Erik

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group (ARG), comprised of the USS Boxer (LHD-4), USS Comstock (LSD-45), and the USS Portland (LPD-27) with the embarked 11th Marine Expeditionary Group (MEU), is on its way to the Middle East after departing the U.S. west coast for deployment.

Olivia Rodrigo stuns with her lumpia for British Vogue.

Q: "Why didn't you tell U.S. allies…about the war before attacking Iran?" President Trump: "We wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?"

Hegseth: "My 13 year old son popped into my office last night while I was editing these remarks. He asked about the war and the families I met at Dover. I looked at him and said, 'They died for you, son. So your generation doesn't have to deal with a nuclear Iran.'"

New fear level unlocked 😳

New fear level unlocked 😳

PRESIDENT TRUMP: And what happened when you touched our boats? JAPANESE REPORTER: President Trump… I’m not sure… This seems inappropriate PRESIDENT TRUMP: How many times do we do it? Go on, remind people.

There was a time where talking about the Constitution for any other reason than acknowledging its existence got you soft branded as an extremist in the military. But you aren’t ready to have that conversation yet.

Q: "Why didn't you tell U.S. allies…about the war before attacking Iran?" President Trump: "We wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?"