Month: February 2022

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, when Hollywood traditionally drops several high-profile trailers for upcoming major films and TV series. This year, the marketing frenzy kicks off with the first trailer for Jordan Peele’s forthcoming horror feature, Nope, which dropped unexpectedly at 3 AM Eastern this morning. We at Ars Technica are totally on board for this film.

Our confidence is pretty well-placed. Peele has cemented his status as the current master of smart, thought-provoking horror, starting with Get Out, his surprise box office hit that earned more than $250 million and snagged Peele an Oscar for best original screenplay—the first time the award has gone to a black recipient. Get Out is a subtle exploration of racial tensions that quietly builds to reveal its horrifying premise and inevitably bloody conclusion. In his 2019 follow-up, Us, the theme wasn’t so much racial tension—it was exploring, in Peele’s words, the myriad ways in which “we are our own worst enemies.”

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer co-star in Nope, a new horror film from Jordan Peele. (credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures)

Peele also co-wrote, with director Nia DaCosta, last year’s electrifying sequel (of sorts), Candyman, which transformed the singular 1990s slasher known as Candyman into an ageless malevolence whose curse reverberates through time. Then there’s Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone and the various films showcased in the anthology series Welcome to the Blumhouse, and the myriad other projects he’s had a hand in with Blumhouse Productions.

Enlarge (credit: Iberdrola Renewables)

Not for the first time, global energy markets are in turmoil. Internationally traded gas prices more than quadrupled in 2021. In their wake, many energy suppliers have gone bust and household bills across Europe are set to soar. Energy prices are driving up the cost of living and inflation, but this is also a moment to realize the old saying: “never waste a good crisis.”

Some of the causes of sky-high energy bills are unavoidable—there is little that most governments can do about the wholesale price of gas itself. Fossil fuel companies make huge investments that take years to mature, breeding periods of moderate prices followed by supply squeezes when prices rocket. Gas prices softened over the previous decade, and the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 depressed demand.

Regions without domestic gas supplies or which have depleted most of their gas reserves in recent decades get a lot of their gas by importing it. European periphery countries, including the UK and many parts of the Mediterranean, assumed they could rely on global supplies of liquefied natural gas. But tankers from the big gas producers such as Qatar can turn to Europe or Asia depending on who pays the highest price. Now there is a scramble, and Asian demand dominates.

Enlarge / The Moon is safe from Falcon 9 rockets. (credit: NASA)

About three weeks ago Ars Technica first reported that astronomers were tracking the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, and were increasingly confident that it would strike the Moon on March 4.

This story set off a firestorm of media activity. Much of this coverage criticized SpaceX for failing to properly dispose of the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket after the launch of NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory mission, or DSCOVR, in 2015. The British tabloids, in particular, had a field day. Even the genteel European Space Agency tut-tutted, noting that it takes care to preserve enough fuel to put spent rocket stages into stable orbits around the Sun.

However, it turns out we were all wrong. A Falcon 9 rocket is not going to, in fact, strike the Moon next month. Instead, it’s probably a Chinese rocket.

Enlarge / Temuera Morrison and Ming-Na Wen (supposedly) star as Boba Fett and Fennec Shand, respectively, in The Book of Boba Fett. (credit: Disney+)

When The Book of Boba Fett was still in production, creator Jon Favreau jokingly dubbed the spinoff series “The Mandalorian season 2.5.” It turns out that wasn’t really a joke. I mean, we knew beforehand The Book of Boba Fett would take place in the same timeline. I just didn’t expect that four episodes into a seven-episode season, the focus would abruptly shift from Temuera Morrison’s iconic titular character—i.e., the supposed star of the series—and the next two episodes would be spent mostly catching up with our favorite characters from The Mandalorian.  

It was (ahem) an interesting creative choice that generated considerable Internet discussion (and more than a few mocking memes). The good news is that, on the whole, The Book of Boba Fett is still a hella entertaining Star Wars adventure. And it closed the season with an action-packed, crowd-pleasing hour-long action sequence in which Boba and his various allies took on the nefarious Pyke syndicate in a climactic battle—with a squee-worthy heartfelt reunion for good measure.

The bad news is that the series never really figured out whose story it wanted to tell, essentially squandering the promise of the first four episodes by failing to develop its supposedly main character in any meaningful way.