Monday, September 03, 2007

Why sci-fi still has a future

The folks over at the Guardian and Paul Howlett in particular take issue with Ridley Scott's tirade at the Venice film festival when he said that Science Fiction Film making was circling the drain.

Howlett says "Ridley Scott thinks sci-fi films have entered a black hole. Maybe he's not watching the right ones,"

Agreed, Ridley's all-time favourite sci-fi film, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is probably the supreme example of the genre, and maybe nothing has topped it in the four decades since its release, but that doesn't mean you can write off all modern sci-fi films ("yes, all of them," as Ridley put it) as "nothing original ... we've seen it all before"

But there are plenty of modern sci-fi movies in which a superior intelligence can be discerned alongside the computer-generated imagery: look at another Spielberg/Cruise project, Minority Report. Yes, it's a huge, glossy Hollywood production that basically sets a thrilling Hitchcockian chase movie in a future world - but what a superbly realised future world it is, complete with cyber-glove computers, creepy spider spy-robots, and individualised street ads that see you coming.

Click the title or here for the complete article

Thanks to SF Signal blog for the original post

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