By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 35 seconds ago

If you’re a movie lover, the phrase “sci-fi remake” likely fills you with dread. After all, Hollywood has cranked out more than a few worthless reboots of nearly perfect genre films over the years. This includes the newer RoboCop, which, amusingly enough, lacked the humanity of the original Paul Verhoeven film. The newer Total Recall was slick and sanitized, lacking the messy charm and charismatic lead of the original. Despite Star Trek (2009) being a wholly original movie, the sequel film Star Trek Into Darkness was a remake of The Wrath of Khan that was worse in every possible way.

Star Trek Into Darkness might very well be the worst sci-fi remake in Hollywood history. Ironically, though, one of its stars is the lead in the best sci-fi remake of all time. I’m talking about Dredd (2012), which features Karl Urban as the popular comic book character who will stop crime at any cost. He fully embodies this complex role and headlines an action film powered by adrenaline, gunpowder, and pure, manic intensity. To experience the thrill ride for yourself, all you have to do is stream Dredd for free on Tubi.

Here Comes The Judge

The plot of Dredd is that future America has become a dystopian hellhole in which highly trained cops have become judge, jury, and executioner to any and all criminals. Judge Dredd is tasked with assessing the skills of a new recruit, one whose psychic abilities may give her a much-needed edge on the battlefield. But she and Dredd will need every advantage they can get to pull off their next mission: a bold raid on a 200-story tower that serves as the base of operations for a local drug lord with a new product that threatens to turn Dredd’s burned-out-berg into a city of junkies.

The central cast of Dredd is as tight as the movie’s script. Game of Thrones veteran Lena Headey plays the ruthless drug dealer who is, honestly, much more vicious than Cersei Lannister ever was. Meanwhile, Juno star Olivia Thirlby is excellent as the psychic rookie getting an unfettered look at what it means to be a Judge in a time of lawless chaos. But nobody is acting their hearts out like Karl Urban, who injects just the right amount of personality into Judge Dredd without turning him into a caricature of himself (something Sylvester Stallone failed to do in the previous Judge Dredd movie). 

Urban is an actor who always disappears into his roles. As a veteran of Marvel, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings, he has more than earned the title of a genre legend. As great as he was in those other roles, though, Urban’s Dredd is the best performance of his career. In another actor’s hands, this performance would have been pure schlock (still looking at you, Stallone) or generic action slop. Paradoxically (and perfectly), Urban finds the sweet spot, conveying his character’s passion for justice while still coming across as a cool and emotionless agent of the law. 

It’s Dredd’s World. We Just Live In It

Now, here’s a confession that might cost me my nerd card: growing up, I never really got into the original Judge Dredd comics. Because of that, my only real exposure to this character has been through the medium of feature films. That’s why I was a little intimidated that I wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate Dredd: I had read about how this second film was infinitely more faithful to the comic, and so I worried that I’d be completely lost. Fortunately, I was quite wrong and discovered to my delight that this movie is very accessible to complete franchise newcomers.

That’s because Dredd, like Mad Max: Fury Road, embeds effortless world-building into its narrative without ever bogging down the storytelling or slowing down the action. If you’re a comic fan, you’ll appreciate all of the Easter eggs placed lovingly throughout the runtime. If you’re a sci-fi fan paying close attention to the dialogue, you’ll quickly suss out everything you need to know about this fictional world. Of course, if you’re just an action junkie who just wants to turn your brain off, it’s entirely possible to enjoy Dredd as a relentless movie filled with one action-packed scene after another.

One Action Scene After Another

For all its amazing attention to detail, the plot of Dredd is mostly a paper-thin excuse to shuffle us from one perfect action scene to the next. Like a sci-fi Die Hard, this movie is all about trapping our protagonists in a building where they are outnumbered and must fight wave after wave of well-armed foes. Fortunately, our heroes are driven by something more than their singular thirst for knowledge: the knowledge that all it takes is a single bullet to the leader’s head to utterly destroy this amoral organization.

It really is that simple. Our heroes must fight their way up the huge tower in search of their prey. At every turn, they encounter new foes, new challenges, and new surprises. The result is a visceral movie guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat. Dredd is the rare film that is full of surprises, always zigging when you expect it to zag. At the same time, however, it never fails to deliver exactly what its core audience wants: one balls-to-the-wall action scene after another. If you’re looking for something like a lo-fi John Wick crossed with The Matrix, then Dredd is the sci-fi action masterpiece you’ve been looking for.

Even if (like me on my first watch) you’re not very familiar with the title character, you owe it to yourself to watch Dredd. It’s got a small-but-swol cast, amazing costumes, and sweet set pieces. It also has action scenes that don’t stop until multiple bodies hit the floor. Think I’m overhyping the film too much? Fine, you be the judge! To experience the craziness for yourself, all you have to do is stream Dredd for free on Tubi. It’s better than the earlier movie in every way, but if this newer film inspires you to start belting out “I am the law!” in your best Stallone impression, don’t worry: I won’t tell anyone.

Florida attorney general James Uthmeier announced Tuesday that the state launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI and its flagship product, the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

The investigation centers on the use of ChatGPT by a gunman who allegedly shot several people at Florida State University in April 2025. The shooting killed two people and injured five others. The suspect, a former student at Florida State University in his early 20s, is awaiting trial for multiple charges of murder and attempted murder.

“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen in our initial review is that ChatGPT offered significant advice to the shooter before he committed such heinous crimes,” Uthmeier said at a news conference on Tuesday, according to NBC Miami.

Uthmeier offered several examples of such exchanges, including one in which the suspect allegedly asked about the gun’s short range power and the type of ammunition the gun used. The New York Times reported that the suspect also prompted the chatbot to answer questions about how the country would respond to a shooting at FSU.

Florida law may consider anyone who aids, abets, or counsels someone in a committed or attempted crime as a principal to that crime.

In a published statement, Uthmeier said that “…if ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder.”

Mashable contacted OpenAI for comment but didn’t receive a response prior to publication.

The criminal investigation follows an initial probe launched earlier this month by Uthmeier into ChatGPT’s links to “criminal behavior,” including the FSU shooting, as well as child sex abuse and the “encouragement of suicide and self-harm.”

The investigation seeks, among other evidence, OpenAI’s policies and internal training materials related to user threats directed toward other people between March 2024 and April 2026.

A recent report published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that many AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, helped test users posing as 13-year-old boys plan violence, including school shootings, knife attacks, political assassinations, and bombing synagogues or political party offices.

At the time, OpenAI said it had since introduced a new model different from the one tested jointly by CNN and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. It is unclear which ChatGPT model the alleged FSU shooter used.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

NASA has completed its next space observatory, built to create sharp, panoramic maps of the universe while revealing how the most mysterious, invisible substances and distant worlds shape the cosmos.

About a quarter-century after the Hubble Telescope reshaped astronomy, and a few years into the era of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will join them not as a replacement, but as a big-picture partner. Where Hubble and Webb zoom in for close‑ups, Roman will capture Hubble‑like detail across areas about 100 times larger, turning isolated snapshots into sweeping surveys that show the very scaffolding of the universe.

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, engineers are wrapping up prelaunch testing on the cutting-edge telescope. Next, the observatory will travel 900 miles to Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where teams will prepare it for launch. 

That could happen as early as this September, about eight months ahead of schedule, NASA managers said at a news conference on Tuesday, April 21. Once in space, Roman will head to a stable orbit about 1 million miles from Earth, near the same region where Webb orbits the sun, and begin a years‑long campaign of deep space imaging. 

“We didn’t want to wait to launch the Nancy Grace Roman. We’re eight months ahead of schedule,” said Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator of science. “Everybody felt the urgency. Everybody was sprinting towards this.”

Named for Nancy Grace Roman, who became the agency’s first chief of astronomy and one of its earliest female executives, the telescope reflects a legacy of opening new windows on the universe from above Earth’s atmosphere. Nicknamed the “mother of Hubble,” Roman helped lay the groundwork in the 1960s for a whole fleet of space telescopes.

A wide shot of the dark universe

At the heart of the mission is Roman’s eight-foot-wide mirror, the same size as Hubble’s, paired with a powerful camera that sees in infrared light, like Webb. That camera’s field of view is Roman’s superpower. In a single shot, it can image vast swaths of sky that Hubble simply can’t match. 

Because a space telescope can only see one patch of sky at a time, it has to take many separate “pointings” — individual shots aimed at slightly different spots — and stitch them together into a mosaic.

In 2023, Ami Choi, an astrophysicist and scientist for Roman’s wide field camera, contrasted the difference between Hubble and the new telescope. To photograph the Andromeda Galaxy, Hubble has to take 400 smaller images and stitch them together. For Roman’s camera, that should only take two pointings, she said. 

This wide, sharp vision is what scientists need to study the so-called “dark universe.” Ordinary matter — the stuff that makes up stars, planets, and even people — accounts for only about 5 percent of the cosmos. The bulk of it is dark matter and dark energy, which do not emit light but leave clues where they’ve influenced space’s expansion and the arrangement of galaxies.

“Current observations hint that our standard model of the universe is incorrect,” said Julie McHenry, senior project scientist, referring to cosmologists’ best recipe for the universe. “Roman will be able to confirm these and set us on the path to understanding what’s right.”

Roman will trace those clues in several ways at once. By mapping the positions and shapes of hundreds of millions of galaxies, it will show how structures have grown from the early universe to today. Subtle distortions in galaxy shapes will reveal how clumps of invisible space stuff bend their light on the way to us, exposing the hidden dark matter. At the same time, Roman will discover and track large numbers of a special kind of exploding star, known as Type Ia supernovas; their predictable brightness lets astronomers measure how quickly space has expanded over time.

Imaging large space targets, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, will require far fewer smaller images to stitch together than other flagship observatories.
Credit: NASA composite image

Taken together, these measurements will allow scientists to test competing ideas about dark matter, dark energy, and even the laws of gravity themselves with far greater precision than ever before. Other observatories can make similar kinds of measurements, but none combines Roman’s sharpness and sky coverage in the infrared, NASA mission leaders say, which lets it see more distant and dust-covered galaxies.

A new census of distant exoplanets

Roman’s wide‑field power also makes it skilled at exoplanet hunting. Previous missions like Kepler and TESS mostly found planets close to their stars, where their repeated crossings dim starlight in a regular rhythm. Roman will focus on a different region of planetary systems: the cooler, outer zones, where worlds similar to Jupiter and Saturn reside. It may even find wandering planets that aren’t tethered to stars.

To do this, Roman will repeatedly monitor dense star fields toward the center of our Milky Way. As a foreground star passes in front of a more distant one, its gravity will briefly magnify the background star’s light. If the foreground star carries planets, they can produce smaller, telltale blips in that brightening. This technique, called microlensing, works best in precisely the kind of crowded, faint, and distant regions that Roman is expected to capture.

Optical Engineer Bente Eegholm inspects the primary mirror for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA / Chris Gunn

Over its mission, Roman will attempt to record thousands of these microlensing events, revealing planets at distances and masses other surveys mostly miss. From that haul, astronomers will compare our solar system’s architecture with many others and judge whether having inner rocky worlds and outer giant planets is the status quo or something more rare.

Roman will also test an advanced coronagraph — a system of masks and mirrors that blocks a star’s glare so the telescope can try to see the faint glow of planets around it. On Roman, this is more of a technology trial than an everyday science instrument, but if it works, it will set the stage for a future observatory whose main goal is to directly image Earth‑like worlds around other sun‑like stars.

“What astronomers can do today with coronagraph instruments is see planets that are maybe a million times fainter than their stars,” Vanessa Bailey, NASA’s Roman coronagraph scientist, told Mashable. “What we’re doing with the Roman coronagraph is hopefully getting to 10 million to 100 million times fainter, maybe even a little bit more, in the best case scenario.”

Catching the universe in motion

Roman is also built for studying how the sky changes, creating a veritable library of “before” and “after” shots.

Technicians assemble the solar panels on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA / Sydney Rohde

One of its major surveys will repeatedly scan high‑latitude regions of the sky, away from the plane of the Milky Way. By returning to the same fields every few days, Roman will catch supernovas as they ignite and fade, watch black holes light up as they feed on nearby material, and uncover other short-lived, dramatic events across the distant universe. Its infrared vision will reveal explosions and flares that dust clouds hide from visible‑light telescopes.

Another core program will stare toward the Milky Way’s central bulge. There, Roman will track how the brightness of millions of stars rises and falls on timescales of minutes to months. Those records will not only power the microlensing planet search but also expose other phenomena, such as neutron stars and black holes.

Because Roman will cover such large areas with fine detail, its images will also become a long‑lasting reference tool. When other telescopes later spot something odd — a burst of high‑energy radiation, for instance, or an unusual variable star — astronomers will be able to pull Roman’s earlier images and see what was there before the excitement.

“The images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman. “Roman will give the Earth a new Atlas of the universe. I think it’s worth pausing for a moment just to think about how really incredible that is.”