Guardians of the Galaxy

More unambiguously on Ron Howard's plate: Colossus, set for 2010. Colossus revisits 1970's Colossus: The Forbin Project, Joseph Sargent's adaptation of a D.F. Jones novel about a post-HAL but way pre-WOPR, pre-Skynet, pre-Matrix supercomputer built to oversee United States security (and, to a lesser extent, Guardian, its Soviet equivalent).

Colossus first came to my attention in 1991, when Joel Robinson called it his favorite movie, but it never seemed widely available, and it was a number of years before I got a chance to find it a great, humanistic sci-fi thriller which shockingly hadn't seemed to age a day in a quarter century, set design and typefaces aside.

Somehow I had mistaken it for a TV movie – perhaps it was the limited need for set variety, a subconscious association of Eric Braeden with the medium, or the unfortunate pan & scan print available. In fact, the only DVD release to date is a bargain-priced grainy, cropped version. A fine widescreen print makes the internet circuit (let me know if you need a copy); this is probably the laserdisc, released in a two-pack with Silent Running (remake not yet announced). The remake should fix this, and we'll probably see a nice rerelease, but in the meantime, Amazon UK shows a May 26, 2008 target date for a widescreen disc.

While James Bridges' screenplay for Colossus: The Forbin Project was based solely on D.F. Jones' original 1966 novel, the updated Colossus script by Jason Rothenberg includes material from 1974's The Fall of Colossus and 1977's Colossus and the Crab. I'm curious about that last one too.