Link: Is sci-fi out of ideas? | I Am Legend | The Final Cut | News + Notes | Entertainment Weekly | 1.
"... Sci-fi is in trouble, though it's not the kind of trouble that can be measured at the box office, where it looks as healthy and robust as a T. rex must have seemed five minutes before it realized that there was nothing left to eat.
"The genre has been around for as long as the movies themselves, and flourished for the last 30 years. The problem is, none of the ideas are getting any newer. Scratch that: The problem is, there are no ideas.
"The season's big movie hit is Will Smith's I Am Legend, the third screen version of a Richard Matheson novel that was published in 1954.
"In television, fans await the final season of Battlestar Galactica, a spiffy, politically freighted update of a dopey piece of TV debris from 1978; they're also anticipating the promised launch of a new series that will extend George Lucas' Star Wars franchise into its fourth decade.
"Our most popular sci-fi comic-book movies are based on characters that were created more than 40 years ago — or, like Transformers, were inspired by pieces of plastic manufactured in the 1980s.
"This Christmas' guilty-pleasure DVD indulgence was a multidisc collection of five different versions of the 1982 film Blade Runner, which is itself based on a 40-year-old Philip K. Dick novel. Personally, I'm holding out for a SuperPlatinum Deluxe Psychotic Edition, which will arrive in a crate containing 47 discs and Ridley Scott himself, who will hang out with you and then rewire your home sound system.
If you're truly desperate for a trip down memory lane, you can check out Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, another attempt to crossbreed franchises that are now, respectively, 29 and 21 years old: In sci-fi terms, this is like staging a cage match between Grandma and Grandpa....
