Four years ago, Jack Bauer ( Kiefer Sutherland) was branded a traitor and forced to go on the run in the final episode of “24.” Jack’s return has been heavily anticipated for years and now we know just what it takes to bring Jack out of the shadows once again.
Fox has unveiled the first full trailer for “24: Live Another Day,” the upcoming 12 episode miniseries that will catch up with Jack in London as he evades the CIA and attempts to stop a devastating terror plot that puts his former friend and ex-boss, President Heller (William Devane) in the line of fire.
The trailer also teases the new renegade status quo of Chloe O'Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and formally introduces two new characters: Mark Boudreau (Tate Donovan), who is both the White House Chief of Staff and the new husband of Jack’s ex, Audrey Raines (Kim Raver) and Steve Navarro (Benjamin Bratt), the leader of a CIA team that is attempting to hunt down Jack.
“24: Live Another Day” will begin on Monday, May 5 on Fox.
inFAMOUS Second Son, a PlayStation 4 exclusive, brings you an action adventure game where surrounded by a society that fears them, superhumans are ruthlessly hunted down and caged by the Department of Unified Protection. Step into a locked-down Seattle as Delsin Rowe, who has recently discovered his superhuman power and is now capable of fighting back against the oppressive DUP. Enjoy your power as you choose how you will push your awesome abilities to the limit and witness the consequences of your actions as they affect the city and people around you.
A New Origin Story: Step into an open world adventure that offers a realistic take on being superhuman
Choice and Consequence: Witness how the city, the people you encounter, and even the story itself is all affected by the actions you take
Control Multiple Powers: Draw powers out from other superhumans, creating your own set of distinct powers to use as you see fit
Freely Explore the City of Seattle featuring highly detailed environments, realistic weather, reflections, shadows and lighting
Unlock Cole’s Jacket for Delsin to wear in the Bonus Exclusive Downloadable Content, Cole’s Legacy:
Uncover what happened between the devastating events of inFAMOUS 2 and inFAMOUS Second Son in Cole’s Legacy.
Cole MacGrath’s actions in New Marias set in motion a chain of events leading to the now forceful occupation of Seattle by the oppressive Department of Unified Protection. Cole’s Legacy bridges the gap in time with a series of missions Delsin Rowe must complete that reveal unique insights into how the world of inFAMOUS Second Son came to be.
Pre-order now from Amazon and get the limited edition version. Also, get a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime.
This week's installation of The Series Project will incorporate an obscure backwater in television history, so I feel a brief explanation is in order.
The final Smokey and the Bandit feature film was released in theaters in 1983, and if you read last week's article, you'll recall that it was an awkward flop with broad dumb jokes and little-to-no Burt Reynolds. That essentially put the last nail in the coffin for the series. However, fast-forward a decade (to 1994), and series creator (and now stunt luminary) Hal Needham felt the eager need to return to the material… in TV movie form. He recast The Bandit, sliced his budgets way, way down, came up with a series of contrived, PG-rated, TV-ready plots, and presented the world with four new 90-minute TV specials.
So, yeah, over the course of 1994, the world was treated to four new Bandit movies (no Smokey at all), all of which are pretty equal in quality, and – when taken as a unit – may serve as a single season of a Bandit TV series. I don't know the politics of these TV movies – if they were always intended to be feature-length special of if they were meant to kickstart a much larger TV project – but I do know that I have seen them all. I might have to apologize for the brevity of this week's article, as, well, I'm not sure if I have a whole lot to say about these Bandit TV movies. But, as your humble critic, I have done my due diligence and sat through every last minute of all four.
Each film stars Brian Bloom (from “As the World Turns” and almost every animated iteration of Captain America) as a newer, younger, handsomer version of Bandit. He has that mid-'90s Jason Priestly look about him, what with his clear blue eyes. He is not the child of Bandit, and, as far as I can tell, he has not inherited the name. This is a hard reboot of the franchise. Each film starts with the same theme song “Another Dream Away” (yeah, I know) as sung by minor country star Dawn Sears. In this universe, Bandit is friends with the Governor's spoiled son Lynn (Brian Krause), but there is an otherwise rotating bevvy of female leads. Each film can really only be marked by its notable guest stars. Let's start this a-rolling with…
By 1994, the enthused trucker culture phase of pop entertainment had long since passed, and even the “Dukes of Hazzard”-inspired love of the good ol' boy hero was kind of out of the public eye, so bringing back Bandit in this climate strikes me a s little odd. I guess nostalgia-based entertainments stretch back much further than the Great Remake Blight of the '00s.
So Bandit is no longer the down-home charmer he once was, and doesn't even seem to be Southern. Indeed, Brian Bloom is pretty much a Hollywood pretty boy of the highest order, wrapped in some of the most unfortunate of '90s “country” fashion; seriously, he wears pink and aqua cowboy shirts. Bandit still drives a fast black car, and seems to make ends meet by a string of freelance trucker-for-hire jobs in his custom-painted rig. He's not liked by the local law, but he doesn't have the same flip dismissal of the sheriffs that he previously possessed. He also doesn't rely on his charm to escape certain situations. He's essentially a bland, neutered version of the Bandit we've previously seen.
The story of Bandit Goes Country: Bandit is asked back to his small Texas (?) hometown to help out his cousin Johnny (Christopher Atkins) with some sort of vaguely defined illegal business. Bandit is asked under the pretense that his old sweetheart Beth (a pre-Showgirls Elizabeth Berkley) wants to get back together with him, but she is still bitter about an old breakup. Also, Bandit has to – for reasons I don't rightly recall – give a ride to a traveling country star with a stammer (real life country star Mel Tillis), along with his neurotic city-boy agent, Charles Nelson Reilly.
There's a subplot about two star-crossed lovers who would be kept apart because Bandit's home down is divided into sects, or something, and there's a bit city-wide festival wherein the two sects compete in good-natured games, centered on finding a long-lost wooden bear statue. Bandit ends up bringing the two sides of town together by allowing the two youngsters to marry, else he saw the bear in half. Meanwhile Beth is forced to choose between Bandit and a large, mean guy named Jake, played by Tyler Mane, who would go on to play Sabretooth in X-Men and Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's Halloween remakes. In true mid-'90s fashion, she picks neither. I think I saw a similar romantic standoff in an episode of “Beverly Hills 90210.”
It's a TV movie, so it has Aaron Spelling production values and cheesy melodrama all over it, although Aaron Spelling would never produce something to forthrightly comedic. This is only vaguely entertaining, largely for the cheesy romantic flashbacks, the would-be studly men, and the notable celebrity cameos; Charles Nelson Reilly is always a pleasure.
The level of quality will not change for the next three movies. Although the title for the next one is certainly amusing…
It seems to be the week of grizzled old superheroes facing their bleak futures. We saw it in Starlight #1, and there's a bit more of it in Worth #1, from Aubrey Sitterson and Chris Moreno. Whereas Mark Millar's Duke McQueen is an obvious Flash Gordon type, Sitterson's Grant Worth doesn't have that easy an archetypal allegory. We first meet him as a dashing young buck in late-1960s Detroit, riding around on a Mustang and quelling riots, saving people, and stopping guns with his ability to control machinery. He's a hero that military guys call a hippie, and in the summer of 1967, he didn't sleep for days in his effort to keep the peace in the Motor City. In 1968, he agrees to let a friend of his, Dr. Eddie Ludlam, study his power to try and replicate it in order to allow the masses to do the same.
Then, in 2013, he's an old man living alone having arguments with his refrigerator.
It doesn't seem as though Ludlam's work panned out, but we also quickly see why the world seems to have left Worth behind – because machines did. He can only deal with old machinery, as he turns away a kid looking for help with his motorcycle because it's a crotchrocket with a computer in it. Grant Worth can't deal with computers. He can't even use an ATM and has to wait in line at the bank to deal with his money. The man is certainly grizzled.
Alongside Grant's woes unfolds the story of Elliot, a latchkey kid in today's Detroit who lives in Worth's neighborhood, trying to resist the peer pressure from his friend Damon about busting into abandoned old houses to steal their copper wiring for cash while working on his school robotics project. Elliot's path crosses with Grant's when Damon gets the bright idea to steal a bulldozer, which goes badly because it's actually the opposite of a bright idea.
Worth #1 is pretty solidly entertaining, because we like grizzled old coots as well as glory days from important times in history, we like people who can talk to machines and talk mess to ATMs, and we like watching idiots who think stealing a bulldozer is smart. I almost didn't review it because Sitterson uses "must of" instead of "must have" once and editor Paul Morrissey didn't catch it (sorry to only call out an editor for mistakes – but I'm one, too, and I expect to be called out on mine so I can fix them and avoid them in the future), and my hatred for "of" instead of "have" or even "apostrophe-ve" makes me twitch. But thankfully, I got over myself so I can tell you that Chris Moreno's artwork is also pretty interesting, as he crafts a very different style – also thanks to Cirque Studios coloring – to denote the difference between Worth's heyday and the grit of the now.
So that's a thumbs up, a notch in the yay column for Roddenbery and Arcana and Worth #1. It's definitely worth a look.
Magnus: Robot Fighter has been around for a long time, and the entirety of my experience with the character involves me constantly seeing his books at comic shops and wondering if he has anything to do with Magneto, and then remembering he doesn't, and then wondering why anyone would want to fight robots, because robots are cool, and now I'm going to read Transformers. So now that Dynamite is busting out a new relaunch of Magnus with writer Fred Van Lente and artist Cory Smith, I finally have a place to check in and see what this guy's beef with mechanoids is.
Magnus: Robot Fighter #1 seems to indicate that Our Man Mags has a very happy relationship with robots in the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D. In fact, he considers one of them, an A.I. called 1A, to be a father figure, even though it insists that anthropomorphizing him is a bad idea, their concept is love is just aping human words, and he apparently watches with a creep's eyes while Magnus bangs his wife, Moira Oh. Humans and robots live in harmony in Maury's Peak, though, and he teaches them both about Frederick Douglass and his assertions on how one makes a slave out of others. Then, suddenly, weird clunky robo-drones attack, and Magnus suddenly wakes up with a cool jumpsuit in a Blade Runnery future where all people are robots, and he's got no clue how he got there or where he even is anymore. Was it all a dream, was it 1A's version of the Matrix, or is he hallucinating now? It's all unclear, but we begin to see why Magnus has to start fighting robots – because he can't get any answers from them, they try to arrest him as an 'unregistered human,' and they keep trying to shut down his father figure for "deviation against the singularity."
It's an engaging first issue, with enough mystery and confusion to entice us into the second, and Van Lente's always pretty solid with crafting entertaining dialogue. Smith's art has a lot of dynamic action going on, and his designs for the various robots are fun and interesting, allowing for all shapes and sizes, from giant tin cans to multi-armed, sleek-looking receptionists. Magnus isn't a grizzled bastard like I always expected from the title of his book, for some reason, but actually a pleasant guy who is about to find his appreciation for robots severely challenged, and there's every indication that 1A is going to be a really big bad, even though it sounds like it's trying to help right now.
So, hey, if you've ever been curious about Magnus: Robot Fighter, and you should have, because it's called Magnus: Robot Fighter, maybe give the new Magnus: Robot Fighter #1 a shot when it comes out next week, and see if it's your bag, man. It's solid sci-fi stuff. Not super exciting as yet, but it has promise.
The nanotech are dying and they won’t take “no” for answer from Aaron (Zak Orth), the only person on Earth capable of keeping the “reject Skynet piece of crap” alive. In exchange for fixing the code, the nanotech, manifested as Priscilla (Maureen Sebastian), promises Aaron he can stay in the alternate universe dream world where the lights are on, there’s cold beer, hot food and internet porn.
It’s a tempting offer, but when “belly shirt girl” aka Charlie (Tracy Spiridakos) shows up at his office with a crossbow and a reality check, Aaron realizes it’s all just a dream, constructed by the nanotech. Unfortunately, Charlie isn’t long for this world as she's killed by Dr. Horn (Zeljko Ivanek) and his men, another manifestation of the nanotech.
Aaron manages to escape and takes a taxi to Chicago where he finds Rachel (Elizabeth Mitchell), who he saw earlier on TV talking about using the power outages as a weapon, in a parking garage. She’s just a little freaked out by his ranting and raving and ends up using a stun gun on Aaron. But this is his dream and so just when he needs it, Aaron finds a gun in his hand, which he uses to force Rachel to take him to Miles.
Unfortunately, 2014 non-blackout Miles (Billy Burke) is more “shady” drunk than swashbuckling hero and on top of that, he also thinks “Beardy McGee” is off his rocker. Monroe (David Lyons) shows up moments later, but he also doesn’t remember Aaron or the army he led decked out in “on the nose Civil War uniforms” though the idea is appealing to him. But when Horn and his men arrive, Miles, Monroe and Rachel suddenly find themselves armed with a sword, a machete and a whiskey bottle as well as their memories of Aaron “Stay Puft” Pittman.
After defeating Horn’s men, the foursome decides the best thing Aaron can do to wake up from his dream is jump off his own office building. Just as he’s about to take the fall, nanotech Priscilla appears with one last minute plea to fix the code, have children together and enjoy microwavable food. Aaron wants nothing more than to have kids and eat Hot Pockets, but he knows it’s not the answer.
After the jump, Aaron wakes up in a chair in an office with Horn holding a scalpel near his face. He remembers what Rachel told him about concentrating on controlling the dream and is able to free himself from the restraints and disarm Horn. He wakes up yet again, this time next to Priscilla in Peter’s compound in Lubbock. The two walk to Willoughby where they’re reunited with Rachel and Miles who show them what the Patriots are up to. The power is flickering on and off and the Patriots are loading up on weapons and flat screens in hopes it will stay on.
Lightning starts crashing, hitting several Patriots and the foursome takes shelter in an electronics shop where Aaron explains that the lightning is the nanotech’s "death throes." Just then Rachel is struck by a bolt and Miles tells Aaron to do something. He finds the nearest laptop and fixes the code to appease the nanotech and save Rachel’s life. Horn appears again and thanks him. With Rachel, Priscilla and Miles gone, Aaron realizes he’s been tricked into saving the nanotech. Aaron wakes up for the second time at the compound and finds Preacher Pete (Daniel Henney) happy about the miracle he performed.
“Dreamcatcher” teaches us a couple of important things about the nanotech. Like for example, it’s everywhere, even in Aaron’s mind. It’s also got a personality, takes offense to comparisons to Skynet and like its human counterparts, it has a very strong survival instinct.
That’s good to know but we still don’t know what the nanotech’s end game is and how Aaron and his friends fit into it – or don’t. After fixing the code, Horn tells Aaron he’ll leave him alone now. With the nanotech thriving once again, do they have further plans for the Revolutionaries? “Dreamcatcher” is one of the more creative episodes of the season. but will it have an impact on the big picture or is it just a clever distraction from a stagnant storyline?
Ultimate Spider-Man was the first ever Ultimate Comic, and now it's hitting its 200th issue, and it will be a memorial remembrance of Peter Parker, the original Spider-Man of the Ultimate Universe, whose legacy is being maintained by Miles Morales. A gathering of Peter's friends will mark the anniversary of his heroic death, but new secrets are going to come to light as part of a new sinister plan in motion.
Check out this first look at Ultimate Spider-Man #200, from Brian Michael Bendis, featuring art from original Ultimate Spider-Man artist Mark Bagley, as well as Dave Marquez, Mark Brooks, Sara Pichelli, and David Lafuente.
