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Author Topic: Ridley Scott: sci fi is dead  (Read 18560 times)
lester1/2jr
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« on: August 31, 2007, 01:26:34 PM »

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short article in which Sir Ridley Scott says essentially we've seen it all before.  It's easy to be cynical I suppose, but is he right?  I mean,  sci fi is a pretty narrow genre.   If we don't fix our attitude towards the envirnoment or war or something we are going to be like these people in this dystopian world were everyones boss is...a robot or something.


and aren't most sci fi films action movies?

I liked that Wernor Herzog one that just came out, but that is not exactly mainstream or sci fi fanboy.  maybe that's the point
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LilCerberus
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« Reply #1 on: August 31, 2007, 02:12:16 PM »

"Whatever happened to the guy walkin' down the street with his hands in his pockets, whistlin' a tune? Science Fiction & Nostalgia have become the same thing." - T Bone Burnette, The Wild Truth
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"Science Fiction & Nostalgia have become the same thing!" - T Bone Burnett
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Pilgermann
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« Reply #2 on: August 31, 2007, 06:35:06 PM »

I'll still love sci-fi even if ideas are running a bit dry.  I don't really see it as a dead genre.  There's great potential in the upcoming adaptation of The Stars My Destination.  That could be a stunning film if there's some passion and skill put into it.
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Dave M
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« Reply #3 on: August 31, 2007, 07:23:06 PM »

Sci-fi (TV and movies), has always been several decades behind science fiction (literature). They haven't even based a SINGLE movie on anything by Poul Anderson yet, and Scott's pronouncing the genre dead?

They should have made "The Stars My Destination" with Humphrey Bogart, like in "Jeffty Was Five".
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CheezeFlixz
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« Reply #4 on: August 31, 2007, 07:49:04 PM »

Let's see the title of the story is Sci-fi films are as dead as Westerns, says Ridley Scott


Hmm let's see the western is DEAD? And Sci-Fi is dying?

Do the guys the made 3:10 to Yuma that comes out next week, a western know this? There are 1000's a sci-fi books that haven't even been touched yet as the prior poster noted.

Sorry Ridley you're wrong.
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IzzyDedjet
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« Reply #5 on: August 31, 2007, 08:32:56 PM »

Let's see the title of the story is Sci-fi films are as dead as Westerns, says Ridley Scott


Hmm let's see the western is DEAD? And Sci-Fi is dying?

Do the guys the made 3:10 to Yuma that comes out next week, a western know this? There are 1000's a sci-fi books that haven't even been touched yet as the prior poster noted.

Sorry Ridley you're wrong.


How many times have the genres been combined?  Granted, some of them were really bad, but there were some good ones in there too.  I kinda like them myself
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RCMerchant
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« Reply #6 on: August 31, 2007, 08:40:24 PM »

 Most GOOD sci-fi litature is way too intellegent for Hollywood. Heinlen is almost impossible to transfer to the big screen ,at least by "dummy- down'' type directers. (IMO)
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IzzyDedjet
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« Reply #7 on: August 31, 2007, 09:01:39 PM »

The travesty that was Starship Troopers is testimony to that.
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Inyarear
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« Reply #8 on: August 31, 2007, 09:40:18 PM »

Methinks the ol' director doth protest too much. Back in the 1970s, a lot of people had the very same attitude about the world and the movie industry both being in decline. The movie Logan's Run, in particular--which was not actually too bad a film, though it does show its age rather badly these days--bombed, and a lot of people thought the genre was finished.

Then a certain young director by the name of George Lucas came out with a fun little science fiction movie. A lot of people were skeptical that anyone would care to see a science fiction movie that wasn't bemoaning how we were all going to end up in some horribly polluted dystopian future, but it sold amazingly well. The movie in question, which finally got everyone in Hollywood to stop calling the merchandising clauses in the contracts the "junk" clauses, was of course Star Wars, today known as Episode IV. The film and its resulting sequels and prequels and spin-offs are all Hollywood's meat now, but it's worth remembering that it revolutionized the entire industry in its time.

There's currently a dearth of originality in Hollywood, but it's not as if no one has any new ideas, even in science fiction; given some new blood and fresh talent, I think we can expect to see a film any day now that'll leave all the current hacks wondering why they didn't think of making it themselves. As for war and the environment... well, first, Gore & Co. have blown the whole "climate change" problem all out of proportion; we do have some responsibility to take out the garbage, conserve energy, and generally avoid destroying too much land and life, but demanding that we all accept the radical greens' highly political and absurdly exaggerated apocalyptic scenario just because it would make a great movie if it were true is the very opposite of being responsible. In any case, we're not all going to die of any ballyhooed environmental apocalypse any time soon, and we movie-goers won't keep turning out in huge numbers for any more of The Day After Tomorrow's kind of nonsense.

As for war, Hollywood's hypocritical hatred and contempt for our country and our military is what's keeping it from making any truly good war movies; instead, it prefers to posture about its politically correct drawings of moral equivalence between troops and terrorists, and cops and criminals, as if this were a laudable, rather than utterly contemptible and morally bankrupt view of the world. This is Hollywood's greatest blind spot, in fact: that it is incapable of seeing how our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are actually some of the most righteous and morally unambiguous wars we've ever fought, and that the Islamofascists we're facing overseas are such living caricatures of evil (see "Islamic Rage Boy" for an example) that they might as well have been born the orcs of Mordor.

We do need a new kind of propaganda blitz to win this new kind of war our enemies are waging on us, however; unlike the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union (which was remarkably similar to the one in the original Star Wars movies, in fact, especially when one adds in the deleted footage), this terrorist network of loosely affiliated organizations is not confined to any single easily identified bloc of nations. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas and all the rest have no Coruscant and no Death Star. What we are facing is more like a horde of James Bond wannabes, if James Bond were working for evil instead of for good. (Such a scenario is not that difficult to imagine, actually: we wouldn't want agents from other countries employing the same tactics against us that James Bond employs against his enemies.) Al Qaeda, unlike the Evil Empire, also has the World Wide Web. Just imagine how different Star Wars would be if the characters in that story's universe had ever had such a thing!

In fact, I suspect this is the kind of film that will ultimately revolutionize science fiction movies in Hollywood the way Star Wars did: a film that takes everything Star Wars ever taught us about war and turns it on its head. In such a story, Death Stars would be obsolete, with the real threats to life and limb coming from ideology and infiltration. The main danger would be the ease with which an enemy suicidally committed to your destruction (spiritual as well as physical) could inflict massive damage on your whole population with one well-placed bomb and/or hijacked transport. The hero of this story would be an utterly shameless corporate shill who comes up with a completely tacky and tasteless advertising campaign combined with a massive and heavily-armed smuggling operation that, perhaps with the help of some secret support from sympathetic government officials, successfully undermines the terrorists' ideology and turns the public against them.

This would be a sci-fi comedy, needless to say.
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RCMerchant
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« Reply #9 on: August 31, 2007, 10:31:03 PM »


 Your joking,right? I mean about the war in Iraq being the "most righteous and unambiguous " war we've ever fought-part?   Question

 I think "self rightous ", on George Bush's part. As for morals...I seriously don't believe that "fighting the good fight" was on W's mind when we got into this thing in Iraq. His intents are far more political...and I have a hard time equating  Bush's politics as anything remotly connected with morality. 

  I was going to go on a long tirade of why I think Bush is the WORST President in US History...but I thought better of it.
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« Reply #10 on: August 31, 2007, 10:49:49 PM »

Let's see the title of the story is Sci-fi films are as dead as Westerns, says Ridley Scott


Hmm let's see the western is DEAD? And Sci-Fi is dying?

Do the guys the made 3:10 to Yuma that comes out next week, a western know this? There are 1000's a sci-fi books that haven't even been touched yet as the prior poster noted.

Sorry Ridley you're wrong.

Not to mention that...

MTV said the same thing about rock and stopped showing so many rock videos, but then when it became "vogue" again, they started playing them like nothing happened.

Toho has said the same about daikaiju films, and yet D-War, The Host, and "Cloverfield" have come out or are still looming on the horizon.

Does anyone also remember the time before Scream came out that a horror/thriller film being theatrically released was virtually unheard of?  Now, we see a new one every month or so, not to mention hordes of them on DVD, and tons of reissues.

It's all a swinging pendulum.  Sci Fi is not popular at the moment, but it doesn't mean that no one will ever revolutionize it or bring it back into popularity.  If you look at the history of just about any facet of humanity, you'll see this is true.  Just look at religion.  How many times in history have we had religious peaks, but then troughs?  And what follows a trough but a revival.  I think Sci Fi is on the down swing, but give it a bit longer and people will be looking at it more favorably. 
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CheezeFlixz
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« Reply #11 on: August 31, 2007, 10:58:07 PM »

I would say it's more like fashion, everything come back into style at some point.
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Inyarear
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« Reply #12 on: September 01, 2007, 12:00:27 AM »

Your joking,right? I mean about the war in Iraq being the "most righteous and unambiguous " war we've ever fought-part?   Question

 I think "self rightous ", on George Bush's part. As for morals...I seriously don't believe that "fighting the good fight" was on W's mind when we got into this thing in Iraq. His intents are far more political...and I have a hard time equating  Bush's politics as anything remotly connected with morality. 

  I was going to go on a long tirade of why I think Bush is the WORST President in US History...but I thought better of it.


Joking I am not, young paduan. Fight the good fight, Bush does. This refrain I hear from Bush haters too often; political and immoral his foes' attacks on him are...

All right, enough with the Yoda talk already!

However, I should point out that I do already know what kinds of things your tirade would include, as I've heard way too much of this kind of talk aready... and I thank you for skipping it, just as I'm going to skip my tirade about what I think of people with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Quite frankly and honestly, though, I do believe that most of Bush's ostensible reasons for fighting this war have been right, and that he does have good moral moral intentions for fighting this war in Iraq AND Afghanistan. (Of course, I have no way of knowing Bush's motives for certain, but no one else can read Bush's mind either; one should never trust anyone who pretends otherwise.) The short explanation for why I believe these things is here, and one of the longer (and more articulate) ones is here.

And yes, I do think a science fiction movie for our times would reverse almost every lesson we learned from the original Star Wars; it was a science fiction movie for its time, too, which was the Cold War era. As is all too common, our mistakes in this war have mostly come from acting as if we were fighting the previous war.
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CheezeFlixz
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« Reply #13 on: September 01, 2007, 12:07:07 AM »

  I was going to go on a long tirade of why I think Bush is the WORST President in US History...but I thought better of it.

Two Words .... Jimmy Carter.
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Wicked Nick
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« Reply #14 on: September 01, 2007, 05:32:00 AM »

I  disagree. Sci-fi is far from dead, with the advent  of CGI and its continued growth I think we could start seeing Sci-fi movies on a scale not seen previously before. The new StarWars movies, while I think they sucked plot wise, are a perfect example of how CGI can create even larger and more complex worlds. Perhaps the only reason we haven't seen many new sci-fi movies is one lack of imagination on either the film makers parts or on the movie company's, and two money. Big budget sci-fi movie are notoriously expensive.
Now if this quote was about horror movies I would agree. While we are seeing a recent boom in horror movies as of late they are mostly remakes or new takes on old ideas, vampires, werewolves, zombies etc. Horror movies are far more limiting in there originality
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