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The biggest blockbusters of 2014 threw up a varied rogues’ gallery of bad guys. In “Transformers: Age of Extinction”, it was a reincarnated version of Optimus Prime’s perma-nemesis, Megatron, while Captain America faced off against a reborn Hydra infiltrating the upper echelons of the US government in “The Winter Soldier”. For Spider-Man, it was Electro, while Maleficent showed up in live-action to give Sleeping Beauty nightmares.

Christopher Nolan has never been one to go with the Hollywood crowd, however, and in his outer space opus “Interstellar”, the antagonist was time itself — or, to be more specific, Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Nolan, whose Homeric epic “The Odyssey” makes landfall in theaters this week, has always been obsessed with time, and our perception of it. From “Memento”‘s backwards narrative to “Tenet”‘s time-flipping terrorists, the director has tended to steer clear of linear narratives. Even the three interweaving plotlines of his World War II drama, “Dunkirk”, unfold at completely different speeds. In short, Nolan is not a filmmaker you should ever set your clock by.

But time has never been as cruel as it is in “Interstellar”, where the fundamental constants of the universe combine to wreak havoc with human emotions. “Time is relative,” explains Anne Hathaway’s biologist/astronaut Amelia Brand. “It can stretch, and it can squeeze, but it can’t run backwards. It just can’t.”

She’s summed up “Interstellar” in a nutshell, so it’s not hard to see why this was the story Nolan wanted to tell when he added his own entry to the canon of cerebral cinematic sci-fi.

At one point in “Interstellar”‘s evolution, it seemed set to be a Steven Spielberg movie. Physicist Kip Thorne had originated the project with producer Lynda Obst, and the “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” director spent a year developing the movie with them. He even hired Nolan’s younger brother, Jonah (whose credits include “The Dark Knight” and “Westworld”), to write a script.

Spielberg ultimately dropped out — “It just didn’t stick with me, and I don’t know why,” he told Empire magazine — but Jonah knew the ideal replacement. “Jonah actually said, ‘If there comes a point where you decide not to make this movie, I can tell you who’s gonna grab it. He’s already bugging me about it. And that’s my brother Chris.’ The second I decided not to make it, Chris jumped on board, probably the next day. ‘Interstellar’ was a much better movie in Chris Nolan’s hands than it would have been in mine.”

In the film’s near future, humanity is literally running out of time. The Earth’s ecosystem is breaking down, with dust storms killing crops across the United States and causing major health issues among the survivors. Nolan even uses talking head footage of real-life survivors of the Dust Bowl that ravaged the US Midwest in the 1930s (taken from Ken Burns’ 2012 documentary “The Dust Bowl”) to add to the urgency of the situation.

But the remains of NASA — now forced into hiding — have a plan. They’ve discovered a stable wormhole near Saturn, and it leads to another galaxy. Probes have found planets on the other side, and some of them might — just might — be capable of supporting life.

So when former pilot-turned-farmer Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) stumbles on NASA’s clandestine base (for reasons that will later become clear), he’s recruited for a mission checking in on the brave pioneers sent to investigate these strange new worlds. Unfortunately, this means leaving his kids behind.

And this is where relativity becomes one of the harshest antagonists in movie history. The Endurance crew’s first destination, “Miller’s Planet”, orbits a black hole known as Gargantua. Its gravity is so intense that anything in its vicinity experiences extreme time dilation — to the extent that an hour on the planet’s surface is equivalent to seven years for everyone else. “We need to think of time as a resource, just like oxygen and food,” Brand says before they make landfall.

But in that old Hollywood tradition, not everything goes to plan on the surface, and by the time Cooper and Brand escape Gargantua’s influence — minus their late crewmate Doyle (Wes Bentley) — decades have passed on Earth. In an extremely powerful sequence, we see Cooper catching up on the last 20-plus years of life back home via video messages from his son, Tom (the young version played by Timothée Chalamet, the older version by Casey Affleck).

In a matter of minutes, Cooper learns about the birth and death of a grandchild, as well as the passing of his father-in-law. At the end of the reel, his heartbroken daughter Murphy (young version: Mackenzie Foy; adult version: Jessica Chastain; elderly version: Ellen Burstyn) sends her first message since he abandoned her for outer space. The reason for breaking radio silence? She’s now the same age he was when he left; her childhood vanished in the blink of an eye.

“Interstellar” makes a mockery of the myth that Nolan’s films are cold and emotionless. Relativity shows no mercy for family bonds, and McConaughey, Chastain, and Hathaway all deliver towering performances as they deal with its consequences. This is a human story told across a multi-dimensional canvas.

Even beyond their lives being thrown out of sync by time dilation — at the end of the movie, a still-40-something Cooper comes face-to-face with a nonagenarian Murph on her deathbed — they’re coming to terms with the fact that the whole mission was built on a lie.

NASA boss Dr Brand (Michael Caine) may have thought he was doing the right thing by pretending that his gravity equation could be solved and giving false hope that humanity might one day find a new home among the stars. But it doesn’t make it any less of a kicker when he confesses his grand betrayal, admitting on his deathbed that “Plan B” — sending embryos into the cosmos to extend the human race — was “Plan A” all along. Of course, whether he’s right or wrong, he’s a second-tier ‘bad guy’ compared to relativity.

Nolan went to extraordinary lengths to give his film a sound scientific footing. He consulted extensively with Thorne in order to generate a scenario where relativistic effects would be so extreme that minutes on a planet’s surface would equate to years back on Earth. “Kip, apart from being an incredible mind, is actually a very good explainer of difficult concepts, and he was very patient with all of us lesser beings,” producer Emma Thomas told SFX magazine. The Oscar-winning VFX team at D-Neg, meanwhile, turned their work modelling the accretion disc around Gargantua into an actual scientific paper.

By the time the film enters its endgame, it’s embracing tesseracts and five-dimensional superbeings, as Cooper uses gravity to communicate with Murph across time. In the process, he reveals that the “ghost” that helped him find NASA all those years ago was actually a future version of himself. Such diamond-hard sci-fi concepts are probably not, however, the reason that “Interstellar” has since — despite mixed reviews on release — become one of Nolan’s most popular films a decade later.

“What I’ve found is that people who let the film wash over them get the most out of it,” Nolan admitted in “The Nolan Variations” by Tom Shone, and the director may just have a point. While a cynic might have issues with the notion that love is a quantifiable force transcending the universe (anyone know the SI unit for that?), it’s impossible to deny the genius of “Interstellar”‘s use of high-level physics to explore the human condition.

It’s unlikely any of us will find ourselves in the vicinity of a black hole, but all of us know what it means to want more time with the people we love.

“The Odyssey” is in theaters from Friday, July 17. “Interstellar” is available to stream on Hulu and Paramount+ in the US, and Sky Cinema and HBO Max in the UK.

Artificial intelligence could easily fall into the trap of identifying non-life as life on other worlds, claim two researchers from Michigan State University who have tested AI on simulated life in a computer program.

“We had previously seen that AI has a big Achilles heel when it is trying to classify things that are unlike the things in its training examples,” Michigan’s Christoph Adami told Space.com. “We call these ‘out-of-distribution’ samples and it is just incredibly easy to get AI to misclassify.”

Adami is a computational biologist who uses computers to apply information theory to the study of evolution and biology. One of his leading tenets is that life can be defined by its ability to encode information and replicate it. To this end, he devised the Avida computer program in 1993. It runs digital organisms written as code that can replicate by copying themselves and competing for resources — in this case, CPU time — just like real life organisms. Although the use of digital life in evolutionary studies remains controversial, what it does provide Adami with is a huge dataset of simulated lifeforms that AI can be tested on.

Spending three months of computer analysis on a thousand parallel machines, Adami and his student Ankit Gupta asked AI to determine which programs in Avida had the properties of life, and which didn’t. The life and non-life programs have very similar coding, so the difference is not obvious — and this might very well be the case on another planet where life could have differences in biology to Earth life.

Adami and Gupta started out with programs representing a random sequence of molecules and asked the AI to classify them. They then set about tweaking that sequence of molecules to try and fool the AI into thinking it was seeing life, one change at a time, each time checking whether there had been a change in how confident the AI was that it was life or non-life.

“Within about 15 changes or so we can get AI to be perfectly confident of a life classification when in fact not a single time when it was being 100% confident was it actually life,” said Adami.

Furthermore, no matter the sequence they started with, the AI was constantly fooled.

Many in the scientific community stand by AI as an invaluable tool because it can process huge amounts of data and search for patterns in that data. Adami himself believes that AI has an important role to play, but as we see in everyday life, AI is prone to making things up and identifying patterns that don’t exist.

This really comes down to what the AI has been trained on, said Adami. If you ask an AI about data it has been trained on, it usually provides a correct answer. For example, if you train AI to identify pictures of apples and then ask it to pick out the fruit from a dataset that also includes pictures of non-food items, it will answer correctly virtually all the time. However, if you replace the apple pictures with photos of bananas and ask it to identify the fruit, it will struggle and start to misidentify things.

That’s because the bananas represent “out of distribution” data. The AI wasn’t trained on bananas, which are a very different shape to apples, and therefore the AI doesn’t know what to make of them.

Similarly, we don’t know what alien microbes will look like, and they could be quite different to the terrestrial microbes that the AI has been trained on. In other words, the alien life would be out of distribution, and the AI would have no context for saying whether any particular collection of molecules is life or not.

“You need to know your training data, and if you know that your testing data is part of the same distribution as the training data, then you’ll be fine,” said Adami. “But you can’t guarantee that with extraterrestrial life.”

This could pose a problem for missions designed to look for life.

If a Mars rover goes to the red planet and cuts open a rock and directly sees something that looks like microbial life as we know it, then the answer will be clear-cut and can be tested using traditional methods. However, many attempts to detect life will probably not be so hands-on, relying on mass spectrometry data to identify molecules and processes related to life. This could range from attempts to detect life in the atmosphere of Venus, or in the ocean of Europa, or on exoplanets via the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which NASA aims to launch in the 2040s to directly image exoplanets in the habitable zone of stars.

“This means that if there were an AI on a mission looking at particular mass spectrometry samples, then there’s a very great chance that while it has been trained on the ground on a number of biotic and abiotic samples, it could still return a positive verdict when it has absolutely nothing to do with life,” says Adami.

The next step, said Adami, is to move out of the digital world and run the same test with real-world data.

Adami and Gupta will be presenting their findings in August at the 2026 Conference on Artificial Life, which is being held in Waterloo, Canada.

Where does James Cameron’s “Aliens” rank among the other Alien movies? That depends on who you ask. Some might say it’s the best, while others put it just behind the original (spoiler alert: it’s the best). Regardless, there’s no denying that this 1986 film shifted gears, moving the franchise from horror to horror-tinged sci-fi action and paving an alternate path for the future.

As Cameron stated in an interview with Lofficier, the plan always was “to do a film that was not as scary… it’s scary, but it’s not as scary, but more intense, and I like to use the word, exhilarating. Because I think you get exhilarated by the intensity of the kind of action that’s in this film.”

In terms of story progression, the sequel’s shake-up makes complete sense. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley survived the Xenomorph in “Alien”, but now she must conquer her fears and face the grim creature once again. This time, she has allies and firepower on her side, though most of those Colonial Marines turn out to be about as useful as French kissing a beehive.

“Aliens” exploded into a monster hit, both financially and critically, suggesting that Cameron has a Midas touch when it comes to sequels. Famous movie critic Roger Ebert called it “a superb example of filmmaking craft”, and it’s tough to argue that point. Yet what’s amazing to ponder is how “Aliens” nearly fell apart several times before it actually happened.

Despite 1979’s “Alien” turning a big profit on paper, Hollywood’s accounting practices are more baffling than Palpatine’s return in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”.

Somehow, “Alien” was deemed a flop, and 20th Century Fox remained conflicted about a sequel – so much so that it almost sold the rights to the “Rambo” producers of all people (imagine the crossover potential, though, as John Rambo guns down a horde of Xenomorphs while Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic score blares in the background).

After much oohing, aahing, and handwringing, the studio relented and selected Cameron to put together a treatment based on the impressive nature of his script for “The Terminator”.

In 1983, Cameron only needed three days to put together a 45-page treatment, which can be read here. The nuts and bolts of what would become “Aliens” are mostly present in this document, but Fox turned its nose up at the filmmaker’s proposal. The studio certainly wasn’t escaping allegations that it looked for more reasons not to do the movie than to proceed.

What “Aliens” required was a champion from within – somebody to convince the studio execs that they were leaving money on the table by ignoring this franchise. This came with the hiring of producer Larry Gordon, who pushed for the sequel in the four walls of the boardroom.

After the success of “The Terminator”, Cameron returned to the fray as writer-director, while his then-girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife Gail Anne Hurd boarded the film as a producer.

With the script submitted and Cameron cocked, locked, and ready to shoot in 1985, a new problem arose: budget. Cameron’s camp argued that “Aliens” could be done for $15.5 million, but Fox’s bean counters feared it would be closer to $35 million, and nobody considered the poor billionaires at stake.

Fox offered $12 million. “We walked out and said, ‘Thanks, we’ll do something else,'” Cameron told the Los Angeles Times.

Behind the scenes, Gordon managed to convince his bosses to fork out the extra money for the production. With that hurdle successfully navigated, Cameron was back in the driver’s seat and ready to head off to LV-426.

Next though, Fox decided to suggest the unthinkable at the time: “Aliens” without Sigourney Weaver. It’s a decision that reeks of a straight-to-video sequel, the kind of thing you’d expect to be fronted by a Kevin Sorbo type.

Cameron, on the other hand, was under the impression that Weaver had been contractually locked in for a sequel, but that wasn’t the case at all. Now it was up to Cameron to convince Weaver to do the film. He met with Weaver, and the meeting seemed positive enough, but her agents wanted a big payday for her – and rightfully so. Fox refused, and so Cameron and Hurd quit… again; they weren’t going to make the movie without Weaver.

Frustrated but trying to roll the dice on this flailing project one last time, Cameron pulled a sneaky trick, as he revealed to GQ years later. Weaver shared the same agency as Arnold Schwarzenegger, so Cameron phoned Schwarzenegger’s agent and told him how he was about to start rewriting the “Aliens” script to remove Ripley entirely. The news travelled faster than a Xenomorph through a ventilation shaft.

“The deal was done in 12 hours after that,” Cameron said. “So I never wrote a word of that hypothetical story that I said I was gonna do, that I had no intention of writing anyway. So anyway, it worked, and Sigourney got her million bucks, and everybody was happy.”

As far as most movie productions go, “Aliens” was mostly smooth sailing when it began to shoot. Deadlines were met, it didn’t go over budget, and the studio let them get on with it. The biggest challenge involved the final cut – with Fox wanting the picture to have a two-hour runtime to secure more theatrical screenings.

Cameron relented, taking out his scissors and cutting a few superfluous scenes, but the film still wasn’t quite at the magic mark. Having cut everything that he could, Cameron explained that any further amendments would destroy the story and damage the integrity of the movie. This time, Fox didn’t argue and stuck with the filmmaker.

History confirms the right call was made here. The franchise now follows the blueprint laid by Cameron’s “Alien” more than Ridley Scott’s “Jaws in space” foundation. While there’s always a survival element in these movies, the action-centric approach is a critical part of the series’ DNA. Sure, the protagonists remain scared, but they receive the opportunity to light up the Xenomorphs and show those ugly monsters who’s the boss.

Looking back now, it’s unbelievable to think that Fox almost tanked “Aliens” with its studio shenanigans. A classic emerged from the chaos of inflated egos, penny-pinching, and blood pressure-raising frustration.

It’s proof that in Hollywood, no one can hear you scream (nor do they care), so it’s up to you to find a way to survive.