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Alone with his robot on a remote lunar station, Sam is about to head home after a three year contract. That's when things get weird in Moon, which is lucky for you if you like smart, original science fiction stories.

This is the season when movies are more likely to bash you over the head with giant robotic fists then they are to make you ponder the universe. Nothing against robotic fists, mind you. But what sets Moon apart from other space operas this summer is that it blows you away with original ideas and surprising characters. It's still action packed, violent, and intense, but on an individual scale. Instead of spaceship battles, you have one man in his lunar rover, tiny against the immense moonscape.

Sam (Sam Rockwell) has begun to realize something is wrong at the lunar mining station. He can't get a live feed from Earth, and the video mails from his wife seem strangely edited. Plus, his robot Gertie (voiced by Kevin Spacey) seems to be trying to tell him something in a very subtle way: When he delivers news from the company, he flashes emoticons on his screen which signal confusion and distress. At first Gertie seems incredibly menacing, a version of HAL, but slowly we begin to realize that the robot is more complicated than that.

And Sam's life is a lot more complicated too. He knows he's a working stiff, required only to start up stalled mining vehicles. He's so unimportant that the company doesn't even bother to fix his live feed. But when he has an accident, he learns that he's more lowly than he ever imagined.

I would like to give you a reverse-spoiler alert here. Many people seem to believe that the big reveal of this movie is that Sam is a clone. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He discovers this early on, when Gertie awakens another clone after believing that Sam perished in the accident.

Sam's coming to terms with the fact that he is a clone, and his relationship with the newly-awakened second Sam clone, form the meat of this film. Together they must unravel the mystery of their existence and find out what the company has in store for them. Gertie also has a mysterious purpose, and his battered body, covered in post-it notes, always lurks at the edge of the frame. Eventually the company dispatches a "rescue mission" to the base, and the two Sams must race to figure out what they can do to save themselves in a world where clones are clearly less than people.

Directed and conceived by Duncan Jones, Moon is quiet and disturbing, yet manages to be hopeful in the face of overwhelmingly grim conditions. Director Jones happens to be the son of alien rocker David Bowie, but the tone and pacing of this film couldn't be farther from Ziggy Stardust. It's understated and minimalist – awash in shades of gray, with a rippling score from Clint "Pi" Mansell, the story is anti-glam. Which only allows Rockwell's incredible acting to pop even more.

What's pleasing about this movie is quite simply its originality. From the breathtaking images of a strip-mined moon, to the tight shots on Sam's face when he realizes he is just a copy of a man, this is a movie that will wash those YARMS right out of your brain. And without giving anything away, I'll just say the ending is not what you were expecting.

The other thing that I think is interesting about this movie is that it is actually based on current legal theories of clones. As law professor Kerry Macintosh has pointed out in her book Illegal Beings, human clones are illegal and therefore possess no human rights. If a human clone grew up now, it would have the legal status of a slave or worse. So it is not so farfetched to imagine that clones might become the untouchables of the next century.

So if you're wondering what to see this weekend, and you're lucky enough to live in one of the few cities where this movie has opened, check out Moon. You can see robots fighting any old time. But seeing something truly new? That's as rare as a rebellious clone on the moon.

spotted by our anonymous (and uninvolved) submitter on the office bulletin board at a “super mega corp” in columbus, ohio…where apparently a vegan “safe space” is, um, kind of in order. (sob)

related: p.s. bacon is life

extra credit: passive-aggressive vegan grocery cashier, a day in the life [mcsweeneys]

Walt Disney Pictures has released the first promotional photos from Tim Burton’s 3D re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland. Above you can see the first official photos of Johnny Depp as a freakish-looking Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen (”Off With Their Heads”), and Anne Hathaway as The White Queen, looking very pale. After the jump we’ve included newly confirmed details about the film’s plot (did you know its a kind of a sequel?) and new concept art that shows the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), the egg-shaped Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas) and more.

Update: Click here to see Matt Lucas as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

The USA Today article (where the images premiered) confirms our previous report that the movie is actually a sequel in some ways. The film begins at a party where Alice, now 17, finds out that she is about to be proposed to in front of hundreds of snooty high society types. She makes a run for it, and of course, ends up following a white rabbit down a hole, back to Wonderland — a place where she visited a decade prior. The White Rabbit is convinced that he has the right girl but Alice doesn’t remember her past visit to Wonderland. The creatures of Wonderland are ready to revolt and are hoping/waiting for Alice to help them, but will she? Can she?

Other details revealed in the article include: The Red Queen has “a moat filled with bobbing noggins”, The White Queen is beautiful but eccentric, and floats around instead of walking, and that Depp employs an accent for the Hatter that producer Richard Zanuck can only describe as “indescribable”.

I’ve seen most of this art before at previous Disney industry events, and as I’ve stated in the past, I’m loving the Burton-styled look. I know some people will complain that this film looks too dark, but I actually wish some of it was darker. I’m not sure what to think about Depp of Carter’s digitally enhanced appearances. It will be interesting to see what they look like in motion. Head on over to USA Today to see non-cropped, much higher resolution versions of the above concept art. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland will hit theaters on March 5th 2010.

• Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonam Carter in Burton’s Wonderland
• First Look: Matt Lucas in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
• More Alice in Wonderland Casting… I Think…
• Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland to Incorporate Stop Motion; Alan Rickman Talks About Being The Caterpillar
• First Look: Johnny Depp as the Madd Hatter?
• Matt Lucas Cast as Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Tim Burton’s Alice

You know those strange traffic jams that appear to come out of nowhere, with nothing causing them, and then suddenly end? As Wired reports , a team of M.I.T. mathematicians calls them "phantom jams" or "jamitons," and has found mathematical equations to describe them, similar to those that describe detonation waves from explosions. Phantom jams, the mathematicians found, can form when a single driver slows down (to take a sip of coffee or talk on the phone) on a road with too many cars on it. They hope the new equations will lead to roads engineered to keep traffic below the density where a jamiton can form.

The owners of this onetime RV park asked OSKA Architects to create a space for their guests that would be a step or two above camping while still maintaining the open feel of the natural Washington landscape. What they came up with was part caravan, part prefab, and just right...

Each rolling hut is only 200 square feet, but features an additional 240 square feet deck for outdoor living. They are all situated for unobstructed views of the surrounding mountains, yet still in close proximity to the neighboring huts for a true communal feel. You can see floor plans and many more photographs at ArchDaily.
(Images: Tim Bies for ArchDaily)
Related Post:

• Tom Kundig Architecture: A Different Take on an RV Idea

The Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen team are in the UK, to premiere the film and plug the mercy out if it. My own video from the London press day is coming soon, but in the meantime, the BBC have popped their own interviews online and, by the by, broken a story on the next Indiana Jones film.

Newsround presenter Lizo Mzimba squeezed Shia LaBeouf for some details on his upcoming projects and according to the sometime Jones Jr., Steven Spielberg has “cracked” the story for the next movie and is “gearing that up”.

There’s been a long standing rumor that Spielberg and Lucas are planning a hand-down of the torch from Harrison Ford to Shia LaBeouf, a rumor that started before part four yet still stands. How true that story is I have no idea, however, but I’m not exactly keen on the idea. For an Indiana Jones skeptic like myself, Ford’s winking charm is one of the most enjoyable ingredients in the series and I don’t know how much I’d care about a revision of the recipe that didn’t include it. Shia seems to be growing out of his particular charms, I think. He was a perfectly good nervy-awkward teenager, but I don’t know where he goes from here.

I’d argue that Raiders of the Lost Ark has, overall, a pretty nifty plot that moves along swiftly enough and criss-crosses itself in some very pleasant ways. Film by film, however, the Jones plotting seems to have become weaker and weaker until Crystal Skulls ended up quite lumpy and full of ludicrous conceits. From LaBeouf’s comments there’s no way of telling if Lawrence Kasdan has been involved in the seeding of film five, but I wouldn’t bet on it. A crying shame.

Many criticisms of the fourth film expressed a disgust at the inclusion of aliens, these being seen as a serious betrayal of the kind of maguffins included in the original trilogy. Okay, fair enough - but what maguffin would you like to see in part five then? What would get things back to the old ways?

• LOL: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg Rape Indiana Jones on South Park
• Stop Lucas: Harrison Ford Updates on Indiana Jones 5
• Mutt Williams and the Search for Elvis?
• George Lucas Talks Indiana Jones 5, Spielberg’s “Nostalgia,” Compares Fans to “Holy Ghost.”
• Trivia: Dan Aykroyd and the Temple of Doom
• Page 2

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t expecting much from Stephane Halleux’s website when I was first presented with that Flash intro (It’s 2009; are we still doing Flash intros?), but once inside I was met with the most wonderful collection of steampunk sculptures — odd characters, robots, and vehicles that look to be straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie.

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Thanks so much, Mark, for that introduction. We're thrilled that you guys have lent us the keys to Boing Boing for the next few days.

I'd like to tell Boing Boing's readers a little bit about the new web site that Dylan and I have launched, the Atlas Obscura.

The Atlas is a collaborative project whose purpose is to catalog all of the "wondrous, curious, and esoteric places" that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist.

Anyone can enter new places into the Atlas Obscura, or edit content that someone else has already contributed. We're counting on you, Boing Boing readers, to help us fill out the map and document all of the world's wonders and curiosities!

What kind of places are we talking about? Here are a few that were recently added to the Atlas:

- A hidden spot in the Smoky Mountains where you can find fireflies that blink in unison

-A 70-year-old house made entirely out of paper

- A giant hole in the middle of the Turkmenistan desert that's been burning for four decades

- A Czech church built of bones

- The world's largest Tesla coil

- A museum filled with the genitals of every known mammal in Iceland

- Enormous concrete sound mirrors once used to detect aircraft off the English coast

- The self-built cathedral of an eccentric Spanish ex-monk

- A museum of Victorian hair art in Independence, Missiouri

- An underwater sculpture garden off the coast of Grenada

- Galileo's amputated middle finger

- An island in the Canaries where people communicate by whistling

- The corpse of a 14th-cenutry Japanese monk who mummified himself while he was still alive

Dylan and I are hopeful that we if can get a bunch of like-minded travelers (and armchair travelers) to share their obscure knowledge, we can build a truly awesome resource for everyone. So, please check the site out! Explore! Get involved! Add a curious place!

First, though, a quick caveat: The site is still very much in beta. We're still adding features, making improvements, and sussing out bugs. So please let us know what works and what doesn't.

Now, before handing the mic over to Dylan, I'd like to take a moment to abuse this very big soapbox by giving a quick shout out to the Atlas Obscura's amazing developer Adam Varga of Sawhorse Media, our genius fix-it guru Boaz Sender, and our slick designer Aaron Taylor Waldman. Thanks gentlemen!