I find this sort of vision of the future of films to be highly depressing - millions of talking head uber-niche affairs badly acted and with no special fx.

i'll be crying and screaming for the return to the days of the chronicles of riddick - all is forgiven.

But this is a digression from the point of the article - should sci-fi writers lovers be forbidden from writing sci-fi? (And my answer is no they should not.)

ven.batista

There are only so many movies that a studio can make each year, and every movie out there is competing against every other movie. In general, big budget movies compete more successfully against other movies, and for a big budget movie to be profitable it has to appeal to the masses.

In the traditional model of "make movie, play in cinema, sell dvds" the bean counters want to reduce the risks as much as they can, so you get these homogenized films time and again.

Fortunately the internet changes the model. You no longer need a big budget and backing by the big players to be competitive. It's no longer a case of needing to get X hundred people watching it in each cinema per day to make money, you just need the total number of viewers. And while a niche, edgey science fiction movie might only draw 20 people per cinema, there's bound to be thousands of viewers globally.

I think the up and coming, and as yet unimagined, distribution and production methods will only increase the options available to writers, directors and producers, and with the net as a vehicle for distribution we'll get more gritty and edgey sci-fi.

else

As far as the problem with most SF movies, I think the nature of imagining the future allows for some really incredible visuals that movie creators get really excited about. They spend loads of money on the design work, and then loads more on the CGI, and on some level they think, and probably know that if they get stunning visuals they'll be able to produce a good trailer and pack people in the seats for their movie for the week or two it will survive at the box office. Once they've got that all sorted out, they'll worry about story, character development, continuity and all the other more mundane aspects of making a box office success into a good movie.

Some mentioned the Pirates movies, and there's no question Johnny Depp brings everything to every movie he does, and could probably make the first 200 pages of the New York phone book engaging as a drama if he turned it into a movie. You can be sure that he's not picking poor movies and doing a great job, he's picking movies that are already going to be great.

There are directors that seem to do consistently good work; Tim Burton, Ridley Scott, the Wachowski brothers all seem to balance the effects with the acting and the story, but there are far more whiz bang effects directors than there are the other kind. Spielberg can do a great job, as evidenced in Minority Report, which I think was a fantastic movie, despite the fact that Tom Cruise was in it. Don't get me wrong, I like Tom Cruise movies, I just don't expect them to be too deep, and I was surprised at how well M.R. turned out. Spielberg can also turn out movies like A.I., which was effects heavy and such a painful and emotionally draining waste of 2 hours of my life I'd prefer to forget it completely.

Coming to the original question - should SciFi lovers being banned from writing SciFi? No - SciFi consumers should either lower their expectations of SciFi movies, or they should state with their wallets that they're not interested in no story effects schlock, and that the studios need to produce better written movies if they want to survive at the box office.

I'm a SciFi fan, and I'm also a SciFi writer, as well as a general fiction fan, and a non-fiction fan, software developer and general technology junkie. I make a point of not writing what I think other people will like, or writing like other people have written, as I wouldn't want to read that. I write what I'd want to read, and if I'm lucky, other people will enjoy that too. The difference is I'm not trying to fill a theatre with what I write in a market where there's competition from hundreds of other writers vying for those same seats. Also, for me as a writer, the cost of failure is way lower than for a movie maker, so I can't really fault them for taking the safe route, though I'd prefer they didn't. I wonder if they made what they really wanted to make, would we ever get to see it?

Steve_Smith

MOST people who write, sing, play an instrument paint a picture etc suck at it or at best moderately competent at it and EVERYBODY starts by imitating what they love. It's natural. But the talented ones, the great ones transcend this and blend things over time, they become the sum of every story they have ever heard and ever experience they have ever had. They don't think in terms of boundaries.

Let me give you an example of how unhelpful this idea is -I'm pretty sure if you made jazz lovers write only death metal music it might be interesting in a car crash kind of way and may shake things up a bit but wouldn't produce new classics of the genre. It would probably merge and change death metal into something new and odd and probably rubbish.

Creativity is a vital soul enriching thing and no-one should ever be discouraged from trying their best to put something out there - derivative or not. So I say BOO to you naysayers and that Entertainment Weekly writer.

The REAL problem is the people who decide to publish the things - those crony old lizzards that rule the book, TV and film universes.

ven.batista

SeeingI

That said, Ridley Scott does need to get off his ass and make another sci-fi film.

popastronaut

OMG! Ponies!

Johnny Depp's hair was worth 3 out of my 8 dollars. The plot was just an excuse for the actors to chew the scenery.

wishnevsky

It's simple, really. One page of screenplay is one minute of movie. So a screenplay is 200 pages long max. And those pages are mostly blank.

They keep pushing video as the new internet, but video is low density information content, on a verbal level. So gotta have those CGI's.

Same bottom line; now that you can tell any story, show any picture, what do you want to say, and why, to whom?

wishnevsky

And I think the reason reboots and the like are so popular is because the generation that's coming into its own in the entertainment industry is the first generation for whom sci-fi isn't really considered nerdy, in a negative way. You can admit to playing D&D as a kid now, and you might laugh about it, but there's no stigma, and you run into more jocks and girls who know what you're talking about too. And we grew up with all these mythos that seemed very cool but never were explored in depth the way we would have liked. That's why, as a young viewer of Superfriends and He-Man, I loved Justice League and the 2004 Masters of the Universe reboot cartoon (which, frankly, was brilliant and ended before its time). And I think it's the same for BSG and everything else.

Moff

Nostalgia always stagnates imagination and progress. It's the reason I abhor retro anything. Retro is done to death. The prefix RE is always the death knell of an original thought.

alice

And it was MADE OF AWESOME.

JennaW

I do my best to go into films with no expectations, or really low expectations, so I can replicate an opening night screening of the first Pirates film. Which, I have to say, was great fun. That introductory shot of Depp rocked everyone in the theater's world. Cause no one, well at least not me, knew anything about it.

aspiringexpatriate

The trick to enjoying movies is to take them at what they are trying to be, not what you want them to be. People seem to bring such big old bags of expectations to movies and then get upset when the movie fails to live up to the movie in their head.

But the fairest way to judge any work is against the standard of what it's *trying* to do. Does it succeed? If not, does it still entertain? I also think a movie should try to do *something* and not just show up. I, Robot is a pretty darn good little movie (I wouldn't call it fluff but it's not high art, either) which is what it was trying to be; as an adaptation it totally fails, but it does tell the story it's trying to tell very well.

JennaW

aspiringexpatriate

aspiringexpatriate

Waste of time.

Take I Robot. Good bunch of very dry short stories in 1950, totally unsuitable for a movie that expected to make its money back. The Movie was an enjoyable piece of fluff, and its only redeeming virtue was that the Widow Asimov got a nice fat check. (i hope)

Fans are the worst judges of what a movie made from a book is; they always want the book word for word. Sometimes it works, but very rarely. The Potter Movies were good, the Ring Movies i thought were less successful. They were overwhelming, but too many shots of stone-faced Frodo losing for my taste.

The map is not the territory, the book is not the movie.

And i must be the only person in the world who thought "Pitch Black" was ruined by all the logic holes, while "Riddick" was SOP Space opera, with an admirably different artistic look.

Both worth a few bucks. I don't expect or demand transcendence for my $8.00. I just want some non-pretentious amusement to eat popcorn to.

Shallow of me, i know. But it's my $8.00. Rather a good Space Opera with a few jokes and a few explosions than a dreary, pretentious, crapfest like Narnia.

wishnevsky

Off the top of my head, "The Fountain" was another sci-fish film in the last year by a non-sci fi director/writer that really moved me. I'm not sure if it was great film, but I appreciated that it was trying to do something different.

PVIII

I totally agree. Sometimes it's best to ease someone in with something closer to a cross-genre. That's one of the things that frustrates me when BSG fails to capture a wider audience, seeing that they deal with contemporary issues like voter tampering/ torture/ marshall law etc. I have a feeling it has something to do with being named BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, which makes my friends laugh everytime I bring it up (and it won a peabody!). Oh well.

PVIII

"Sunshine" and "Children of Men" = <3

I saw both of those in theatres, can't saw that I'm not doing my part. ;)

Dallin

aspiringexpatriate

JennaW

I'm an ex-librarian, and that is just not the way to do what's called "reader's advisory." When trapping unwary nonfans, it's best to try to match the person to the thing she'll like that will on-ramp her into the brave new world of SF. What *fans* tend to do is try to foist the thing (book, film, etc) they think is the bestest ever and will prove the greatness of the genre to the nonfan prey -- which generally just scares nonfan away.

JennaW

WickedGlee

Jennaw: yes, it is pretentious, but when talking to someone who hasn't read good sci-fi/spec fiction, you have to make up classifications between good and bad other than simply good and bad, cause some pulp is actually good- Fifth Element fore example. And fanboys do regurgitate a lot, but really good writers can also regurgitate really well- i.e. BSG by Ron Moore. It's like the good elements of Firefly with the good elements of BSG with the space opera aspect of later DS9. But altogether it becomes something people like to call 'original'.

aspiringexpatriate

NefariousNewt

Want to out yourself as editor and publisher of ________? ;)

JennaW

NefariousNewt

NefariousNewt

JennaW

WickedGlee

And fans can be so fannish that even when given the chance to create in their beloved genre, they do derivative work. Very true. But since they are doing familiar work, they have a good chance of getting financed: the "Yeah, I've heard of that!" school of story pitching.

My eye rolling had more to do with the genre-eats-itself conversation about the "good" vs "bad" types of speculative fiction.

JennaW

WickedGlee

Even worse, this has spilled out into the SF&F literary world as well. A publisher finds a recipe that makes some money and sticks with it, and if there's anything good that comes out of it, it's almost accidental.

Science Fiction and Fantasy is the one area that is wide open to all possibilities and ironically it is also where you find an amazing lack of originality. It's not the writers fault. It is the fact that those who hold the cash in their hands are not willing to find the publication or filming of something that they just don't understand and is not proven.

WickedGlee

PVIII

What happens is that Hollywood gets a "science fiction" script and immediately applies some sort of filter to it which requires it to be effects-laden, filled with hokey dialog and vapid characters, thereby killing the original story and making it unrecognizable. You only get good sci-fi movies when you get a director/producer who gets it and is willing to go against the Hollywood system (2001, Blade Runner).

NefariousNewt

Fry: "Married?! Jenny can't get married."
Leela: "Why not? It's clever, it's unexpected..."
Fry: "But that's not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared."

putch

I love how Speculative Fiction gets all chopped up into the pieces the speakers feel comfortable owning. It's all just made up, entertaining stories. Some of them are deep, some of them are kitsch, some of them "could totally happen," and some of them could not.

The big problem with adaptations is that the money goes to the familiar rather than the innovative. But how is that in any way surprising? Most things work that way. Architecture for one. We never see the really cool designs get built.

JennaW

Inkymonkey

Sci-Fi is like the top 40 version of Science Fiction.

Like R&B v. Rhythm and Blues or Country v. Country and Western.

Or how real Literature became (niche)-Lit.

Apparently when you no longer have the discipline to say the whole word you've also lost the discipline to master the craft.

92BuickLeSabre

johnmarr

also, firefly, while it was a bold idea that had promise it was ultimately just "buffy in space" and serenity's absurdly tacked on morality and space zombies destroyed any claim to being reputable.

putch

aspiringexpatriate

but that doesn't mean that sci-fi fans should be hands off. harris, argues that 2007 saw the resurgence of the western. but what he's forgetting is that it's resurgence is due in no small part to the critical success of hbo's deadwood. they dumped a lot of money into creating a great drama that lead to this revival. that's what is needed: a ballsy investment to reinvigorate a the genre. preferably by a premium cable channel that can provide funding and an outlet that wont be primarily concerned with ratings and ad revenue. yeah, abc scored big with lost. and heroes and BSG have helped pull sci-fi to the mainstream. but they suffer from the same trappings. heroes is a gussied up fanfic version of the xmen. BSG is a god damn remake. and lost nearly collapsed under the pressure of churning out 22 mediocre eps for season 2. thankfully it seemed to regain some of it's footing in season 3 when they realized that they wouldnt actually have to go all gilligans island.

the closest we've gotten to good new sci-fi are some of the indie film-makers who have gone sci-fi. things like children of men and sunshine are proof that there is some life in the genre. but then again, sometimes a gem like pitch black comes along and then we get stuck with the chronicles of riddick.

also, while i've enjoyed his novels and some of the adaptations (blade runner, screamers, total recall) hollywood really needs to stop going back to the dick well. because we wind up with drivel like payback or impostor.

the point is that it's not the writers fault. are fans of comedy supposed to stop writing comedies? it's the producers' fault for not willing to roll the dice on something fresh.

also, in future, if you're going to link to a multipage article, you might want to link to the FIRST page of it.

putch

Dallin

NefariousNewt

tetracycloide

NefariousNewt

Dekker

tetracycloide