Entertainment Weekly’s Mark Harris asks, “Is Sci-Fi Out of Ideas?”:
Sci-fi is in trouble, though it’s not the kind of trouble that can be measured at the box office, where it looks as healthy and robust as a T. rex must have seemed five minutes before it realized that there was nothing left to eat. The genre has been around for as long as the movies themselves, and flourished for the last 30 years. The problem is, none of the ideas are getting any newer. Scratch that: The problem is, there are no ideas.
He points to things like I Am Legend (the film based on a book published in 1954), Battlestar Galactica (a remake of a show from 1978), and the J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek remake/prequel thing (which I also objected to) as proof that sci-fi has run out of ideas.
Bullshit.
Children of Men, Serenity, Primer, Pitch Black, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Donnie Darko are all very recent, and very excellent examples of quality science fiction. Go just a little bit farther back and you come across films like Dark City, The Matrix, and 12 Monkeys.
And, let’s not forget that Cloverfield opens January 18th.
If you think there’s a lack of ideas in sci-fi then you need to stop watching garbage. Yes, it totally sucks that Star Trek keeps movie backward and that Star Wars keeps gets worse each time Lucas screws with it, but what’s that’s only the very tiny tip of the sci-fi iceberg. Great sci-fi is out there, you just have to have a Netflix account and your head out of your ass.
The fault, dear Mark Harris, lies not in the stars, but, I suspect, in your unfortunate film choices. Try to check out some new stuff in 2008, why don’t cha?
Excellent points, although I don’t know that I’d count Cloverfield… isn’t it basically Godzilla, except possibly good?
Don’t cha know, CP Labs figured out what the heinous monster that’s attacking New York really is: http://www.coudal.com/cloverfield.php
I’d that face Godzilla than that.