UFO movie news round-up

By Robbie Graham

Silver Screen Saucers

Alien contact movie based on “factual data” seeks funding

 

A new independent film about alien contact based on “factual data” is seeking public funding. According to io9.com, the movie – titled Ellipse – “is about a girl who is destined to be an astrophysicist. It's also about an Enlightenment-era woman who helped discover longitude. And it's about aliens. Plus, it's made by seasoned SF filmmakers in collaboration with scientists at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.”

The filmmakers behind Ellipse describe it as follows:

“Leo is from another world, many light years from Earth. He is a player in an intergalactic game, travelling to other worlds and planting the seed of knowledge about whether we are alone in the universe.

On Earth he has tried many times to point us toward the truth but our technology and the recipients of his 'sharing' have not been able to take the steps needed to unlock the secret.

Then he finds Ro, an exceptionally bright girl who he draws into the game. She becomes fated to study astrophysics and, as a grown up astronomer, her research leads her to identify a particular comet and send a lander to explore it…

The film begins over 400 years ago at The Queen's House. We meet Louise de Kerouaille, a mistress to Charles II. She was responsible for convincing the King to create the observatory as a way to map the stars and solve the problem of longitude, an amazing woman.

Next, the whole of Ro's study and the data seen in the film from the alien world is from NASA's Kepler mission and the amazing app called EXOPLANET. Hanno Rein, from the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton has chosen several stars with exoplanets to be discussed on screen and in the educational pack we are producing to support the film for schools, this will be written by Dr Lewis Dartnell and Marek Kukula, the Public Astronomer at the ROG…

Also, the whole film is being made in collaboration with the Royal Observatory Greenwich, home of the Prime Meridian.”

Ellipse needs £12,000 to get off the ground. If you want to support this movie, you can make a donation here.

 

‘Jupiter Ascending’ gets a release date

Warner Bros. has announced that its epic (and, by the sounds of it, completely bonkers) science-fiction movie Jupiter Ascending will be released on July 25, 2014.

Directed by the Wachowski brothers (Cloud Atlas, The Matrix) and starring Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, and Sean Bean, Jupiter Ascending “focuses on higher forms of life who are watching us from other worlds. Kunis will play a Russian immigrant who is busily scrubbing toilets for a living. Unbeknownst to her, she actually possesses the same perfect genetic makeup as the Queen of the Universe and is therefore a threat to her otherwise immortal rule.”

‘Defiance’: SyFy’s new alien drama reviewed

The hotly-anticipated (exopolitical?) TV series Defiance will premiere on SyFy on April 15. io9.com has already seen the first three episodes and has delivered its verdict:

“On a Syfy scale of Battlestar Galactica to Piranhaconda, Defiance is in the upper middle. It's got heaps of promise and an amazing cast… It's got a lot of heart and so far is a lot of fun.”

For the full, spoiler-free review of Defiance – which is set on Earth 30 years after a collective of five alien races arrives, turning our civilization upside down – head on over to io9.com.

‘Monsters vs. Aliens’ TV show

DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens is headed to the small screen as a Nickelodeon TV series.

Based on the 2009 feature film, Monsters vs. Aliens tells the story of a team of monsters brought together to protect the Earth from interstellar threats.

The pilot episode – titled "Welcome to Area Fifty-Something" – will premiere on March 23, with the series proper beginning April 6.

Check out the series trailer here...