Is the world of science fiction, in the movies and on TV, out of ideas in the year 2008? Mark Harris over at Entertainment Weekly seems to think so. As evidence, he points to the films and TV shows with science fiction themes that are currently on the market: “I am Legend” with Will Smith, an adaptation of an old book, and the third such movie adaptation of said book; “Battlestar Galactica”, a drastic remake of an old TV show.
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Ideally, sci-fi’s next rescuer should be someone whose ideas about the future derive from somewhere — anywhere — other than old sci-fi. It can be done. Just a year ago, no movie genre looked deader than the Western. Then 2007 brought us not only a familiar but lively overhaul of 3:10 to Yuma but also the gorgeously arty mood piece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and a handful of extraordinary films — the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and even, in its way, Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah — that drew deeply and inventively on different aspects of Western conventions and mythmaking to create something new, often stunning, and not instantly identifiable by genre. Sci-fi desperately needs filmmakers who are interested in bending the form toward their own passions and obsessions as artists. 2001 has come and gone, and right now the future looks too much like something we’ve already seen.
Consider some of the bigger named sci-fi movies of the last few years — “Aeon Flux” with Charlize Theron, “Ultraviolet” with Milla Jovovich. Neither were very big box office hits — in fact, I’m pretty sure both were flops. And they were original, weren’t they? And yet, Will Smith’s “I am Legend” was a big hit. Why?
Easy: Sci-fi is like every other genre — you put a big enough name in front of the camera, and people will come. People who went to see “I am Legend” didn’t go to see “a sci-fi movie”, they went to see a “Will Smith movie”. Likewise, people didn’t go to see “3:10 to Yuma” because it was “a Western”, they went to see it because it was “a Western starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale”.
So how do you revive the sci-fi genre at the movies? I don’t think there’s a need. I think sci-fi is doing just fine. Hollywood makes hundreds of movies a year, and 90% of them are failures. Why should sci-fi be any different? It’s not because the genre is out of ideas, it’s just the way the movie business works.
