Cinefantastique Online

Is science-fiction cinema stumbling into the future while chained to the dead weight of the past? That is the conclusion of Mark Harris in “Is Sci-Fi Out of Ideas?” Although acknowledging that the genre is strong at the box office, Harris expresses concern that the genre currently tends toward recycling old ideas: I AM LEGEND; based on a 1954 novel, TRANSFORMERS based on an ’80s line of toys; ALIENS VS. PREDATOR; REQUIEN, based on franchises over twenty years old. For Harris, the last straw seems to be J. J. Abrams upcoming reboot of STAR TREK.

Harris hopes that a filmmaker will come along “whose ideas about the future derive from somewhere – anywhere – other than old sci-fi”:

Perhaps science fiction needs to be saved from the very people who love it the most. Nostalgia for a form can be annihilating to creativity, so while its devotees are swamped in their own canon, trying to mine now-sacred texts for any new material, I wish a great writer or director with no particular affection for the genre would let his imagination loose and see what it yields. It happened 40 years ago, when Stanley Kubrick, following his own ice-cold muse and his fascination with science itself, decided he wanted to create something that ”extended the range of science fiction,” a genre that didn’t particularly impress him. What nerve! The result was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which changed the game so completely that in movies, the sci-fi genre immediately vanished for a few years while everyone surveyed an irrevocably altered landscape.