Word: planetful
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...Arctic home. The fact that lush forests could have grown so far north indicates that the climate there was once far more hospitable. In fact, scientists have long known that during the early part of the Tertiary period, which began about 65 million years ago, the entire planet was warmer, probably due to carbon dioxide that spewed into the atmosphere during movements of the earth's crust. The result was a greenhouse effect, in which the excess carbon dioxide, like the windows of a greenhouse, trapped the heat of sunlight...
...criminals create the shadow planet, or does the shadow planet create them? Whatever. The planet thrives, where even Ozzie and Harriet's little boy, grown middle-aged and off camera, is said to have floated high on cocaine en route to dying. It is as if the American mind itself were divided between clarity and dreams, freedom and addiction...
Their efforts produced some stunning footage for Lucasfilm, including a 37- second hologram of a planet floating in space in Return of the Jedi. There was also a memorable one-minute sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan of a barren, moonlike sphere being transformed into a living planet, complete with computer-generated mountains, oceans and blue-green atmospheric haze. But in the end, even Lucas balked at the cost. "I don't want to be in the R.-and- D. business," he said earlier this year. "It's just too time consuming and expensive." Enter Jobs...
...that picture lay in its relocation of that classic device of the horror genre, the haunted house. Instead of being a Gothic pile isolated on a bleak moor, it was a spaceship visiting an unwelcoming planet in an obscure corner of the universe. But the situation was the immemorial one: a monster, in this case an alien life-form requiring human hosts for gestation, is stalking the spaceship's endless, ill-lighted corridors, picking off victims one by one. But there was only one creature, six frightened earthlings and little more subtext (or, for that matter, dialogue) to the film...
...premise is a straightforward one. As Ripley was drifting through space after her previous close encounter of the unspeakable kind -- a flight that used up the equivalent of 57 earth years -- the alien planet was colonized. But now, suddenly, it has fallen silent. Is it possible that this wild tale of rampaging monsters she keeps telling is true? A party of Marines is sent out to investigate, and Ripley reluctantly accompanies them as a sort of Cassandra-cum-consultant...