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Fox pictures have a number of exciting movies coming out this year, spanning a number of different audiences.

Guest moderator Ralph Garman introduced the first movie, How to Train Your Dragon 2. Director Dean DeBlois and surprisingly Jay Baruchel (voice of Hiccup) took to the stage. After showing a completed first five minutes of the movie (which looked fantastic by the way) DeBlois elaborated that this second film of what is to be a trilogy takes place five years after the first movie, showing how our characters and the village have both grown and learned to make living with dragons part of their daily lives. “We also see that Stoick (Hiccup’s father) has changed from seeing his son as an embarrassment, to becoming an overly proud dad that has high hopes for his son. Hiccup can’t deal with these aspirations.” And we’ll be introduced to a new villain, Drago Bludvist, and how he plans to put a permanent wedge between the humans and dragons. How to Train your Dragon is coming to theatres June 13th.

Following next, Ralph Garman introduced the cast of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to the stage. Director Matt Reeves, Keri Russell, Gary Oldman, and Andy Serkis. “This movie follows years after the virus is released from the first movie and humans are extinct, or that they are thought to be,” says Matt. “We see that Caesar now is the leader of his tribe, and he has a family; a wife, one teenage son and a new baby.”

As it later introduced into the film that humans are still alive, it creates a conflict between the two species and inside Caesar himself. “Caesar is an ape, but he also had a human dad,” explained the director. “And he knows how it is to lose someone you love, so he’s empathetic to the survivors. He has to walk a fine line between his feelings and keeping his tribe together. And we see how there was a possibility that two could have lived together, but of course we all know what happens. That’s not a surprise.”

After watching the short movie clip they show us and listening to the discussion of the internal struggles on both the important parties of the movie, it’s difficult to decide who you want to root for. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes will be seeing theatres this July 11th.
Based off the widely popular young adult book by the same name, Maze Runner is what I see as a futuristic Lord of the Flies. This movie adapted by James Dashner’s book has all the makings of the next Hunger Games, by which I mean futuristic technology set in a forest setting, and the murder of teenagers. The movie does have some exciting action shots for those who like to run and fight, thrown in with a lot of CGI.

Presenting the movie were the director Wes Ball, author James Dashner, actor Will Poulter, and actor Dylan O’Brien (made famous by the series Teen Wolf). The author confessed that for his book a number of influences were the book Ender’s Game, the book Lord of the Flies, the show Lost, and his fear of mazes. “Remember in the Shining with the maze scene? Mazes creep me out. If you’ve ever been in a corn maze then you know.” The anticipated Maze Runner will be out September 19th of this year.

Moderator Ralph Garman introduced a last minute addition into the screening lineup. Coming out this fall is a spy movie called Secret Service. Its notable actors are Colin Firth (famous for many things including his portrayal of Mister Darcy in a BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice) and Samuel L. Jackson who will be playing the villain in this movie. Its setting is somewhere in the U.K., and the premise is that it deals with an organization that is funded by private investors as to not be hampered by politics and bureaucracy. The action sequences appear to be a faster paced Avengers, and technology stolen by Spykids. Still a work in progress.

And finally, what the Arena seemed to be waiting the most for, Ralph Garman introduced X-Men: Days of Future Past. The extended trailer and snippet of the movie looked beautiful and action packed. Unfortunately as a last minute change up, director Bryan Singer didn’t show (for reasons I’m sure we all know), but in his stead we had writer Simon Kinberg. He elaborated on things in the movie spanning from the politics in the 70’s, art styles of the bleak future and bright past, and as well as the convoluted concept of time travel. “Even though in the original comic that the movie is based off of they had Kitty go back in time, we decided that Wolverine worked better. James Cameron really helped us with the idea of time travel and how it scientifically would work, so you’ll see a lot of that in the film.”

In part of his final words, Simon Kinberg also added that he hopes this movie will make up for the failures of the 3rd X-Men movie, which was based off of the Dark Phoenix comic arc. X-Men: Days of Future Past will be out May 23rd; Not soon enough.

By Nicholas Rankin

In May 1941, Ian Fleming and his boss, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, were touching base in New York City with William Stephenson, the British Secret Service’s representative in North America as head of British Security Co-Ordination, whose headquarters occupied the 34^th and 35^th floors of the Rockefeller Center. The place later went into Fleming’s fiction. In chapter 20 of the very first Bond book, Casino Royale, James Bond confesses to the assassination of a Japanese cipher expert cracking British codes on the 36^th floor of that building – it was the first of the two wartime cold-blooded killings that led to Bond’s Double O number.

On 28 May 1941, Ian Fleming celebrated his 32^nd birthday in New York City with the good news that the Royal Navy had sunk Germany’s greatest battleship, the 42,000-ton Bismarck. Then he and Godfrey travelled by train to Washington DC on their mission to persuade the American authorities that they needed to create a unified American secret service. Intelligent combination in the USA would be an improvement on the system in the UK, which had evolved four different bodies with overlapping functions and competing masters: the blockaders of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), the propagandists in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), the saboteurs in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the spies of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6).

Before WW2, the United States of America had similarly left foreign intelligence variously to the diplomats of the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division (or G-2) of the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence. No-one below the White House was collating intelligence and no-one was taking the big strategic view. Although Admiral Godfrey found all three US departments polite and friendly towards him, he was surprised to discover how much the US Army and US Navy loathed and detested each other and what a snakepit bureaucratic Washington could be, like Whitehall at its very worst.

The only man who could knock heads together was the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States. Admiral Godfrey was invited to dine at the White House on 10^th June 1941, and given an hour with the President afterwards in the Oval Office. According to Godfrey, after watching ‘a rather creepy crawly film of snake worship’, FDR drawlingly recounted his reminiscences of British Admiral Reginald Hall’s brilliance as Director of Naval Intelligence in the Great War, while Godfrey himself reiterated three times the need for the Americans to have ‘one intelligence security boss, not three or four.’

That very same day, 10^th June 1941, William J. Donovan, (the American ‘Bill’ of the previous blog), had submitted a memorandum to the President recommending the establishment of ‘a central enemy intelligence organization’ to analyze and appraise all information on enemy intentions and resources, both military and economic, and to determine the best methods of waging economic and psychological warfare.

A week later, on 18^th June 1941, President Roosevelt accepted Donovan’s proposal and appointed Donovan himself as Coordinator of Information (COI). His job was to ‘collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security: to correlate such information and data, and to make such information and data available to the President…’ Roosevelt scrawled a note on the memo’s coversheet, ‘Please set this up confidentially … Military – not O.E.M. [Office of Emergency Management].’ The CIA historian Thomas F. Troy glosses ‘confidentially’ to mean there would be access to the President’s secret funds and ‘Military’ to denote ‘by virtue of the President’s authority as commander in chief’. William Stephenson, the Canadian ‘Bill’ was jubilant. He cable