Crystal Dynamics has “just started development” on a new Tomb Raider game, the studio announced today on Twitter. It didn’t share what the game will be called nor when fans can expect to play it, but it did note that it will run on Epic’s new Unreal Engine 5. After working on the mediocre Marvel’s Avengers, the project will see Crystal Dynamics return to the franchise it spent more than a decade making popular again.

It would also appear to signal the end of the studio’s in-house Foundation engine, which powered Rise of the Tomb Raider and the most recent mainline entry in the series, 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Crystal Dynamics said the move to UE5 would help the studio take its “storytelling to the next level.” The next Tomb Raider joins a handful of games already announced for UE5. Those include the next Witcher game and Black Myth: Wukong. Of that group, only the latter has a release date, with Chinese developer Game Science Studio aiming to get it out sometime in 2023.

A24 has shared the first trailer for Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, a film adaptation of the viral YouTube series of the same name. If you’re not among the millions of people who have watched the shorts (the first entry has more than 32 million views), they were co-created by Zootopia and Obvious Child actor Jenny Slate. In the new film, Slate returns to voice the titular Marcel, an anthropomorphic seashell in search of their family. Co-staring alongside Slate are Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann, as well as series and film director Dean Fleischer-Camp. The film also features cameos from the likes of Conan O’Brien and Lesley Stahl.

A viral YouTube series more than a decade old may seem like unusual source material for a theatrical film, but then A24 is no stranger to backing such movies. Last year, the company released Zola, a film inspired by a 148-part Twitter thread from 2015. Marcel The Shell With Shoes On arrives in US theaters on June 24th.

Unreal Engine 5 is finally here after nearly a year of early access. Epic Games has officially released UE5 to developers, promising both more photorealistic visuals and easier-to-use creator tools. 

The new Unreal Engine's most obvious upgrades affect the basics of 3D rendering. The Nanite geometry system lets producers use objects with millions of polygons each while scaling gracefully and maintaining playable frame rates. Lumen, meanwhile, provides dynamic global lighting that adapts to everything from the time of day to a character's flashlight. You've seen early results in Epic's The Matrix Awakens tech demo — UE5 can render extremely detailed scenes with more natural lighting than you might have seen in the past.

Epic Games

There are some behind-the-scenes improvements that should affect the games you play, too. It's now much easier for developers to make open-world games thanks to systems that both automatically divide areas (to make them easier to stream) and let multiple developers work on the same region at the same time. There are new and upgraded tools to create models, animations and audio without resorting to external editors, and companies making videos or still images can generate very high quality output that would normally require a time-consuming offline renderer.

It will take a while for content to use the new engine. At best, studios have had less than a year to test the engine and start work on their projects. Even Black Myth: Wukong (one of the first announced Unreal Engine 5 titles) won't be available until 2023, and the next Witcher game doesn't have a release date. Still, the launch effectively sets the stage for the next wave of games and video special effects. You could see a significant leap in realism from games that take better advantage of the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and the latest PC video cards.

Elon Musk, who recently became Twitter's largest shareholder, has posted a poll on the website asking users whether they want an edit button. His options are a misspelled "yse" and "on," which might make you think that the whole thing is joke until you see that the poll has been retweeted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. "The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully," Agrawal wrote, hinting that the poll could lead to an actual edit button on the social network. 

Many Twitter users have asked for an edit button over the years, but the website has remained staunchly resistant to those requests. In a video Q&A with Wired back in 2020, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey said the website will "probably never" add an edit button. He explained that the social network started as a text messaging service, and you can't take back a text once you've sent it. Twitter apparently wanted to preserve that vibe and feeling.

Musk, who's been a prolific tweeter way before he purchased 9.2 percent of the social network, might serve as the catalyst for the company to change that outlook. As of this writing, 74.7 percent out of the 1,439,779 accounts that participated in the poll voted "yse" to an edit button. Whether Twitter will immediately start working on the feature if "yse" wins remains to be seen. That is, if it hasn't started developing it yet — the official Twitter account recently posted that the company is "working on an edit button," but that was on April Fools' Day.

It's also unclear how an edit button would work on Twitter, where reposting other people's content is widely practiced. If the person who tweeted the original post edits it, will the retweeted content reflect the change, as well? And will the edit button for a tweet be available indefinitely or only for a short period of time? Dorsey said during the Wired interview that Twitter previously considered giving users a 30-to-60-second window to correct something, which would be more than enough time to edit spelling mistakes and other minor changes.

One of the best video game series of all time is making a return in 2022 with some of its key original creatives on board. Return to Monkey Island is "a game by Ron Gilbert," who conceived the point-and-click comedy-adventure saga in the late '80s.

Gilbert wrote and directed the original game, The Secret of Monkey Island. He was director, programmer and designer on the sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. He left Lucasfilm Games soon after the latter was released, but he was credited on 2009's Tales of Monkey Island. Gilbert is now back at work on arguably the series he's best known for as a co-designer and co-writer alongside fellow Monkey Island veteran Dave Grossman.

Return to Monkey Island is in development at Gilbert's Terrible Toybox. The studio's working alongside Devolver Digital and Lucasfilm Games on the latest entry. According to the description on a teaser video Devolver posted, it's a "long-awaited follow-up" to the first two games.

The clip also notes that Michael Land, Peter McConnell and Clint Bajakian — all of whom have previously worked on the series — are handling the music, while Dominic Armato is reprising his role as Guybrush Threepwood. So, it'll certainly sound like a proper Monkey Island game.

Gilbert tried for years to get back the rights to Monkey Island (and Maniac Mansion) from the Disney-owned Lucasfilm Games to no avail. Still, it's great to see him and so many other Monkey Island veterans returning to the series. 

This just shot to the top of the list of my most-anticipated games in 2022. Sorry about all the game of the year awards you just lost, Elden Ring.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk now owns 9.2 percent of Twitter after purchasing $2.89 billion in stock, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing spotted by CNBC. The purchase follows recent criticism by Musk over the social media site's free speech policies. "Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy," he tweeted last week.

Musk is a prolific Twitter user and has over 80 million followers, but the platform has also brought him trouble. Most famously, in 2018 he tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 a share, setting off an SEC lawsuit that cost him $20 million and his spot as chairman of the board. Musk recently challenged the settlement, saying that the SEC overstepped its authority. He's asking a federal judge to terminate his agreement requiring some tweets to be vetted by a lawyer.

Along with the comment, Musk launched a Twitter poll last week with the question "Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this [freedom of speech] principle?" He also mused about the idea of starting his own social media platform, saying he was giving it "serious thought." 

In a follow-up tweet, Musk said that "the consequences of this poll will be important," and that prediction has now apparently come true. His stake in Twitter is still a passive one, but he could up the stakes somewhat. "This eventually could lead to a buyout," analyst Dan Ives told CNBC. Twitter shares have reportedly surged more than 25 percent in premarket trading, according to CNBC. 

A little more than a month before its May 5th premiere, Paramount+ has shared a new trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. For those who have become weary of the franchise’s more dark tone during the Alex Kurtzman era, Strange New Worlds looks like a return to the relentless optimism and romanticism put forward by creator Gene Roddenberry. “I love this job,” Pike whispers to Rebecca Romijn’s Number One, followed by a brief montage of some of the adventures the crew of the Enterprise will find itself in season one of the series.

Set about a decade before The Original Series, Strange New Worlds features a handful of future Star Trek greats before their career-defining stint on the Enterprise, with Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck reprising their respective roles as Pike, Spock and Number One from Star Trek: Discovery season two. To that cast, the series adds the likes of Celia Rose, portraying a young Nyota Uhura, and a few newcomers that we haven’t seen before.

In the US, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will stream exclusively on Paramount Plus.

If you love dinosaurs (and who doesn’t?), you’ll want to mark May 23rd on your calendar. That’s when Prehistoric Planet, a new five-part documentary series narrated by Sir David Attenborough will debut on Apple TV+. Produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit, which previously worked on Planet Earth, the show promises to tell the story of some of the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth more than 66 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.

It will also feature music from Hans Zimmer and visual work by MPC, the VFX unit that helped Disney create its live-action adaptions of The Jungle Book and The Lion King. Apple said the series would incorporate the latest findings from paleontologists. Among other things, expect to see an “eye-opening” look at how the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex took care of its young. All five episodes of Prehistoric Earth will premiere the week of May 23rd, with one new episode each day.

You don't have to start a Paramount+ trial just to figure out whether or not the Halo TV series is worth your time. The streaming service has made the first episode of the game-inspired show free to watch on YouTube for a week starting March 31st (sorry!). The freebie is only viewable in the US, but it's worth a look if you want to see Hollywood's take on Master Chief and the Covenant.

There's no mystery behind the strategy. Paramount+ is clearly hoping to build Halo's viewer base (and thus the subscriber base) as quickly as possible, and a free sample might help when trailers aren't enough. The provider has used this approach before with releases like Star Trek: Picard.

It might also be a question of seizing on early success. Paramount+ was confident enough in Halo to renew it before the premiere, and that support was apparently well-founded. Deadlinereported that the series broke the service's one-day premiere viewership record, ousting the Yellowstone prequel 1883. While Paramount+ is still small compared to heavyweights like Amazon and Netflix, sustained interest in Halo could help the streamer grow and reduce its dependence on Star Trek.

If there was ever a Star Trek film that needed a do-over, both artistically and reputationally, it was The Motion Picture. Dismissed by critics as boring and sterile when it came out, its nickname inside Trek fandom has long been “The Motionless Picture.” In 1997, director Robert Wise started the process of re-examining the film, with a Director’s Edition being birthed at the dawn of the DVD era in 2001. For a couple of reasons, the altogether better version of that movie fell into obscurity, unavailable for most people to see. Now, twenty years after Wise’s amended film made its debut, the film has been given a second do-over in the form of a 4K remaster for Paramount+.

The Abandoned Picture

You can buy a shelf’s worth of books discussing the troubled production of The Motion Picture, and its creative failures. Paramount wanted a new Star Trek TV series, until the money men balked at the cost and potential disinterest from advertisers. The pricey show got crunched into a single movie-of-the-week, right until the moment that Star Wars (and Close Encounters) swallowed 1977 whole. Bosses wanted a slice of that late ‘70s sci-fi movie pie and upgraded the Trek project to a big-budget movie. Except none of the already-made material was movie quality, and the effects house wasn’t up to the task at hand.

The Motion Picture was directed by Robert Wise, a footnote in a career that started in 1934 and ran through 2000. Wise got his big break as Orson Welles’ editor on Citizen Kane and, more controversially, The Magnificent Ambersons. He’d won enough Academy Awards that The Motion Picture wouldn’t be in the top ten of his most notable achievements. The special effects were eventually completed by the recently-departedDouglas Trumbull and John Dykstra; both could point to 2001 and Star Wars as the highlights on their own resumes. Even so, Wise was battered by the process of making it, hand-delivering the prints to the film’s premiere and declaring it to be a rushed, unfinished job.

Length was a problem for the film, a 90-minute TV pilot expanded to more than two hours, bloated with too many special effects shots. Paramount would subsequently produce an even longer cut of the film, letting ABC screen a super-sized, 143-minute TV version which included deleted and unfinished scenes. (There is a rumor, apparently tied to this forum post from 2016 (via Memory Alpha), which suggests that Wise re-cut the film in 1980 to be 12 minutes shorter, but producer David C. Fein doesn’t believe it to be true.)

The Director’s Edition

Paramount

In 1997, Wise, through his company Robert Wise Productions, enlisted the help of producers David C. Fein, Michael Matessino and Daren R. Dochterman to help fix the film. They examined the original storyboards, fixed some of the more egregious effects choices and tightened the editing. While the runtime was longer, a snappier edit (more or less) helped contextualize some of the choices made back when the film was shooting. It also helped to kickstart the reappraisal of the film as something more valuable than the big-budget catastrophe it was treated as.

Part of that work was to broaden the visual palette, especially in some of the key sequences which weren’t fully-realized in ‘79. The inconsistencies during Spock’s first scene – which were shot in broad daylight but painted on a matte implying darkness – are fixed. Many sets that were constrained even with matte paintings were broadened out and CGI – by pioneers Foundation Imaging – used to fill the gaps in the action. The film remained, more or less, like it had two decades prior, but was a much more joined-up experience on screen.

But this edition, while considered “definitive,” was never re-released beyond its original 2001 DVD printing. According to Memory Alpha, it’s because Paramount never kept its own archive copies of the CGI files for its projects. And when Foundation Imaging went under after the death of its founder, Ron Thornton, it was believed that those files were gone forever.

The Re-Remaster

Paramount

“Completely untrue,” said David C. Fein who produced both the first Directors Edition and its 2022 successor, to Engadget. “Everything was designed to be able to go to film, but the resolution [in those original files] wasn’t there, [...] so it couldn’t just be re-rendered,” he said. “It had to be recreated by people who knew what we were going for, because we’re now able to put the detail in for it to be full-size.” “We re-did all the visual effects, not from scratch – the setups [from 1999] were there – then we worked in all of the new levels of technology and information,” said Fein.

Fein says that the project, which was announced in July 2021, is “not a restoration,” and that his team wasn’t just “polishing this film,” but working to tweak it to improve the overall storytelling. That meant scanning the raw material and re-compositing everything to make a fresh, 4K scan off the original 35mm live-action footage. (Douglas Trumbull, to avoid detail loss, would shoot on 65mm film, and so his material was scanned in at 8K, while Dykstra’s VistaVision material was scanned in at 6K.)

The project is, if we’re being a little too honest, long overdue, since Paramount opted to offer the theatrical print of The Motion Picture for all of the Blu-ray releases. “Unfortunately, when the hi-def [versions of the Star Trek films] came out, Bob [Wise] got to watch the fact that it was the original theatrical version,” explained Fein. “And he sat me down in his kitchen and said, ‘I need you to promise me something Dave’ – ‘I don’t care how long it takes, I need you to finish the director’s edition and it needs to be finished,’ meaning film quality.” But Fein says that the lag time was down to a need for the technology to improve, and also for the “guardian angels” at Paramount+ to greenlight the work.

There are a number of small tweaks to the film, designed to smooth out even more of its visual rough edges. Keen-eyed fans will enjoy spotting the additions and changes, an early highlight is the addition of Shuttle Pod 5 to the exterior of Starfleet’s orbital office. “Just about every shot [in the film] has been touched in some way, there’s a lot of subtlety added to shots,” he said. “There’s [also] at least one clearly new shot in the film that helps continuity, and I hope no-one else notices it.”

One sequence that Fein spent lots of effort on, both then and now, was when the V’Ger probe attacks the bridge. The original film sequence was projected through a bent mylar filter with intentionally harsh lighting to create the alien effect. “The way that it looked, was almost like [our] film stopped and another one started,” he explained, looking at the washed-out colors, high grain and poor continuity. Fein credits the power of HDR which enabled his team to create a harsh overexposure of the probe without dulling the rest of the film.

And a less obvious change – unless you’re like me and watched multiple versions side-by-side – is a vastly improved color grade. Because the film was so rushed, Fein explained, the process of color grading, which can take months, was crunched down to four days. He said that the crew’s opinion, at the time, was “just ‘let’s get it done as flat [as we can] so everything matched, and [get it done] as quickly as it could.” The film’s colors are, traditionally, washed out, leaden with that ‘70s sci-fi beige that makes even the actors look like pieces of furniture. “Now that we’re working from negative scans, we’re able to do what [Robert Wise’s] real intention was.”

The final task Fein had to oversee was to ensure that The Directors Edition is no longer a rare curio. Fein explained that, having worked with the digital negatives and produced a new print designed for theatrical distribution, the film is now “future proof.” That should ensure that it never again becomes the sort of film you have to actively seek out to watch. Not to mention that Fathom events will offer a handful of screenings (in select theaters) for viewers to see the film on the big screen once again.

Give me a Good Time

I don’t want to be facetious when I say that The Motion Picture is less of a film and more of an experience. For all of the complaints that the film was slow, antiseptic and cold, it also offers something a little more heavyweight than you may expect from a franchise movie. The team behind the film may not have been making Solaris, or 2001, but those influences are keenly felt through much of the movie. It’s not dumb noisy fun, and it’s not as clever as it thinks it might be, but it’s trying to deal with some weighty issues around what it means to be human. A computer looking to understand if there’s any meaning beyond its existence is something fiction has come back to again and again – it’s always been a fascination for Star Trek, too.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to watch the 4K transfer in all of its glory, since previews were capped at 1080p (I know). What is obvious, however, is that the new version is a whole lot brighter, with much more detailed CG models and much better sound, in most places. The new color grade makes a huge difference, with actors no longer blending into the background of their own film. There are only a few moments where the transfer seems less kind than you may expect, and that’s mostly when you go looking for matte lines. You can clearly see some of that hand-cut wonkiness in the more detail-heavy sequences, like the drydock scene.

(While we’re on the subject; the Drydock sequence is considered, by non fans, as the ne plus ultra of pointless fan service. Yes, it’s a six-minute scene in which Kirk stares, milky-eyed at the refitted Enterprise, well-known enough that even nü-Trek repeatedly tipsits hat to it. But let’s be honest, if you wanted to spend six minutes staring at a model, you might as well make it the most beautiful model ever to be created.)

And as much as it’s Wise’s name on the film, in these modern eras, I think we should also offer kudos to Trumbull and Dykstra for their contribution. The effects sequences are, for their age, some of the best ever put to film and the trippy late ‘70s sci-fi visuals during the spacewalk sequence are on a par with anything 2001 offered. I can’t not also say that, without Jerry Goldsmith’s score, one of the best ever written, much of this film wouldn’t hold together nearly as well as it does. While the finished product is not to everyone’s taste, you can tell it is the product of a number of virtuosos all working to produce their very best work.

It’s funny, because I’d say that I’ve seen this film more times than I should probably admit, especially the first 40 minutes. Something that only occurred to me during this rewatch is how Wise’s direction, and the acting, loosens up as things go on. Kirk, Spock and McCoy all start this film stiff and stagey, acting like they’re all trying to act under the effects of a sedative. But once they’ve returned to the Enterprise and you see Kirk visibly relax into his chair, Spock and McCoy start bantering, and you could almost frame this as a deliberate choice to make the film a form of origin story.

While researching this piece, I went hunting for critical reviews of the film back when it first debuted in 1979. (The best modern essay on the film, and the best modern essays on any of the Star Trek films, is Darren Franich’s 2016 retrospective, which I urge you to read.) Weirdly, Roger Ebert wrote the smartest take on the film back then, and I reckon the conclusion of his review is probably the most elegant way anyone could discuss it. He wrote, “Some of the early reviews seemed pretty blase, as if the critics didn’t allow themselves to relish the film before racing out to pigeonhole it. My inclination, as I slid down in my seat and the stereo sound surrounded me, was to relax and let the movie give me a good time. I did and it did.”

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - The Director's Edition, will be available on Paramount+ on April 5th, 2022. A physical media release will follow with new special features.