Inverse - ⚔️ 'Rings of Power' levels up

Monday

Oct 03 2022

We have such sights to show you!

As someone who spends a lot of time covering TV and movies for Inverse, it feels like we’ve never been busier. Amazon and HBO are currently airing rival fantasy epics, while Disney has concurrent Star Wars and Marvel shows airing on Disney+ every week. On top of that, Mike Flanagan makes his annual return to Netflix this week with the spooky new series The Midnight Club, and Hulu is prepping to reboot the Hellraiser franchise with a fresh movie dropping this Friday.

There’s never been more new fantasy, sci-fi, and horror to sink your teeth into, but it can feel a little overwhelming. That’s where Inverse comes in. Today’s edition of Inverse Daily features behind-the-scenes stories from Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Hellraiser. And later this week, we’ll have reviews for Midnight Club, Marvel’s Werewolf by Night, and more.

What's New

Feature

Television

How Rings of Power’s stunt coordinator made a more “organic” Helm's Deep

In a previous life, Vic Armstrong wore the jacket and fedora as the one and only Indiana Jones.

Now, the Hollywood veteran and former Harrison Ford stunt double commands an army as the leading stunt coordinator on Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Despite honing his expertise through cinema’s greatest action heroes — from Spider-Man to Superman to James Bond, just to name a few — Armstrong tells Inverse the bar for cinematic action can always be raised just a little higher.

“Every stunt has been done in some shape or form,” Armstrong says. “It’s putting an original edge on it, a little bit of jazz, and coming up with something original. I’ve said over the years, the hardest stuff I’ve done in movies is being original.”

In a conversation with Inverse, Armstrong breaks down some of the wildest — and most spoiler-y! — moments in The Rings of Power’s epic sixth episode, including surprise cinematic influences and hints of foreshadowing that will demand fans take a second look.

Space

Science

SpaceX and NASA just unveiled an ambitious plan to save Hubble

SpaceX and NASA will conduct a feasibility study to see if the private spaceflight company could successfully dock a crewed vehicle with the 32-year old Hubble Space Telescope to raise its orbit.

“A few months ago, SpaceX approached NASA with the idea for a study whether a commercial crew could help reboot our Hubble spacecraft into a higher orbit,” NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen told reporters during a conference call on Thursday, September 29.

Zurbuchen said this might “extend its observational lifetime.” And as NASA officials would later state, Hubble’s observations are important to maintain because they are complementary to the James Webb Space Telescope’s work.

Learn more

Virtual empathy

Gaming

How Minecraft is building a more empathetic metaverse in the classroom

The metaverse is far older than Facebook’s recent bid to make baby boomers fall in love with VR.

Cruising through its eleventh year, Minecraft is more popular than ever, with an active player count of nearly 172 million in August 2022 alone. But there’s more to the game than building castles and slashing Creepers.

September saw the full release of Minecraft Education Edition, which has been available in beta since 2016. Over that six-year period, the game has become a powerful platform for interdisciplinary learning on a broad range of topics, from climate change, to literature, to indigenous cultures. It shares all the same features and functionality of “bedrock” Minecraft, with more stringent privacy and safety tools — and a library chock-full of educational resources and experiences.

For Head of Minecraft Education Allison Matthews,the potential of a metaverse doesn’t lie in branding opportunities or flogging NFTs. It’s about making the world a better place. And that starts with education that cultivates empathy.

“From our perspective, a Minecraft server or multiplayer world is a metaverse. If and when the metaverse expands more broadly, we would want to make sure that the values that we have within Minecraft apply more broadly to metaverses everywhere,” Matthews tells Inverse.

Forbidden seltzer

Science

Analysis of asteroid reveals unexpected evidence of mini-ocean — and carbonation

Asteroids are many things — dinosaur killers, archives of the earliest days of the solar system, targets for planetary defense — but they’re not supposed to be water worlds. Right?

Well, at least not these days. But in the earliest days of the Solar System’s formation, Ryugu—the diamond-shaped target of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)’s Hayabusa2 mission — had a tiny ocean within it.

Before it was the asteroid it is today, high-precision isotope analysis shows it was part of a larger, older parent before being blasted apart in a collision. But even more surprising is that within that tiny ocean, some dry silicates from the original parent asteroid managed to survive unaltered.

A new paper from one of Hayabusa’s Curation Teams published this month in Nature Astronomy gets at what they show about the makeup of Ryugu’s parent and the asteroids of the very early Solar System.

Inverse Interview

Horror

Why Hellraiser’s 2022 reboot needed a female Pinhead

It’s no easy task to reboot a legendary horror franchise like Hellraiser.

First, a reboot has to get out from under the shadow of the excellent first two entries, Hellraiser (1987) and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). Then, it needs to dodge the increasingly convoluted lore of Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) and Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1996). After that are the six straight-to-video entries released between 2000 and 2018, which bled what little life was left out of Clive Barker’s creation.

Following all those obstacles, one big question remains: What would a fresh take on Hellraiser even look like?

Enter director David Bruckner (The Night House) and star Jamie Clayton (Sense8), who give Pinhead a new look in Hellraiser. This installment follows a struggling young addict, Riley (Odessa A’zion), who discovers a mysterious puzzle box with a dark history that unleashes the sadomasochist Cenobites into our dimension while expanding the themes and lore of the franchise in new ways.

Speaking to Inverse, Bruckner and Clayton discussed their collaborative process, walking in the footsteps of Clive Barker, and creating a world we’ll hopefully see more of soon.

Read the full interview

Behold

Moons

NASA spacecraft takes a stunning closeup of Jupiter's moon Europa

Let’s get reacquainted with Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

NASA released its first close-up look at the icy world in 22 years. While there’s no shortage of fascinating objects around the Solar System’s largest planet, few have astronomers as excited as Europa.

Our current understanding of the moon suggests it’s varnished in a top layer of ice where water vapor spouts up from a subsurface ocean. In a series of new images published Thursday, September 29, software developer Björn Jónsson and NASA transformed Juno spacecraft data into alluring visuals.

Take a closer look

Meanwhile...

Ancient humans forged hybrid species at critical periods in our evolution

5 critical lessons from the most iconic climate documentary of all time

Meta’s Quest Pro headset may actually make mixed reality mainstream

'House of the Dragon' Episode 7 ending explained

Today in history: One of the most sensational trials in U.S. history ended October 3, 1995, as a jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Song of the day: "Helm's Deep Theme"

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James Webb Space Telescope former Harrison Ford stunt concurrent Star Wars epic sixth episode private spaceflight company Virtual empathy Gaming active player count rival fantasy epics spooky new series greatest action heroes surprise cinematic influences leading stunt coordinator The Midnight Club Minecraft Education Edition

Inverse - ⚔️ 'Rings of Power' levels up

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