REUTERS/Mike Blake How do you top a huge San Diego Comic-Con movie panel with Charlize Theron and Damon Lindelof?
Well, in this case, you send in Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried.
After Prometheus star Theron and screenwriter Lindelof had shed a bit of light on what the heck Ridley Scott's Prometheus is about ("It also sounds really pretentious," acknowledged Lindelof), Timberlake and Seyfried showed up to 20th Century Fox's Comic-Con panel to talk about the future...
Particularly the freaky one that sets the scene for their new sci-fi flick.
"Time is money," Timberlake described In Time (formerly known as Now and a couple of other things), about a society in which everyone stops aging at 25 but then you need to work to stay alive.
"I'm just an ordinary guy, trying to stay alive," he said of his character. "And there's a lot of guns, which both of us really enjoyed," added Seyfried.
Since it was the actors' first time at the notoriously crowded convention, Timberlake joked about how he and his costar "brought protection." [Cue the loud applause.]
But back to Prometheus for a sec.
Without coming right out with it, the sci-fi adventure is sort of an Alien prequel, about a future in which space travel is a way for humans to find out more about themselves.
"Ridley has been cryptically obtuse about everything, but there are some big ideas in Prometheus. It covers a vast expanse of time, past, present, and future," Lindelof said.
"God, you're talking like the guy who created Lost," Theron scolded him.
Topping both Prometheus and In Time for sheer geeky pleasure, however, was the never-before-seen footage of Rise of the Planet of the Apes that screened afterward, accompanied by commentary from motion-capture veteran Andy Serkis, of Gollum and King Kong fame. (James Franco must have been busy composing an opera or writing a thesis, or something.)
No apes were harmed in the making of this film–because there are no apes in it!
The entire pack of damned, dirty primates are digitally rendered via motion capture technology, and they look both really scary and suspiciously human.
Coincidence?