Here's an interesting column from the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly. I think the author makes a good point. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20169296,00.html
I think if you want really original, cutting edge sci-fi you need to look to novels. Movie and television studios don't want to risk a whole lot of money on some really new concept when they can just warm up the leftovers (Star Trek) and put a new face to it.
Well, there hasn't been a whole lotta fresh ideas coming down the pike in recent years, but there's been a fair number of good sci-fi films... Sunshine Children of Men Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Solaris The Thirteenth Floor The Matrix Contact Starship Troopers Dark City Gattaca Total Recall Back to the Future The Terminator Blade Runner The Thing Alien ...and I'm sure plenty others. Not to mention TV. Are there any truly news ideas to mine from science fiction? I think there still are. Time will tell...
if the studios could be arsed tackling some of the novels instead of seeing how often they can recycle a franchise, things would be better. christ, it wouldn't be too much of an expense to base a series in the commonwealth of 'pandoras star'/'judas unchained' and that offers a lot of new stories to tell.
i was thinking of howard the duck this morning! stuck in a queue of traffic, i was thinking just how handy having car-destroying electricy powers would be
A lot of the ones you mention reinforce the point in the OP though.... Sunshine Children of Men Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Solaris The Thirteenth Floor The Matrix Contact Starship Troopers - based on old novel Dark City Gattaca Total Recall - based on old story Back to the Future The Terminator Blade Runner - based on old story The Thing - remake of old film Alien Of the rest, you have 2 star vehicles and a bunch of movies which were mostly not big box office. The Matrix and Alien being the obvious exceptions, and to a lesser extent Contact. It seems to me that if the argument is this: if you produce and distribute an SF film that does NOT have a built in fan base from it's source material, you run a huge risk of financial disappointment. It's not so much that there are not new ideas, but that tryely new ideas are very expensive gambles....even when you cast a guy like Clooney who is bank at the box office.
Uh, no it's not. The reason Hollywood sci-fi tends to suck so hard is precisely because the people producing it believe that something like this is what sci-fi's all about. Sci-fi is supposed to take a premise where science works differently than we know it to work--the premise may or may not be contradictory to current knowledge, but it must not be within current knowledge--and run with the premise to explore the human condition. The future has nothing to do with sci-fi except for being an easy to use setting for discovery of as-yet undiscovered premises. Ships, the future, laser weapons, time travel; these are, in good hard sci-fi, simply devices to allow people (or other entities with human characteristics) to encounter things humans wouldn't ordinarily encounter and react in ways humans ordinarily wouldn't react, allowing the writer to explore the consequences of these reactions. In good soft sci-fi these are tools for telling allegories that, if told in a more realistic setting, would have political, racial, religious, or other similar overtones that would be too controversial for a lot of readers or viewers to actually accept the point of the story. In either hard or soft sci-fi, the future is just one possible tool of many for telling a story that's at its core about people.
I'm still waiting for traditional space opera to make a comeback. Personally, I'm sick of science fiction that harps about being "gritty" and "realistic". I'm ready to watch stuff that looks "new", "futuristic" and "idealistic".
Sci-fi isn't out of ideas, just most of the people who are currently paid to produce it. I'm not much for genre-tic purity anyway.
While I admittedly haven't kept up with the majority of SF novels recently, I have noticed an overall trend away from hard SF and Space Opera, and more towards either Fantasy or Alternate History. It's pretty easy to spot on the bookstore shelves even if one is simply browsing. So, using the premise that new source material comes best from novels, it doesn't surprise me that there is a scarcity of hard SF movies. Also, Shep hits the nail on the head with his comment: That is EXACTLY studio-think in a nutshell!
I think classic space opera has been on the way out for years for one basic reason: A central premise of classic space opera is a faith in science and technology. The idea that technology is going to "solve our problems" (though it might cause some new ones). But since the 1970s, there has been a major tendency to see science and technology as problems and not solutions. I think Star Trek:The Next Generation was in many ways a throw back to classic space opera. After it, all other Star Treks (along with other series) really wanted to go the "gritty" and "realistic" route.
What would you consider an example of 'classic space opera'? Are you talking about Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon? Because the Star Wars movies were kind of made in that same vein.
