue" and Hans Patrick Griesser for "WHAT'S MORE AFFORDABLE THAN FREE?"

Keeping busy as partner in rhyme to DJ and production specialist Chief Xcel in lauded duo Blackalicious, Gab took five years to follow his masterful solo debut 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up, a record as obsessed with scientific discovery as spiritual awakening. But even with Gab’s phonetic prowess and all that time to prepare for launch, Escape 2 Mars doesn’t reach the transcendent heights of its sublime, lushly orchestrated predecessor, ultimately feeling less like an epic interplanetary voyage and more like space camp. But who didn’t fantasize about going to space camp as a kid? Space camp is fun! And so is Escape 2 Mars. At its best (“E2MTRO,” “Spotlight” and the title track), the record plays like rap’s funky answer to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars?”

Usually, low-rent comedy genre house The Asylum (Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, Transmorphers: Fall of Man) waits until just as a movie is released to unleash their own knock-off / parody of the project. But with Edgar Rice Burroughs and A Princess of Mars, the company gets a two-fer. Their new Princess of Mars is already close to finished, and with it the company can perhaps steal a few Avatar-related dollars while creating a product that will be ready on DVD shelves when Disney eventually begins to promote Andrew Stanton’s John Carter of Mars. See the first teaser for Asylum’s version of the Burroughs novel, after the break.

In a stunning piece of astronomical news, the planet Sol III — better known as “Earth” — has been completely obliterated. In connection with this sudden catastrophe, authorities have questioned a resident of neighboring planet Sol IV (Mars), who is known to have made threats against Earth in the past. This questioning is thought by many to be a formality, as most sources indicate that the destruction was caused by a foolhardy group of scientists in central Europe.

Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet. Site visitors can pan, zoom and explore the planet through images from Mars landers, roving explorers and orbiting satellites dating from the 1960s to the present. Many of the images have never before been seen. The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.

Students in fourth through seventh grade will work to create the ultimate baseball experience "on Mars," even designing the rules for how to play a game on the Red Planet. NASA and JPL have partnered with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum to host a workshop for kids on Sat., Nov. 7, in Cooperstown, N.Y. The workshop runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 7. Cost is $5 per student, which covers materials, supplies and admission to the Museum. The workshop is limited to 50 participants. To register, visit http://education.baseballhalloffame.org/something_new/ or call 607-547-0362 to request a registration form.

Doctor Who special The Waters of Mars is ‘one of the scariest’ according to star David Tennant. The forthcoming special which sees the Timelord arrive on Mars in 2059 and battle terrifying zombie like aliens. Viewers will see the Doctor meet the first human colony of people living on Mars, facing a battle to save them from a parasitic virus that makes them spurt water. In time honoured tradition the transformation scenes are sure to send children rushing to the back of the sofa. The episode, which will broadcast on BBC1 on November 15, also shows him facing a moral dilemma about whether to condemn people to their fate or save them and ultimately change the future.

They don’t set movies on Mercury. Venus either. Or Jupiter or Saturn for that matter. Oh, certainly there are a few movies set on Venus. 2001 had the spaceship Discovery going to Jupiter, because Stanley Kubrick thought it would be too difficult to depict Saturn on the big screen. Doug Trumbull, who did the special effects for 2001, decided to set his own movie, Silent Running, at Saturn just to show it could be done (see “The green green grass of Earth”, The Space Review, March 2, 2009). There was also the barely tolerable Saturn 3 set at, well, Saturn—so that makes two for Saturn. And the ridiculously awful Event Horizon was set at Neptune, which provided a creepy backdrop for the haunted house in space story that had been done much better in numerous other movies. But you get the point: science fiction movies set in our own solar system don’t go to many planets. They all go to Mars. It is a cliché, but Mars captures the human imagination like no other planetary body except, maybe, the Moon. Other than Earth, it’s the planet that has been the subject of the most books and movies, a result of its ancient mystique and the fact that when you are outside on a very dark night, out in the middle of nowhere, where the city lights don’t spoil the night sky, Mars is so damn weird. A bright red spark that is both alluring and ominous.

It’s not exactly a revelation that Hollywood is filled with thieves and hacks who steal each others’ ideas. There are numerous examples of similar movies coming out in the same year. This happens when writers and/or studios get wind of a script circulating through Tinseltown and decide to emulate (aka “copy”, aka “steal”) it. That’s what happened back in 2000 when we were treated to not one, but two movies about missions to Mars. Before they premiered, space enthusiasts were excited that they were finally going to see reasonably realistic depictions of the near-term human exploration of Mars. The movies were Mission to Mars and Red Planet. It’s not hard to guess at the origins of both of these movies. It usually takes about two to three years to make a movie. In summer 1997 NASA’s Mars Pathfinder rover landed on the surface of the fourth rock from the Sun and gained tremendous publicity for NASA. It undoubtedly led Touchstone Pictures and Warner Brothers to greenlight Mars-themed movies. Something similar happened when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter in 1994; in 1998 there were two movies about saving the Earth from an incoming space rock: Armageddon and Deep Impact.

Though the start date of Disney's adaptation of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs series is delayed, actress Lynn Collins confirms that pre-production has begun.

From the sound of things, Disney's adaptation of the nearly hundred-year-old sci-fi series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, "John Carter of Mars," is going to start shooting as early as January of next year. The start had previously been pushed back from November. Pre-production continues to move steadily forward nonetheless on the hybrid live action/CGI film.

At first glance, James Allerdyce's strategically staged one-man mission to Mars might seem overladen with pop-culture references and undernourished with the inherent drama of a crash landing on the red planet. But don't make for the airlock yet; there's actually much more going on in this refreshingly succinct performance. While Allerdyce's stranded captain waits for his air supply to run out, he desperately toggles invisible switches and reconfigures unseen whatsits (the actor is aided greatly by his precise interaction with the evocative sounds he designed with Jerry Morris). Equipped only with an office chair, the writer-director-performer effortlessly conjures up a believable spaceship failure, regrettable marital troubles, and more than a touch of David Bowie–inspired space madness.

With all the probes recently landing on Mars, it's no wonder we feel that the planet is close enough to vacation there. Robert Zubrin has such a scheme already in place for his book entitled "How to Live on Mars – A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet". Though vacationers are welcome, he much more expects the arrival of immigrants who are ready and raring to put spade into ground for a homestead of the future. Once we have the vehicles to carry our bodies to Mars and once a substantial number of people live there, then we will need guidebooks on how the rest of us can join in. Though perhaps jumping the gun a bit, Robert Zubrin's book "How to Live on Mars – A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet" presents one particular view on people's needs to living on that little red speck that we see in the night sky. Perhaps with more people imagining our presence there, then we won't have to wait so long for the eventuality to occur.

AMC is going to Mars. Hot on the heels of its Emmy wins for Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the cable channel is making its move into sci-fi by developing a new series based on Red Mars, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Writer-producer Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon, Die Hard: With a Vengeance) will be in charge of adapting Kim Stanley Robinson's classic 1992 novel, which describes a team of humans as they attempt to colonize the planet.

Here’s the Slashfilm plot synopsis: A Princess of Mars by Edward Rice Burroughs was first published in 1917. The movie will follow Civil War vet John Carter, who is transplanted to Mars, where he discovers a lush, wildly diverse planet whose main inhabitants are 12-foot tall green barbarians. Finding himself a prisoner of these creatures, he escapes, only to encounter Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, who is in desperate need of a savior.

Creating a world set 170 years in the future is what a team of Honolulu-based game developers considers a challenge. On the Net: www.avatar-reality.com Make the planet Mars, populate it with ultra-modern cities, flying cars and millions of gamers, and that's what they call a whole lot of fun. The development of Blue Mars, an online multiplayer game set to debut in beta format next year, is bringing dozens of former Square USA employees back to Hawaii under the company Avatar Reality Inc. The company, founded in mid-2006, is helping revitalize a local gaming industry that saw the loss of more than 200 game developers when Square closed its Honolulu office in 2002.

The first astronauts to explore Mars will undoubtedly face challenges, some of which may mirror those depicted in a new mini-series and documentary chronicling humanity's initial steps on the red planet. "Race to Mars," a martian multimedia event orchestrated by the Discovery Channel Canada, follows the efforts of six spaceflyers on a 600-day mission to reach the red planet and hunt for life before China's unmanned probes. The first installment of the four-hour miniseries airs tonight for viewers in Canada. "This will be the definitive story of the human mission to Mars," said Paul Lewis, president and general manager for Discovery Channel Canada, in a statement. A six-part documentary "Mars Rising" – narrated by veteran space actor William Shatner – will follow the mini-series beginning Oct. 7 to present an in-depth look at the inherent hurdles facing a human expedition to Mars. A companion book and multimedia Web site further explore issues raised in the $20 million television events.

Mars has two moons, Deimos and Phobos; both orbit in the same direction. Standing near the equator on the Martian surface one night, you watch them both. To your astonishment, Deimos appears to be slowly moving from east to west relative to you, while Phobos is slowly moving from west to east. How can this be? Supporting calculations will score extra points!

The 1974 Ford Cortina used in hit BBC police drama Life on Mars has been auctioned on eBay, raising almost £13,000 for Comic Relief. The car, seen in two hit series of the show about a modern-day police officer who finds himself transported to the 1970s, sold for £12,800. Its description on eBay admitted "one or two battle scars" from chases. The current series of Life on Mars, starring John Simm, is the last. The Comic Relief telethon is on Friday.

The Autobots and Decepticons are from the planet Cybertron, but apparently were on Mars in 2003 wreaking havoc on the Beagle 2 "Rover" (which was actually a lander). Click on "Watch The Exclusive Announcement Now" to check it out.

Astronauts are stomping around Mars without ever leaving Earth in Canada, where filming is underway for an ambitious new documentary and mini-series that blur the line between science fact and fiction. Clad in spacesuits on sets awash in red dust, actors are portraying future astronauts in the television mini-series Race to Mars, a Discovery Channel docu-drama aimed at realistically depicting a manned mission to the red planet. The three-hour program, a six-part documentary Mars Rising, and a related Internet site Mars Interactive are set to debut in Fall 2007 on the Discovery Channel and its broadcast partners.

Director Jon Favreau confirmed to Sci-Fi Wire that Paramount has put the the long-gestating film adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars on hold, pending the success of his next directing project, Iron Man, and the upcoming eleventh Star Trek film. The eleven volumes of Burroughs' classic adventure series center around a Civil War veteran who takes shelter in a cave when pursued by a group of Apache Indians. Once inside, he suddenly finds himself transported to Mars, where he's taken prisoner by 12-foot-tall green men.

Scientists have set their sights on the human exploration of Mars within a generation - but Discovery Channel and Galafilm Inc. will bring the Red Planet experience to audiences across Canada and around the world even sooner than science, announcing today that principal photography has begun on Race to Mars. This landmark three-hour docudrama imagines and simulates with breathtaking realism the first human mission to Mars based on the science being developed and tested today. Production on Race to Mars, starring Michael Riley (Supervolcano, This is Wonderland) as astronaut Captain Rick Erwin, commenced today in Montreal and St-Hubert, Quebec, and will continue through mid-June.

U.S. Navy Capt. Michael Foreman, set to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard NASA�s STS-120 shuttle flight, will appear in the television program Trading Spaces: Boys vs. Girls to assist in transforming a typical 10-year-old New Jersey boy�s bedroom into a Martian landscape. Foreman will help in the installation of a mission control center and a Mars Exploration Rover that will double as a bed. The program appears at 11:00 a.m. or 11:30 a.m. EST on Dec. 3, but will be rebroadcast Dec. 5 and Dec. 9 at 7:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. (0030 and 0300 GMT on Dec. 6 and Dec. 10) on NBC�s Discovery Kids channel (Check local listings).

As Tom Cruise's WAR OF THE WORLDS exits the theaters, the only true movie adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic novel, produced by Pendragon Pictures, continues enjoying strong DVD sales in the U.S. and Canada. Now, Pendragon Pictures announces the international release of the Director's Cut of H.G. WELLS' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. The never-before-seen Director's Cut features new enhanced special effects, new scenes and faster pacing. Director Timothy Hines comments, "I had the opportunity to re-cut the film for the foreign release and subsequent U.S. distribution and I'm proud of the end result. Virtually every scene in the film has been reconceived and retimed from the original Summer release. It plays remarkably better.

THE MARS UNDERGROUND is a landmark documentary about renowned aerospace scientist and visionary, Dr. Robert Zubrin, and his struggle to get the first human mission to Mars off the ground. Shot entirely in breathtaking High Definition (HD) and directed by accomplished documentarian, Scott J. Gill (Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, The Blood Earth), THE MARS UNDERGROUND brings to life Dr. Zubrin�s vision, known as "Mars Direct", through startling 3-D CGI animation of the launch, voyage and landing of spacecraft, as well as glimpses into the future of man�s reign on Mars.

Now Playing Magazine caught up with screenwriter Ehren Kruger who spoke about his current project, the long-gestating film adaptation of an Edgar Rice Burroughs classic. "I'm in the writing process for John Carter of Mars, working with the director � Kerry Conran," Kruger informed Now Playing. "He's in, too, with his visual design team � the effects, and the sort of outlandish worlds that need to be created for that. He has to design all that. So we're pretty [well] along with the script.

Can you help discover water on Mars? Finding water on different regions on Mars has implications for understanding its complex geologic history, the possible existence of past life and the sustenance of potential future astronauts. Many space missions have taken photographs of the surface of the red planet, and some of them might show a subtle clue pointing to water on Mars that has been missed. By close inspection of images, following curiosity, applying scientific principles, applying knowledge about features on the Martian surface, and applying principles of planetary geology, such clues might be brought to light.

All true aesthetes know that the dullest intellectual movement of the twentieth century was Earthism. Trees? Mountains? Humans? Boring, boring, boring. Yet most influential art museums actually endorse these trite subjects! Ever seen C�zanne's Bords d'une rivi�re? It's a riverbank. How original. Let's be honest: Our planet often seems like nothing but a bunch of feral cats and plots of arable land. It's time to move on with our art. As a certain Predator II once put it, "Earth is nothing to write home about." The Johnson Museum's new and startling photography exhibit, "Rover Landings: Cornell on Mars," addresses this problem by shifting our attention away from our overly familiar planet. This is not artwork from a Lower East Side loft; it's the result of advanced robotics in a desolate, crimson hellscape without oceans or oxygen. In other words, it's a lot like the ILR library.

The filmmaker who made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name in the 1977 film "Pumping Iron" is making an IMAX documentary about NASA's dual rover mission to Mars. George Butler previewed his project here Tuesday at Flight School 05 and PC Forum, a combined meeting of top space industry officials and entrepreneurs as well as leaders in the tech industry. Several people in the small audience expressed awe at both the mission's scope and the telling of the story in the film, titled "Mars."

If NASA is ever able to put a man on the moon again, or on Mars, it's very likely that the agency will owe a bit of thanks to a small Maryland video-game developer. In recent months, Vision Videogames has been putting the finishing touches on SpaceStationSim, a game timed for publication when the next space shuttle launches, supposedly this spring. As its title suggests, the game lets players pretend they're astronauts on the International Space Station in a 3-D, simulated environment. But pure fantasy this is not. In fact, Vision Videogames designed the game using technical specifications from NASA as part of a Space Act agreement. And now the company is under contract to play a crucial role in the development of the crew exploration vehicles, or CEVs, that could someday prowl around the moon or Mars.

Frank Buss writes "A new challenge: Mars Rescue Mission. Have fun! Now you can win real prizes."

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame will celebrate Halloween with a new exhibit that explores H.G. Wells' 1898 classic novel, The War of the Worlds. Through dozens of book editions, radio and film adaptations, and even a musical, The War of the Worlds continues to amaze us more than a century after its first publication.

Millions of panic-stricken Americans clogged the roads, loaded guns and hid in cellars 66 years ago as news spread of a Martian invasion. Mass hysteria gripped parts of New Jersey and New York on Oct. 30, 1938 when Orson Welles broadcasted a radio drama of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" reset in the actual U.S. town of Grover's Mill. While the same mass hysteria is not expected this Oct. 30, GhostLight Productions is hoping to scare scores of people with their live onstage recreation of the infamous radio play at Heard-Craig Hall.

While a team of aerospace engineers takes aim this week on the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition for privately developed suborbital spaceflight, a Nevada millionaire is planning an even loftier contest. Robert Bigelow, chief of Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace, is apparently setting higher goals for private spaceflight endeavors with America's Space Prize, a $50 million race to build an orbital vehicle capable of carrying up to seven astronauts to an orbital outpost by the end of the decade, according to Aviation Week and Space Technology. Bigelow told Aviation Week that not only would Space Prize winners secure the $50 million purse, half of which he's putting up himself, but also snag options to service inflatable space habitats under development by Bigelow Aerospace.

The Bigelow Aerospace project to privately develop inflatable Earth-orbit space modules is beginning to integrate diverse U.S. and European technologies into subscale and full-scale inflatable test modules and subsystems at the company's heavily guarded facilities here. While much public attention is focused on the massive International Space Station (ISS), Bigelow has quietly become a mini-Skunk Works for the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). Ongoing technical assistance to Bigelow from JSC is focused on helping the company spawn development of orbiting commercial inflatable modules by the end of the decade, with the possibility of JSC later using the Bigelow technology for inflatable modules on the Moon or Mars.

Pendragon Pictures proudly announces the completion of principal photography of H.G. WELLS' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Set in Wells' intended turn-of-the-century English locale, the movie is the world's first authentic adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic 1898 novel. The live-action production, lensed in tight security under the cover title THE GREAT BOER WAR, took two and a half months to complete on location in England and the Pacific Northwest. The picture wrapped almost three years to the date when Pendragon's original updated version of WAR OF THE WORLDS was shut down due to the events of September 11th. Director Timothy Hines reflects, "We never stopped really. After an initial two-week hiatus, we saw the light in adapting a dead-on accurate version of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS from the original source material.

A major sensation was caused at the convention by the announcement by award-winning filmmaker Sam Burbank that he would be making a theatrical motion picture based on Robert Zubrin's novel "First Landing." Listing the various Hollywood horror pictures or shoot-em- ups nominally featuring Mars, Burbank drew a sharp distinction between those efforts and the kind of movie "First Landing" will be. There never has been a movie actually about the human exploration of Mars. This will be the first." Burbank said, adding: "It will not be set in the glorious science fiction future, but in our own time, and it will show the mission done with all the grungy realism of the kind of space travel we can really do. It's not going to show the Mars mission as being easy. It's not going to show it as being impossible. It's going to show it as being really tough, but doable, by a group of people who have what it takes to do it."

When NASA foots the bill for producing a video game about colonizing Mars, there are rules. �No explosions and no dead people,� says University of Montana computer science professor Joel Henry. �Not even harmed people.� Last year, the University of Montana received a $51,000 grant for students to design, write, code and record audio for an educational video game about Mars for 12- to 18-year-olds. Henry believes he knows why NASA prohibited explosions: �I�m pretty sure that [decision] was politically motivated.� Despite the limitations on graphics, the team of nearly 30 computer science, English and media arts students completed Mars: The Journey Begins early this summer.

The NASA rover that landed on Mars this year has found Inuit colonists living on Mars! At least, that's according to the August 2, 2004 cover story of the tabloid, the Weekly World News, that shows a family of Inuit dressed in fur and eating country food on Mars � all with large alien eyes. The article says NASA's Spirit Rover has sent back photos of "an Eskimo-like tribe living at the north pole of Mars" with 187 people living in Martian homes that look like igloos.

Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise will bring the classic H.G. Wells alien-invasion novel, "The War of the Worlds", to the big screen, with Cruise expected to star, according to Variety magazine. The movie version has been accelerated onto a fast track, with only 10 weeks of pre-production scheduled before the film goes into shooting later this year. DreamWorks and Paramount are co-financing "War of the Worlds" which is expected to cost around or over $100 million --with both Cruise and Spielberg opting out of fees in favor of a share of the gross. "War" is now on track for a November start date and a 2005 release.

Four years of waiting, breathless previews, tantalizing glimpses. Not to mention delays from id Software, in which its typical message was: It'll be done when it's done. It's hard to overstate the anticipation for "Doom 3" or the impact of the series, especially in light of attempts in recent years to establish a causal link between violence in video games and reality. The addictive 1993 original popularized the first-person shooter genre, became one of the all-time best-selling computer games and helped propel the Mesquite, Texas-based company, which also makes the "Wolfenstein" and "Quake" games, to net revenues of $948 million in the past fiscal year.

Kerry Conran (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) is in line to helm Alphaville's SF adventure-action movie A Princess of Mars for Paramount, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Conran entered the picture after former Princess director Robert Rodriguez resigned from the Directors Guild of America earlier this year, making him ineligible to direct the Paramount movie.

Now, the granddaddy of all alien invasion tales will be adapted for a second big-screen treatment (the first was in 1953, starring Les Tremayne and Gene Barry). And who better than to put his name on a big-budget special effects extravaganza than the master himself, Steven Spielberg? The eminent director of such modern classics as Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report will team with Really Big Star Tom Cruise to bring the film to the big screen. Currently, Spielberg is expected to join Cruise in producing the film. It is anticipated that Cruise will also take the starring role. The two will be expected to settle on a production start date once screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Secret Window) delivers an acceptable script.

A group of mice will be trained and sent off the planet in 2006 to help pave the way for a human visit to Mars. This is a serious space project by US-Australian scientists. But before the rodents rocket away from earth, a Chinese company will create a sci-fi cartoon based on their interstellar adventures. "The Mouse Tronaut" is the first cartoon based on a real space project, designated to bring a hi-tech and adventurous feel to young audiences in China.

Horror movie about Martians invading earth to grow their "Gargon Herd" (actually a lobster). The hero realizing that there is intelligent life on Earth decides to warn us. Eventually he sacrifices himself to destroy the incoming herds of Gargon's and save Earth. Come see this amazing film. But you get to change the plot! Thanks to Twisted Flicks, you can decide what happens. Make the teenagers German! Make the hero a Microsoft employee! Your suggestions make it a different movie every night. All dialog, sound effects and music will be performed live by the Twisted Flicks cast.

Call it an invasion for Mars. Aerospace groups are planning a blitz next week to visit more than 200 members of Congress to push for funding for President Bush's proposal to return man to the Moon, then go to Mars and beyond. Among the ringleaders is former astronaut and senator Jake Garn, R-Utah, although he personally will not be part of the visits because of speaking engagements in Utah. Garn is chairman of Global Space Travelers, one of 20 aerospace organizations that have decided to band together for what it calls the Moon-Mars Blitz from July 11-13, 2004.

Friday marked the opening of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. It's located in Seattle at the foot of the Space Needle. Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen built the 13,000 square-foot museum next-door to his Experience Music Project. The featured exhibit at the museum is "The Changing Face Of Mars: the past, present, and future of the "Martians" and their red planet."

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Infestation from Mars is the brainchild of Elliott Haimoff, the film's executive producer, who is a tropical biologist and maker of science documentaries. Mr. Haimoff credits producer Barbara Sharp, a former area resident, with persuading him to film his latest project in northwest Ohio. Kerstin Khalfani, a bodybuilder and actress, plays Eve II, a Martian who takes over the body of a local housewife and terrorizes the town, sucking the brains from unsuspecting humans.

Universal Pictures has optioned the film rights to the Doom SF video-game franchise for producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and John Wells, Variety reported. Enda McCallion is attached to make his directorial debut, the trade paper reported.

Lubinsky is contracted by BBCWA separately and directly in the United States to produce and edit the Tom Baker special featurettes of the original 98 Tom Baker episodes that had Howard Da Silva's narrations exclusively for the US market. For Pyramids of Mars, it's all eight original introductions and recaps as recorded by Da Silva in 1978. Lubinsky used old off-air Beta 1 and VHS sound recordings from when WOR New York first aired Doctor Who with these segments. Lubinsky cleaned up, eq'd and matched the original off-air sound recordings with the new DigiBeta clone restored footage and effects wipes. He even recreated the actual font used to credit Da Silva at the end of each of the four episodes, and put this all together for the Pyramids Of Mars DVD's Region 1 release.

IGN FilmForce has confirmed that Robert Rodriguez is no longer the director of Paramount's A Princess of Mars (a.k.a. John Carter of Mars). We were tipped off earlier today that he wasn't going to be directing and that his decision was final. Rodriguez's reps at ICM have confirmed that the Spy Kids filmmaker has indeed departed the Paramount/Alphaville project.

Arguably the world's most lovable band, THE FLAMING LIPS will co-headline this year's Lollapalooza Festival. The 2-day event will feature The Lips on the main stage on the 2nd day, just before String Cheese Incident. THE FLAMING LIPS are nearing completion of their oft-mentioned Sci-Fi movie "CHRISTMAS ON MARS," which will be released this December. The feature-length film was written and directed by Wayne Coyne and The Lips, and features band members, family, friends and a few celebrity cameos in the cast.

A rocket ride to Mars is bringing tourists back into the orbit of Disney's Epcot theme park. �Mission: Space,� a simulated voyage to the red planet, opened seven months ago in Disney's second-oldest Florida park, and the results have been out of this world.

NASA's March 23 announcement of evidence of the past presence of "a body of gently flowing saltwater" on Mars is big news for America, and giant news for seafood fans. In January, Long John Silver's offered to give America free Giant Shrimp if NASA found conclusive evidence of an ocean on Mars. To celebrate the success of NASA's Mars Rover project, the company is going to give America free Giant Shrimp on Monday, May 10, 2004.

On the anniversary of the day Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth in 1961, more than 100 students, space addicts and self-described sci-fi fanatics gathered at the top of the Space Needle for a night of celebration in the Soviet cosmonaut's honor. The local event was the brainchild of Graylan Vincent, who graduated from UW with a bachelor's degree in geology and aeronautical and astronautical engineering last quarter. Vincent first heard of the global celebrations of Yuri's Night from a colleague at NASA, where he worked last summer.

Robert Rodriguez's resignation from the Directors Guild of America has jeopardized Paramount's development of its adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic SF book A Princess of Mars, Variety reported. The director of Spy Kids quit the union so he could co-direct Sin City with Frank Miller, who created, wrote and illustrated the three-book graphic novel series on which that movie is based, the trade paper reported. (Guild rules do not permit such "co-directing" credits.)

In recent decades a few popular artists have penned songs with at least vague space themes: �Major Tom� by David Bowie and Elton John�s �Rocket Man� come to mind. The 1982 Rush album �Signals� included �Countdown�, a song inspired by the band�s visit to Cape Canaveral to watch the first shuttle launch. In addition, in the last several years Elaine Walker, both solo and with her band, Zia, have recorded several albums devoted almost exclusively to space topics (including a CD of �space elevator music�). However, in general spaceflight is a topic generally overlooked in nearly all music genres, from country to rap to pop. (Sorry, but Britney Spears prancing around in a spacesuit for the video of �Oops, I Did It Again� doesn�t really count.) In an effort to fill this void comes �To Touch the Stars� ($15.97), a compilation of 17 songs about space exploration released recently by Prometheus Music.

A rocket ride to the red planet is bringing tourists back into the orbit of Disney's Epcot theme park. Mission: Space, a simulated voyage to Mars heavy on G-forces and "gee-whiz," opened six months ago in Disney's second-oldest park, and the results have been out of this world. Emphasizing the attendance boom was the sea of people watching Tuesday as Disney honored NASA's two Mars rovers, currently rolling atop the martian rocks and dirt.

For the past few years, all eyes in Hollywood have been squarely focused on the portly figure of Peter Jackson. His creation of a multi-billion earning trilogy is a feat for the ages, and one that will keep New Line accountants smiling for years to come. Such success inevitably leads to coypcat behavior as competing studios look to create their own cash cows. That makes every existing established literary franchise a potential gold mine for someone. Paramount Pictures is not normally known as a financially adventurous studio. After the disappointment of the Tomb Raider sequel, many observers expected the studio to grow even more fiscally conservative. Oops. Paramount is spending over $100 million to ignite a new potential franchise, and it's not exactly a Harry Potter situation.

Harry Knowles, creator of the Ain't It Cool News Web site, will co-produce the upcoming SF movie Princess of Mars for Paramount Pictures, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Knowles will join a production team that already includes director Robert Rodriguez, his wife Elizabeth Avellan, Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel.

First water, then methane... what else will we find on Mars?

To save you some time and effort ... this review is for dyed-in-the-wool film buffs. No one else, you see, will ever understand or appreciate a film such as "Destination Mars." And more's the pity, since this 2002 spoof is one fun film. However, you do need to be intimately acquainted with the films of Ed Wood Jr. and of the naive science-fiction flicks of the '50s to get the point of the whole thing.

If a few still pictures from the Mars rovers can capture the nation's attention, imagine what a high-definition video -- compiled by a supercomputer, projected onto a 36-foot screen, with 50 times the detail of any previous image -- will do to the minds of school kids. It could very well blow the doors off, if Tuesday's unveiling at the Mars Center at NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View was any indication.

Daniel Maas is the film-maker that first brought animation to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers' launch, landing and driving. His video required four years of research to achieve eight minutes of realism in high-definition. Maas described what it meant to join the Cornell team that landed on Mars.

The IMAX Corporation today, in association with Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks, and aerospace technology leader Lockheed Martin Corporation, announced a new IMAX� 3-D space film, which will take moviegoers to the moon and allow them to walk side-by-side with the brave astronauts of the Apollo program. IMAX will produce "Magnificent Desolation" along with Hanks' and Gary Goetzman's production company Playtone.

Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have confirmed that Paramount Pictures has tapped Spy Kids director Robert Rodriguez to helm the $100+ million adaptation of A Princess of Mars, part of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 11-volume series of John Carter sci-fi novels. Variety points out that the film � which will hopefully spawn a franchise � may ultimately be titled John Carter of Mars.

Soft drink maker Pepsi have taken notice of the recent Mars craze and produced a TV spot about a scientist monitoring a Mars rover's travels, who becomes so engrossed in his Diet Pepsi, that he misses a bunch of Martians jack it up on cement blocks and try and steal its wheels.

Robert Rodriguez is a busy fellow these days. Hot on the heels of the announcement last week that he'll be adapting Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City for the big screen comes word that he's also signed on to A Princess of Mars. Variety reports that the project, a version of author Edgar Rice Burroughs' first novel, is expected to be a big-budget flick ($100 million) thanks to CGI, with the Lord of the Rings series mentioned as a parallel. Paramount Pictures is hoping to develop it into a franchise.

Academy Award winning film director, James Cameron, takes a tour through a human mission to Mars. His commissioned renderings of the Mars Design Reference Mission illustrate how a quarter billion miles away, a crew and cargo will meet up to build and fuel their future habitat.

Fans of suspense adventures will soon learn the end of a story that started a long time ago -- last year, at the very least. In the imagination, decades -- if not centuries. Another American spacecraft is due to land on Mars tonight. Sunday's "Mars: Dead or Alive," a "Nova" documentary on the project, provides detailed background on the project.

The final minutes of "Mars Dead or Alive" promise to be as gripping as a movie cliffhanger and the best reality TV going. The PBS "NOVA" special details the building and launch of a Mars-bound rover set to land on the red planet Saturday one day before the program airs. The ending, at this moment, is literally a blank. The film's final 2 1/2-minute sequence will be hastily added when the fate of Spirit is known. The title is no exaggeration: Mars is a "graveyard" for half the spacecraft sent there, we are told.

As the rest of the country settles down with the turkey today (December 25), members of BLUR will be holed up inside CHESHIRE�s JODRELL BANK OBSERVATORY � waiting on word back from life on Mars. Today sees the climax of the band-backed Beagle 2 project, the British effort to land on Mars. If things go to plan, the probe will land on the planet�s surface on Christmas Day and the first signal we Earthlings will hear back will be a Blur song.

In its early moments this documentary, hosted by British actor Brian Blessed, ponders whether man could ascend the biggest mountain on Mars, Olympus Mons, a massive peak three times as high as Everest. It might have proceeded as a predictable vanity exercise for an actor, playing the hero, and dashing to a TV-produced finish line. In fact, Blessed proves he's more than up to the task and the results make for breathtaking television.

After months of deliberating over 27 proposals submitted for Discovery's Race to Mars project, a winning production team has been named at the World Congress of Science Producers in Paris. The triumphant group consists of Galafilm Productions, Snap Media and Mentorn. Race to Mars will encompass a television event consisting of several docudramas and a companion reality series simulating a daring human expedition to the Red Planet, all shot in HD. On-line interactivity and games, as well as a companion book will support this initiative.

Michelle! Do you want to go to Mars? "Let's go!" The two young girls dashed off to Mars, reinforcing the premise of the newest Pacific Science Center exhibition - "Space" - that an exhibit, a film, a speech can be an inspiration for a young person. Ask Susan Helms. As a child, she visited the center and was inspired to dream of becoming an astronaut. Today, Air Force Col. Susan Helms holds the record for the longest space walk, spent six months on a space station and starred in the IMAX film "Space Station 3D."

The collection of animated short films features a wide variety of films from different countries and even different eras, like the very rare excerpt from "Mars and Beyond" -- a 1957 Disney film.

The show, which has been touring the country since mid-September, is a compilation of animated shorts from around the world. Many of the selections have been nominated for Academy Awards, among other honors; most have been in circulation for a few years. Anyone who follows animation closely probably won't be seeing anything new, but what the show does offer is a collection of some of the best, most beautiful work of the past few years. One of the most interesting selections is "Mars and Beyond," part of a series of color shorts done for Disney in 1957 by Ward Kimball. The film is a nature documentary theorizing what life on Mars would be like and borders on the surreal in both its vision and brilliance.

Mission: Space, a new ride/space flight simulator at Epcot Center, part of the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, takes Disney guests in a whole new direction -- straight up into space. The byproduct of a partnership between computer giant Hewlett Packard and Disney, Mission: Space cost approximately $100 million to construct, making it one of the most expensive attractions at the world-famous theme park. It is also the most technologically advanced attraction.

Shot in Black Panther Oakland in the early '70s, the legendary funkadelic independent Afro-centric underground blaxploitation film Space Is the Place decrees that intergalactic cultural and free-jazz revolutions will indeed be televised. Imagine Sweet Sweetback Goes to Mars. John Coney's feature has caped crusader Sun Ra, benignly enigmatic throughout, fighting a war of mind control against the satanic, supernatural pimp known as the Overseer.

To increase viewer involvement with National Geographic (NGC), the infotainment channel plans to launch a new programming initiative, Mission Mars, in January next year. The much-touted programme will coincide with NASA�s probes landing on Mars. Mission Mars will be telecast across the world, with exclusive behind-the-scenes look at NASA and the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the masterminds of the Mars space programme. Mission Mars, in a way, is expected to follow up on the success of Mission Everest, launched earlier this year.

If you've been dying to take a ride into space, there are three ways to go about it. You can go through years of training to become an astronaut. You can sign up for a citizen-in-space program and pay for the trip, just like Dennis Tito did. The going rate these days is a cool $20 million. Or you can pay far less than that by heading to Orlando, Fla. Tonight on "Tech Live" we take you to Disney's Epcot Center where a new ride could be the closest thing to the real going-to-space thing, and it's right here on Earth.

Did the infamous Orson Welles The War Of The Worlds broadcast actually cause mass hysteria, or was it the biggest hoax to be found in the fact that we believe so many panicked?

Radio's most famous broadcast celebrates -- if that's the right word -- its 65th anniversary this Halloween eve, a literal and figurative dramatic presentation that shook the nation from New York to Concrete, Wash. The CBS Radio network's production of H.G. Wells' science-fiction novel "The War of the Worlds" aired on Oct. 30, 1938, locally on KIRO and KVI (both were CBS affiliates at the time). The P-I listed the production, part of "Mercury Theater of the Air," as one of the "best bets."

Guess what it pays to package. After the success of Mission Everest, National Geographic Channel has announced its next big programming and marketing initiative Mission Mars. The infotainment channel plans to invest $ 2 million for the initiative. In a bid to spread the spirit of exploration and adventure, the latest initiative Mission Mars is another big step towards emphasizing the channel's positioning as the provider of wholesome, credible entertainment, says a company release. Scheduled to air in January 2004, to coincide with Nasa's probes landing on Mars, the special will provide an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Nasa. The channel will also offer a special peek into works of the scientists at the Jet propulsion laboratory in California, the masterminds of the Mars space program.

By bringing "taikonaut" Yang Liwei safely home from orbit, China's communists staged the most compelling production of their 54 years in power. Because the Shenzhou 5 mission, while grounded in science and the military, was at heart pure Hollywood blockbuster. "China's manned `Star Trek' signals a brighter future," the state-controlled newspaper China Daily enthused.

Tuesday night may be the last chance to see the fabulous Flaming Lips for quite a while. This may be disappointing news for avid fans who love to dress up in outrageous costumes to attend the Flaming Lips' flamboyant, balloon-filled shows. But while the Lips will be off the road, they won't be far from reach. An EP titled "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell" is due in November, and a DVD will be out shortly thereafter. There's also a much-delayed movie, "Christmas on Mars," due in the fall of 2004.

Makoto Shinkai's Voices of a Distant Star is truly a work of love--created, produced, and animated all by a single man. Using the focus and cohesiveness that only an individual work can provide, Shinkai has created a masterpiece, blending luscious animation, a tear-jerking story, and beautifully honest dialogue to create one of 2003's very finest releases.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin has had another taste of space travel ... by blasting off on Walt Disney World in Florida's newest ride. The space veteran, the second man ever to walk on the Moon, rocketed to Mars on the world's most expensive roller coaster and loved every minute of it. The hi-tech Mission: SPACE will let thrillseekers experience what it is really like to blast off towards the stars.

Dragon 4D F/X Theater has been offering sensory 4-D rides that exceed the virtual level such as Himalamazon and Dino Island since their grand opening in March. Their virtual reality attractions give you the four-dimensional amusement, amazement and excitement of a high-speed story that races all over the theater. The latest attraction, Mars (Space Odyssey to Mars), is now open at Dragon 4D F/X Theater. This is a science fiction tale that takes place in the not-too-distant future, when many people move to Mars, Earth's new frontier.

People who love animation but can't take the bad-taste-and-gore-fest that is "Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation" should find that "The Animation Show" is just their speed. "The Animation Show" screens this weekend at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Show times are 9:30 p.m. tomorrow, 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 8:50 p.m. Sunday.

To experience the thrill of space travel, you can pursue a university technical degree, be accepted into the U.S. astronaut program, train for years, and possibly get a seat on a shuttle mission. Or, you can do the next best thing and plunk down $52 at Walt Disney World Resort to ride its newest Epcot attraction: Mission: SPACE. Mission: SPACE - conceived, designed, and developed by Walt Disney Imagineering - is set several decades into the future at the International Space Training Center. "Astronauts in training" board capsules that hang from the arms of four independent centrifuges. Sophisticated hardware and software, high-fidelity visuals and audio, and special lighting, perfectly synchronized with capsule motions, simulate what it feels like to launch into deep space. "It's an amazing experience," says Senior Show Producer Bob Zalk, Walt Disney Imagineering. "In fact, it's out of this world. Guests will certainly say this ride is unlike any other experience they have had before."

The Flaming Lips' long-awaited feature film, 'Christmas On Mars', will be released before the end of the year, dotmusic can confirm. The movie, written and directed by frontman Wayne Coyne, tells the story of Major Syrtis and his experiences of spending the festive season on a newly colonised Mars. Coyne described the movie as: "Maybe 'Eraserhead' or 'Dead Man' crossed with some kind of fantasy and space aspects, like 'The Wizard of Oz' and maybe '2001: A Space Odyssey', except done without real actors or money, and set at Christmas-time."

With "The Animation Show," animators Mike Judge ("King of the Hill," "Beavis and Butt-Head") and Don Hertzfeldt (an Oscar nominee for "Rejected") put together a program of animated shorts that have one thing in common: They all are really cool.

This festival of animated shorts should attract a wide audience. Serious cinephiles will want to check out ambitious, Oscar-nominated foreign titles like Katedra, which recalls Final Fantasy in its stunning resemblance to live-action sci-fi, and La Course a L'Abime, a gay romp in the world of Impressionism set to the strains of Berlioz's "The Damnation of Faust." Connoisseurs of the lowbrow will revel in early works by Beavis and Butthead creator (and Show co-producer) Mike Judge; the festival's other producer, Don Hertzfeldt, supplies several of his patented gag reels�wicked, mean, and piss-your-pants funny. Trust me: Until you've seen stick- figure children get the beating of their lives from demonic balloons, you have not truly lived. Special bonus: an excerpt from Mars and Beyond, a quasi-hallucinatory 1957 cartoon that speculates about life on Mars with enough visual imagination to make would-be Asimovs whimper with delight.

A unique project � over 4 years in the making � is finally coming to fruition. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the National Space Society (NSS) sponsored a strange and unusual competition: the Apollo Awards for Space Songwriting. The winning entries, along with new works from selected singer/songwriters and winners of the Mars Society's similar Rouget de Lisle contest, are featured on a wonderful new album from Prometheus Music. It's called To Touch the Stars -- A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration, and it's in the final mastering phase at Fantasy Studios now, with an expected release date this Christmas.

The movie is a combination of two short films and two very short films using one of the lead characters as the focus. The main story here is about The Scientific Boys Club (volumes 1 & 2). Set in the recent past, initially at least, the story began with a scientific convention centering on the Viking spacecraft mission to Mars...

Mars attacks � but sometimes Mars laughs. In our last episode, we saw how Hollywood science fiction tended to project period anxieties � communism, infiltration, nuclear destruction, etc. � onto the Red Planet. Sometimes, though, Mars was the butt of jokes. Still, there�s apparently just enough magic to keep the cameras intrigued. Director Timothy Hines is shooting a new version of War of the Worlds for Paramount, and rumor has it that Paramount also is developing an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs� Mars novels, complete with four-armed warriors and bronzed princesses.

Its the year 2036, 75 years after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin paved the way for humanity into space, and the International Space Training Center now complements NASA by screening the thousands of hopeful candidates to help settle the new Mars base. At least, that is the premise behind Mission: SPACE, the newest attraction to open at Walt Disney World Resorts' Epcot Center. Billed as the most extreme and technologically advanced ride Disney has ever attempted, Mission: SPACE (M:S) is part flight simulator, part thrill ride, and part educational experience.

Although the historic close proximity of Mars this week is for a limited time only, skywatchers with Martians on the brain can continue feeding their red planet hunger with a variety of popular culture mediums available on Earth. Over the last century or so, Mars has been viewed many ways in books, film and music. Writers and filmmakers have made it the home of antagonistic aliens and the next New World for human pioneers. At least one movie has credited the planet for seeding Earth with life as we know it.

so wanted to like this game. Not only is it a LucasArts creation, but the plot � as presented in the opening cut scene � is so reminiscent of Aliens that it's almost a ripoff. Right there, you've got traces of Star Wars and James Cameron coming together � a veritable dream pairing for sci-fi fans. So far so good. But it doesn't take long for RTX Red Rock to fall down.

Warner Music Vision has just announced the September 22, 2003 release of the Flaming Lips "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" on DVD-Audio. The DVD-A includes 5.1 surround sound mixes of all the songs originally featured on the CD version of the album, plus 10 video clips including singer/front man Wayne Coyne being interviewed about "The Making of the Yoshimi DVD-Audio album", the "Christmas On Mars" movie trailer, plus six new songs in surround that weren't featured on the original CD album.

The excitement, thrill and rush of rocketing into outer space has come to Walt Disney World's Epcot with the opening today of Mission: SPACE to the public. Visitors who "accept the mission" will engage in an experience that launches them into a simulated space adventure -- from liftoff to the sensations of traveling though outer space on a mission to Mars.

There's no need to wait for NASA to come up with a way to get astronauts to Mars. Guests of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando will soon have a new way to experience the trip by stepping inside Mission: SPACE -- a long-awaited, space-themed ride that is arguably the most technologically advanced amusement ever developed by Disney Imagineers. The Epcot attraction is scheduled to "soft open" to the public Aug. 15. That will be followed by a star-studded, grand opening celebration in October. "We have worked for a long time about doing 'space' at Epcot because it's just such a natural fit with what we're about here," said Brad Rex, Disney's vice president in charge of Epcot. "This is a tribute to NASA and the space program." Sponsored by HP, the attraction was designed with the full support of the space agency and is believed to have cost Disney more than $100 million to develop and construct.

The newest thrill ride at Walt Disney World's Epcot is a simulated rocket flight to Mars heavy on "Gee whiz" and G-forces. It remains to be seen whether Mission: Space also will lift the theme park's flagging attendance skyward. Mission: Space made its debut for journalists this month and officially launches Aug. 15, with a grand opening celebration slated for October.

The Mars Media Project involves the making of a pop-music video about humans-to-Mars that will be filmed on Devon Island in the high Canadian Arctic. The Mars Media Project activity on Devon will be hosted by the NASA Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) as part of their Education and Public Outreach program for 2003. Our very own Mars Project Coordinator, Advocate and Board member, Elaine Walker, was invited by the NASA HMP to do just that! She will be spending one week on Devon Island this July 22-28 as a Space Frontier Foundation representative on the HMP-2003 expedition. The music video, filmed for a pop song she has written, will help to promote the idea of humans traveling to Mars to young audiences. The video footage will be mixed after returning from Devon Island, and every effort will be put into getting it on the airwaves!

Producer Gale Ann Hurd (Hulk, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) has signed a deal with the SCI FI Channel to produce the six-hour miniseries, Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. Based on Robinson's best-selling novel of the same name, Red Mars chronicles the epic adventure of the first hundred colonists on Mars and their perilous mission to create a new world.

James Cameron, whose technological wizardry helped make Titanic the highest-grossing film in history, is convinced celluloid is on its way out. And to help send it to its grave, the director says he will start production early next year on one of the most ambitious movies ever made: a high-definition, 3-D digital feature. The topic of his planned movie is a secret. Some Cameron watchers speculate that it might be his long-planned epic about the first manned trip to Mars. But Cameron is making no secret of his belief that the movie-going public is now ready for the biggest transformation in the movie business since talkies were invented.

All right, so James Cameron delivered the textbook case for creating a sequel that can stand on its own without merely copycatting the original ("Aliens"). He made science fiction smart and rousing in the relatively low-budget "The Terminator," then pioneered morphing visual effects in its sequel, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." He launched modern cinema's biggest blockbuster with "Titanic," dominating the Academy Awards and luring teenage girls back to see it again and again to pine over Leonardo DiCaprio. But what's he done for us lately?

It�s no big secret anymore that James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director behind �Titanic� and the new 3-D film �Ghosts of the Abyss,� had his hopes set on getting into space. He even visited Russia�s cosmonaut training facility in Star City to find out if he had the right stuff to go to the international space station (and was told that he did). This summer I�m completing a film that I started last year, that�s an expedition film,� said Cameron, whose expedition to the sunken German battleship Bismarck was the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary. Then he�ll work on a hush-hush 3-D feature film project. Whatever that project turns out to be, it�s not going to be Cameron�s long-simmering saga about a future mission to Mars.

Director James Cameron told SCI FI Wire that he has put plans on hold for a fictionalized film about a manned expedition to Mars until NASA gears up space exploration again in the wake of the Columbia shuttle accident. But the director added that the movie is still in his plans. "I only need to make that film sometime before we actually go [to Mars]," Cameron said in an interview.

The Sci Fi Channel is planning to send a dozen civilians to Mars. Mind you, ratings for "Taken" weren't so good that the cable network can actually afford a mission to the red planet. Instead, Sci Fi is developing a new unscripted series that will simulate what it might be like if earthlings were ever to colonize Mars. The series, titled "Life on Mars," is one of several unscripted shows (Sci Fi calls them "alternative reality" programs) the network has in development.

Martians land on Saddoun Avenue here every night, on a mission to save mankind. The people of Baghdad love it. The space aliens, in aluminum-foil suits, count a beautiful blonde, a sour-faced midget and a Darth Vader-like character among their crew. A "drunken" comedian speaks for humanity. The laughs have rocked the Victory Theater for four years, as the surreal farce "I Saw It With My Own Eyes ..." has played to sold-out crowds and delivered a "message from Mars" that, for these particular Earthlings, strikes an all-too-real chord.

Radical Tactics Experts, who evolved out of the military's special forces, are the smartest and toughest members of the armed services, uniquely known for their strategic thinking, adaptability, and pure military muscle. Individuals from this elite unit are trained for insertion into undefined combat situations where even a small team is too large and unwieldy. In RTX Red Rock players immerse themselves into the role of Wheeler, who engages in fierce tactical combat, investigates mysterious, foreboding environments, and solves challenging puzzles to reclaim the Red Rock colony on Mars.

Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood has been signed up to star in bizarre movie directed by one of his favourite bands - rockers The Flaming Lips. The young Hollywood actor was asked to star in Christmas on Mars after meeting the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots rockers in L.A. recently.

The Faction is back, and here at "Extended Play," we're off to join the revolution. The sequel to last year's underrated PS2 and PC first-person shooter on Mars, "Red Faction," takes us to Earth this time around.

When they're not busy touring with the likes of Beck or Cake, or releasing (and re-releasing) inventive albums with long titles, The Flaming Lips choose to spend their free time with a typical rock 'n' roll pastime... shooting a feature film about Christmas on Mars. On the phone from his home in Fredonia, NY, drummer/keyboardist Steven Drozd talks all about the side project to end all side projects...

TNT's slate of original movies for 2004 includes several genre telefilms, Variety reported. The two-hour movies will be produced for around $8 million apiece. Production start dates range from January to summer 2003, the trade paper reported. The slate includes the following film: The space-race-themed Voyage to Mars, based on the book of the same title by Laurence Bergreen.

Sidney Pink, a movie producer who pioneered 3-D feature-length movies in the 1950s, died Oct. 13 at his home in Pompano Beach, Fla., after a long illness, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 86. In 1959, Pink co-wrote and produced The Angry Red Planet, the tale of the first expedition to Mars. The SF movie was filmed in what was advertised as a "revolutionary" process called "Cinemagic," a printing-process technique that gave the Mars scenes a pink glow, the newspaper reported.

Review: It might be impossible to navigate, but the show must go on. And so the Farndale Church Guild theater group -- the British version of the five stooges, the reason directors take up knitting and which is pictured under incompetence in the dictionary -- return in the Edge of the World Theatre's production of David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jr.'s comedy, "They Came From Mars and Landed Outside the Farndale Avenue Church Hall in Time for the Townswomen's Guild's Coffee Morning."

British novelist HG Wells� classic tale War of the Worlds is to be brought back to the big screen, it was reported today. Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner will produce the Martian invasion film for Paramount Pictures with work starting next year, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Paramount Pictures sees green in the red planet, inking a deal to acquire rights to an 11-volume science fiction adventure series written decades ago by Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the original "Tarzan" legend, Variety reports. Under the deal, Paramount has agreed to option the "John Carter of Mars" serial for a $300,000 upfront fee and to pay a $2 million sum if the studio brings the work to production. Paramount-based producers Jim Jacks and Sean Daniels' Alphaville Prods. plans to turn the first book into a movie. Although Burroughs is best known for having penned the iconic "Tarzan of the Apes," the English writer's first book was "A Princess of Mars." Written in 1912, it was serialized in All-Story magazine under his nom de plume, Normal Bean.

Ray Bradbury, whose novels and short stories have taken readers to Mars and the future, has come down to Earth on the street of dreams. On Monday, the author of "The Martian Chronicles" and many other classic science fiction novels will receive the 2,193rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Mayor Jim Hahn, actor Charlton Heston and other officials are expected to attend.

Few alternative rock musicians have challenged themselves quite like the Flaming Lips. Over the past five years they have created "Parking Lot Experiment," a symphony performed with dozens of car stereo tape decks each playing different music, Zaireeka, a box set of four different CDs meant to be played simultaneously, and the beautifully atmospheric pop album The Soft Bulletin. Now the Lips are back in the studio working on their next full-length record, tentatively due in May. As mind-blowing as the group's next record promises to be, the project that's really twisting Coyne's synapses is a full-length motion picture he and his bandmates are writing, directing, scoring and acting in called "Xmas on Mars." "Xmas on Mars" is tentatively scheduled for release next Christmas and is about people on an isolated colony on Mars who are suffering from depression and becoming suicidal. To ease his comrades' suffering, one resident, played by Lips drummer Steven Drozd, decides to put on a Christmas pageant to celebrate the birth of one of the colonist's babies.

John Carpenter likes to put his name in front of movies. Perhaps he does this to seem like an auteur, a director of vision, an innovator. He has directed some of my favorite low-brow films (Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York). These films have a vision, a style, a sort of mindless glee. Ghosts of Mars has nothing. It leaves no mark. It has no effect. It isn't even really bad; it's just there. John Carpenter's name may be in front of the title but it could have been directed by any sub-par creator of sci-fi/horror. The movie has a relatively interesting setting: a human colony on Mars ruled by martial law and a matriarchal society. This should provide Carpenter with fodder for some dynamic power struggles and interactions between the characters, but he does nothing with his matriarchal setting. It's just an excuse to make Natasha Henstridge the lead character instead of Jason Stratham.

Planet Earth�s red neighbour has long been the inspiration for a healthy number of works ranging from Hollywood blockbusters to sci-fi books. Now you can add Volition�s Red Faction game for the PC to that list. Unless you�ve been really stuck on Mars, you�ll know that Red Faction is the much-awaited first person shooter (FPS) from the people responsible for the Descent and Freespace series. Released earlier this year on the PlayStation2 platform, Red Faction puts you in the mining boots of Parker who unwittingly finds himself being pushed into the forefront of a miner revolt on Mars.

Pendragon Pictures' principals are concerned over a rumor that production of War of the Worlds is about to resume on October 8th. Director Timothy Hines expresses dismay at the rumor, "It is absolutely not true that War of the Worlds is about to resume. "The reality is that we are massively reworking the script in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster and we will not be able to go before the cameras for a little over a year." The Pendragon principals lost a close friend and investor in War of the Worlds in the World Trade Center attack.

Pendragon Pictures announces that, due to many story similarities of their production of WAR OF THE WORLDS to the tragic and horrific events surrounding the World Trade Center attack, production is forced to go on hiatus. For at least one to two weeks the principles at Pendragon Pictures will assess the project's potential effects on the spirit of the world. WAR OF THE WORLDS direct Timothy Hines comments, "I don't, in any way, wish to potentially contribute to the pain and grief of those affected by this senseless act of terror."

The new version of the HG Wells classic War of the Worlds is gearing up to start shooting on October 15, and the filmmakers have been taking advantage of an act of God to get some nice FX shots for the film: they travelled to Washington state to get footage of real forest fires. Says producer Susan Goforth:"I've never seen anything like it in my life. There are just no words to describe the experience of being so close to a curtain of fire rising into the sky and stretching on for miles. Wafts of heat constantly remind you of forces that are greater than our own. [Director] Timothy [Hines] was so excited. He kept moving in closer and closer with the camera. I was very worried as to how far we were pushing those boundaries. I had to keep reminding Timothy that we didn't want to announce that the principals of the new WAR OF THE WORLDS movie perished while filming forest fires."

A live stage show for children, "Mad Mission to Mars 2025," recently opened at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Comedy and music, along with special effects and 3-D computer animation, transform guests into "astronaut trainees" on a virtual trip to Mars. During the show, scale-size models of planets are placed in the audience to simulate the solar system. Staff members choose volunteers from the audience to help demonstrate aspects of living and working in space.

John Carpenter, director of the upcoming SF thriller film Ghosts of Mars, told SCI FI Wire that he derived the idea for the Red Planet's possessed human savages from primitive Earth cultures. "Science fiction is a mirror," Carpenter said in an interview. "So anything in the future's got to resonate with us here. We looked at kind of ancient war cultures--tribes going way back to the Celts, the Vikings and all those guys."

John Carpenter, who first made his mark with low-budget shockers like Assault on Precinct 13 before achieving international fame with Halloween in 1978, has wanted to make a Mars movie for nearly two decades. "Throughout our civilized history, Mars has been a symbolic deal to human beings. Mars himself was the god of war, of blood lust, passion, death ... all that kind of good stuff that movies are made of." But for a long time, Carpenter couldn't find a plot idea for the kind of Mars movie he wanted to make. Finally, about three years ago, an idea started to jell.

It�s bad form for a movie critic to review an audience. Especially at a free screening of a movie where the audience has no vested interest, because you expect a certain amount of restlessness among the masses. However, with "John Carpenter�s Ghosts Of Mars," I�m making an exception as I counted no less than 20 people walking out of the theater 30 minutes into the film. With mutilations and decapitations filling the screen every five minutes, it�s a small wonder why. With "Ghosts Of Mars," which resembles warmed over episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and outtakes from "Escape From New York," it seems Carpenter attempted to recapture both of those elements. Unfortunately, he just ended up with a horrible gross out film that a first year film student could easily improve upon. In Carpenter's defense, while walking out of the theater I heard a young man say, "Dude, that film was awesome." That comment made me stop and think. Maybe Carpenter hasn�t lost the elements of his earlier films after all. Forget about art. The man knows the business of movie making and how to make a fast buck from the audience he�s aiming for.

Pendragon Pictures announces that its production of WAR OF THE WORLDS will premiere for general release on Halloween, October 31, 2002 instead of summer 2003, as originally planned. Director Timothy Hines explains, "As the details of our production became more refined, we realized we had it within our grasp to release by Halloween, which I really want to do as Halloween is the night Orson Welles broadcast his famous radio version of WAR OF THE WORLDS. I feel the approach to our production has a great deal in common with the approach Orson Welles took with the material, and we will make history on Halloween night, 2002."

Mars, 2176 AD. Long inhabited by human settlers, the Red Planet has become the dark and dangerous manifest destiny of an over-populated Earth. 640,000 people now live and work at far-flung outposts all over Mars, mining the planet for its abundant natural resources. But one of those mining operations has uncovered a deadly mother lode: a long-dormant Martian civilization whose warriors, now unleashed and apparently unstoppable, are systematically taking over the bodies of human intruders, bent on ridding the planet of the invaders from Earth.

Red Faction for PlayStation 2 owes plenty to the first-person-shooter games that have come before it - especially "Half-Life," from which it borrows its story-driven approach to carnage. But to simply disregard it as a cheap imitator would deny it the credit it deserves. Not only does the game pour plenty of fun into the genre, it serves up a few innovations of its own as well. The game starts with a cinematic narration in which you discover your character has left Earth, hoping for better fortunes in the mines of Mars. Here you find yourself trapped in a savage prisonlike environment with no hope of escape.

Newly formed Pendragon Pictures is gearing to produce a new rendition of the H.G. Wells classic War Of The Worlds. Described as a non-campy, live action production, the latest version will be directed by Timothy Hines and produced by Susan Goforth. Financed through an array of sources anchored with venture capital, Pendragon Pictures' production will be the first ever to feature the ten-story tall alien fighting machines.

Seattle-area disc jockey planning performances at Mars Themed Camp at this years Burning Man. Burning Man is an extreme desert artistic fire festival that takes place the week leading up to Labor Day on the Black Rock desert of Nevada. Camp Mission Statement: The Flight To Mars theme camp is a massive space/time transition system which transports beings into a gyration arena on the surface of Mars. The name was inspired by a mysterious seattle funhouse which we believe was transported to the red planet to make room for the EMP (Experience Music Project). Our engineering bio-drones will create this edifice in Black Rock City, NV for Burning Man- August 27, 2001.

The War of the Worlds, HG Wells's epic tale of monstrous invaders from the red planet Mars, is to be restaged in a project that has triggered a parallel conflict in the equally hostile environment of an American courtroom. Lawyers are lining up to protect their clients' share of a �40m retelling of the original short story published in a magazine in 1898. In a first for American cinema, the film is being funded by a group of Seattle dotcom entrepreneurs who are big fans of the pioneering social critic.

Wing Commander director and video-game creator Chris Roberts has opened his own production company, Point of No Return, in Los Angeles, and will develop Earthfall, an SF movie set on Mars, Variety reported. Point of No Return aims to produce 12 films over five years, as well as TV series and interactive projects, the trade paper reported.

When you've recorded a four-disc set requiring the simultaneous playback of all four and composed a symphony expressly for a forty-piece boombox orchestra, the logical next move would be to write, direct, produce, score and star in a futuristic epic where stranded space colonists celebrate the first Martian Noel with an alien replacing Santa (who killed himself). Logical that is, if you're the avant-garde, neo-psychedelic, sonic visionaries known as the Flaming Lips. Lips' wizard Wayne Coyne is developing his debut full-length feature film, First Christmas on Mars, and hopes to begin production this summer in his native Oklahoma.

If you like TV, you'll love the Mars Channel. Take your seats for the network premiere of interplanetary telly. When you watched Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, it was like watching a TV show shot through someone's nylons," recalls Bill Foster. Yet, he admits, those blurred shots fired the public's passion for space travel. Now, 32 years on, Foster plans to reignite those flames with footage so clear and crisp you could be scaling the mountains of Mars from your sofa.

Hey folks, Harry here with an upgrade to the trailer for GHOSTS OF MARS that Smiling Jack had up yesterday... Sony has gone and posted a high and low res rendition of the first teaser for John Carpenter's latest film. And though I looked really, really hard... no Harry head yet. But hey... that's cool...

Old time AICN-man Smiling Jack Ruby has scored a cool trailer that we're all waiting on... JOHN CARPENTER'S GHOSTS OF MARS!!! The trailer is so small though, that details are hard to make out, so I can't see my head (if it is there at all) and sometimes the action seems to just be pixels moving... but I dig the way the trailer is cut and the music... which is just... cool.

Ray Walston, who played the lovable extraterrestrial Uncle Martin on the 1960s sitcom "My Favorite Martian" and the devil in the Broadway musical "Damn Yankees," has died. He was 86. In "My Favorite Martian," Walston played opposite Bill Bixby as a Martian stranded on Earth. His antennae-sprouting alien character masqueraded as Bixby's "Uncle Martin" and spent most of his time trying to conceal his identity from curious Earthlings.

The second of a series of Mars movies is out, and it is my great pleasure to say that "Red Planet" is vastly better than "Mission to Mars". Of course, the stomach flu is better than "Mission to Mars". Anyway, I was dreading watching RP since the critics had nearly universally panned it (with the exception, notably, of Roger Ebert), but I found it to be an enjoyable film. It's possible that my opinion was swayed by expecting something horrible, and thus thinking it was a lot better than it really was. But I do really think it was a fun flick. Of course, it did make a few astronomy mistakes! It also got some interesting things right as well. Want to know more? Then read my detailed review! As always, with a newly released movie, I place the review on a different page so as not to spoil the details for people who have not yet seen it.

It�s 2052, and our descendants are choking on the wretched refuse of their own technology. In a last-ditch effort to forestall environmental Armageddon, Earth takes a cue from the playbook of countless fictional aliens and looks for salvation on another world, in this case Mars. Robotic craft have been sent to melt the polar caps and seed the planet with blue-green algae in a barely plausible bid to produce a warm, breathable atmosphere.

Val Kilmer made one small step onto the red carpet at Red Planet�s Hollywood premiere, and made one giant leap for hype kind. But even Kilmer�s star power was eclipsed by the gravitational attraction the press corps had for Red Planet costar Benjamin Bratt�s stellar companion, Julia Roberts. For a film about a planet with a thin atmosphere, there was reportedly a lot of friction on the set. First, NASA decided not to cooperate with film because of the script�s depiction of combative astronauts. Second, press reported Val Kilmer and costar Tom Sizemore at odds throughout the shooting. Sizemore�s and Kilmer�s people both denied any conflict. Adding fuel to the fire, Sizemore maintained strict radio silence at the premiere.

By 2050, the overpopulated Earth has been depleted of its resources. The atmosphere is poisoned and slowly dying. Even the frogs are extinct. The solution: find a potentially hospitable planet for colonization. Hence, the Mars Terraforming Project, which has strewn algae over a stretch of Mars in an effort to create enough oxygen to sustain human life. The mechanism for transmitting data on the experiment has failed, and a manned spaceship, commanded by Carrie-Anne Moss, has been launched to investigate. This is the premise of "Red Planet," a mildly diverting adventure film for those who enjoy thrills and shocks without having to think too much.

Warning: spoilers ahead! Peter Telep has churned out his share of novelizations and media tie-in books, and he�s put that experience to good use in his novelization of the upcoming movie Red Planet (Ace Books, $6.99 paperback). Like the stranded astronauts of the story, he makes the best of what he has, and the result is a decent though slightly ludicrous adventure novel. In the year 2050, humanity has been terraforming Mars for 28 years. Nuclear blasts have melted some of the polar ice caps and thousands of packages of algae have been dropped on the surface. Everything seems to be going well � until the oxygen level takes a nose-dive and the automated probes on the surface stop sending readings.

There are two solar systems - NASA's and Hollywood's - and the twain don't always meet. NASA would like to send humans to Mars, if Congress would bankroll the mission. But Hollywood filmmakers have sent humans to Mars for decades, ever since Buster Crabbe piloted giant Roman candles across the cosmos of Depression-era America. More recently, new digital technologies have allowed movie-makers to depict extraordinarily realistic-looking Mars flights. Digitally realized space odysseys include last winter's "Mission to Mars" and the forthcoming 50-odd-million-dollar "Red Planet," plus the recent orbital comedy-drama "Space Cowboys."

While the cast of the upcoming movie Red Planet are pumped to be in a interplanetary adventure onscreen, not all would want a real-life ticket to Mars. In the film, Carrie-Anne Moss plays the stubborn commander of a last-ditch mission to Mars. It's a natural role for the Matrix star hailed to by one reporter as "an action diva in a man's world" and by another as the successor to Sigourney "Alien" Weaver. Months after filming, her fellow cast members still half-seriously refer to her as "our captain."

Titanic director James Cameron has undergone space flight training as part of his research for a forthcoming film and book about Mars. Cameron, who also directed Aliens and the Terminator films, experienced weightlessness on board a Russian aircraft used to train cosmonauts.

Ever wanted to colonize the planet Mars, or visit the underwater paradise of Atlantis? Now you can, when you surf to www.fandom.com. Fandom Inc., the number one choice for genre entertainment, today announced the launch (at 5 p.m. PST) of Fandom Worlds -- online communities that permit users to enter, move about and interact with others in real time within computer-generated, three-dimensional virtual environments.

Movie synopsis and DVD review...

Besides "Dark Angel," Cameron had also been expected to produce a miniseries for Fox based on the best-selling "Mars" trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. But he has abandoned the project, explaining that "these books would not be well served in television and the story was too big a meal for a feature film."

The image of Val and Tom with the "weird" substance on their faces is really their sweat turning into ice as night falls on the planet Mars. This takes place during one of my more favorite scenes.

With nearly FOUR months left until the movie RED PLANET hits theaters, the official site has opened up to have a huge number of images. The images depict everything from the astronauts en route to Mars to the astronauts on the planet.

Finally the first real large group of images have been released for this movie...

Making movies may not be rocket science but NASA researcher Kathryn Clark knows one way to reach the stars is to start with luminaries of the Hollywood variety. Clark and other scientists are increasingly helping Hollywood actors and filmmakers make sci-fi movies as realistic as possible in an effort to fire the public's interest in space exploration.

When Courtney Love bowed out of the sci-fi action flick Ghosts of Mars � partly due to an injured ankle, partly due to trouble on the set, according to US Weekly � producers needed a tough, ass-kicking babe to take her place.

Just when you thought Ice Cube couldn't get much higher than his all-star Up in Smoke tour, the rapper is now heading to Mars. Or at least New Mexico. As originally planned, the rapper-turned-actor has parted ways with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and company to begin work on John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars, the action sci-fi flick that begins shooting this week in New Mexico.

Hey folks, Harry here. I can absolutely put to rest any ongoing lingering rumors about the casting of the lead role in GHOSTS OF MARS. In yesterday's story, Moriarty ended the piece saying that Natasha Henstridge was being favored for the lead role... well as of about 2 hours ago, the ink dried and she is in.

All I can say is, it's about time we had some news, and more directly... good news, concerning Red Planet. It's been pretty dry for a while, but hopefully things will pick up now that the first phase of the marketing campaign appears to be officially underway.

The teaser trailer for the movie RED PLANET is great, as most teaser trailers are. But honestly, I'm a little confused about the plot to the movie. It was my understanding that the movie dealt with man's survival on the hostile planet of Mars, but the trailer makes it out to be Man vs. Nature vs. a robot. Also, is this movie a horror movie (ie the tagline to the movie "The Color of Fear") or a sci fi one?

Clea DuVall is in final negotiations to co-star in the sci-fi action thriller "John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars," opposite Courtney Love and Ice Cube.

Developed by Talonsoft, Martian Gothic is an action-adventure with an intriguing twist: The three player-controlled characters must never meet each other. In 2009 Earth establishes Vita base on Mars. The humans hope to study Martian bacteria, but something goes horribly wrong and in 2018 Earth receives Vita's last signal, "If you send another manned craft, warn the crew � stay alone, stay alive." But Earthlings never quit easily and within a year a manned rescue flight lands at Vita base.

Highlighted differences between the movie MISSION TO MARS and the script to the movie. Did you know that the script featured a launch scene of the Mars 2 crew leaving the Earth and that the Mars 1 astronauts were killed in a different manner?

Never one to fall behind the curve, teeny-bop sensation Britney Spears has set her sights on outer space. In the promotional video to her song "Oops! ... I Did It Again", the title track to her upcoming second studio album, Spears wears a red spacesuit and cavorts with astronauts on a trip to Mars.

Rocker-actress Courtney Love is in final negotiations to star opposite Ice Cube in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars.

Rumor has it that grunge diva Courtney Love is up for a starring role in the upcoming science fiction film, Ghosts of Mars.

The critics hated it. Moviegoers, as so often happens, couldn't have cared less. The movie's potent performance is perhaps most attributable to its eye-popping special effects, the ever-reliable attraction of plucky humans in peril, and the durable mystique of Earth's red neighbor.

Gary Sinise has appeared everywhere from Broadway to the Wild West (THE QUICK AND THE DEAD) to the jungles of Vietnam in FORREST GUMP. He also has a penchant for doing the big things twice�he�s played two famous politicians (Harry S. Truman and George Wallace), and with MISSION TO MARS, he�s going back to space after playing another ill-fated astronaut in APOLLO 13.

With talk of real Mars missions in the early decades of the new century, cinematic trips to the Red Planet have once again become fashionable. Once again, accuracy has taken a back seat to storytelling. But maybe this new crop of Mars movies will help spur audiences to demand the real thing. And then today's 5-year-olds won't have to be satisfied with watching science fiction voyages.

The production notes for the movie M2M have been released. They include details of cast selection, story synopsis, aspects of project conception, and character development.

A growing movement hopes to capitalise on public interest in the red planet to pay for research�and to build support for a manned mission.

When you watch the actors in Mission to Mars walk in "space," you can rest assured a pro taught them how. Former astronaut Joe Allen, one of the first to go extra-vehicular in space without a tether, was a technical adviser for the film, which opens March 10.

The advance word is that accuracy rules in Disney's Mission to Mars. The first of two Mars-themed movies coming out this year (Warner Brothers' Red Planet opens November 10), Mission has been a NASA-friendly project from the start.

The National Space Society has produced an educational supplement for MISSION TO MARS, about the first human missions to Mars. The new movie from Touchstone Pictures opens nationwide, March 10. The NSS supplement, which will be included in 35 newspapers and magazines nationwide during the coming week, is designed to provide background on the movie and factual information about Mars exploration. The National Space Society is extremely grateful to Lockheed Martin for sponsorship of this NSS public education program.

Touchstone Pictures, in cooperation with mybytes.com, presents a special digital satellite screening of Mission To Mars. Click to see a list of schools (and their venues) participating in the free advance screening of Mission To Mars.

Ted Tally has earned a reputation in Hollywood for developing strong characters within genre conventions. He won an Oscar in 1992 for his adapted screenplay of The Silence of the Lambs. Most recently, he was brought on to rewrite the script to Mission to Mars in an effort to enrich the characters, saving the film from becoming yet another piece of sci-fi twaddle "about hardware and science."

For the upcoming film Mission to Mars, veteran production designer Ed Verreaux led the team responsible for the look of all the space equipment. Verreaux, whose design credits include Contact and Raiders of the Lost Ark, is no stranger to difficult assignments, but designing for the future provided its own special set of challenges.

A few more images of the upcoming RED PLANET toys have been photographed at this year's Toy Fair. This time, the figures consist mostly of the smaller scale ones.

These are pictures of prototype toys that should appear on store shelves sometime this year.

The latest batch of images from the official site include images of the spacesuits, the landscape and the spaceship that travels to Mars. Most of the images included here are pre-production art pieces. There's a lot of hard design work that goes into every movie and only a bit of it is included here.

In the battle of the epic Mars flicks, Warner Bros. is blinking first. The studio has moved its Mars-themed Red Planet back nearly four months, from June 16 to Nov. 10. That leaves Mission to Mars, the offering from rival Disney, a clear takeoff March 10.

The official site for the movie MISSION TO MARS has released a few more images. All of the new images (including production sketches) feature the space suits worn by the astronauts on their "mission" to Mars.

The "Mission To Mars" movie site houses a wide variety of "Mars"-related excitement and information, including a movie trailer, the challenging six-part "Mission to Mars" Adventure game, movie information, regularly updated exclusive movie stills and production sketches, as well as links to a variety of science-oriented Web sites.

While Touchstone Pictures' exciting big screen "Mission To Mars" movie does not open until March 10, 2000, space enthusiasts every where will have online access to the "Mission To Mars" television ad developed specifically for this year's SuperBowl XXXIV.

These two images from the movie MISSION TO MARS depict the "SPACE ROOM". This room essentially tells the billions of years of history of the planet Mars in a matter of minutes. Thanks go to Ain't-It-Cool-News.

The first "true" official images have been released through the official site for the movie RED PLANET. The movie will be released June 16, 2000.

These are the nicest images that have been released, so far, from the upcoming movie MISSION TO MARS. The left image may be the one used on the final poster for the movie.

The movie Mission to Mars is set to launch March 10, 2000. Teaser images are beginning to pop up on various Internet sites. Here is a set spotted by the webmaster of SurviveMars.com

The first major set of images have been released through the official site for the movie MISSION TO MARS. The images depict everything from portraits of the major characters to wide vistas of the planet Mars.

A new web site has been launched this month... Survive Mars.com's mission is to cover all of the movies and television shows that deal with the exploration of the planet Mars. Movies that are currently being covered include: Mission to Mars, Red Planet, and Mars Imax 3D.

There are currently four Mars films in the works, which are already being hyped on the Web, and James Cameron is behind two of them. He is preparing an IMAX 3-D movie and a television miniseries for the spring of 2001, about the first humans to visit Mars. The shows will likely have the same cast and overlapping stories.

While real-life NASA scientists search for water on Mars, astronauts in Hollywood�s "Mission to Mars" have already found it. From conception through completion of "Mission to Mars", the next movie from veteran action-movie director Brian DePalma, NASA was on hand to provide input to the script, including the cinematic invention of the discovery of water.

On Friday, November 12, Entertainment Tonite aired a short piece about the upcoming movie RED PLANET.

It's day 40 on the set of The Red Planet and there's a hitch. One of the five astronauts strapped inside the Mars landing pod has lost communication.

The last time the Red Planet loomed large on the big screen -- during the 1950s and 1960s -- it was the Martians who typically visited Earth. This time around, Earthlings are venturing to Mars.

Ghosts of Mars is set 200 years in the future and concerns itself with human colonists on Mars who are possessed by vengeful Martian ghosts.

Moviemakers have begun working on the $100 million Mission to Mars film in Vancouver, British Columbia. Among a cast of Hollywood actors-turned-astronauts on a 55- acre plot of sand dunes converted to red planet terra firma, are ex- space walkers, a Mars Pathfinder geologist, and NASA's chief scientist for the International Space Station.

James Cameron has a red planet on his mind. In the next 18 months, he'll produce a TV miniseries and an IMAX film, both depicting the first small steps humankind takes on Mars.

For filmmaker James Cameron, 2001 will indeed be a space odyssey. Speaking at the University of Colorado's Annual Mars Society conference to a collection of scientists, engineers and space geeks, Cameron offered up details on two red planet-themed projects he plans to premiere in two years.

Cameron is working on one of three dueling Mars projects. How to go bigger than Titanic, still the biggest film of all time? Cameron is unveiling a Mars miniseries for Fox and a related Imax film, both will be ready in 2001.