Friday, September 12, 2008

SCI-FI golden age... yes, sure! :(

''Is this a Sci-Fi "Golden Age"?'' article.

Golden age my ass!
According to this article series like:
"Heroes, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica, ... Supernatural, Doctor Who and Torchwood"
show that ''we might be living in "almost the golden age of sci-fi." ''.

Come on! Half of these series are remake of old ones, Heroes is basically a rip-off of X-Men, and Supernatural is so lame that I think I never endured a single episode.

What they have in common, for me, is not some kind of SCI-FI theme, but more soap-opera themes disguised as SCI-FI or fantasy...
(Some definitions of the SCI-FI genre can be found here).

The soap-opera aspect I hate the most is the tendency to have a lot of characters in each episode, follow them all the time, in a round-robin fashion, so that each character does or says very little in each episode.
For me one of the worst examples of this was "The 4400": nice idea, but after the first 2 episodes there were already more than 10 characters being followed in each episode! The same happened with Heroes, that for me was another lost opportunity: nice idea (old, seen, but nice), but it slows down and nothing really happens, as usual in soap-operas.

For the teenagers I find it even more so. Take Smallville or Roswell: they are so much soap-based that the action is almost non-existent and all you end up seen is indecision and people flirting.

Go back to the 1970es or 1980es and you will find some very good SCI-FI movies!

2 comments:

limaCAT said...

Cm'on, the new Battlestar galactica is really cool, and adds a lot about writing... the fact that there are people who you hate, and they are realist
ic assholes (today's dr Baltar) rather than "omg evil traitor and he also has sweaty hands" (yesterday's Baltar) is a sign that SCI-FI is not anymore just kiddie stuff, or just "cowboys in space" (the pitch for the original Star Trek promo was "cowboys in space", words by Gene Roddenberry while presenting the restructured pilot episode "The Cage").

Also, come on, Heroes was blessed by a cameo of a certain person... the fact that it is heavily influenced by all the u.s. comics is not a bad thing at all, in the end...

Andrea Valente said...

I disagree.
The new BG is simply more a soap-opera than the old (that was already not that great, in my opinion). Proof: they replaced iron cylons with soft-porn chicks, and even one of the central characters Starbuck (better known today for his coffee shops :D ) is now a busty girl.

And about the kids stuff, consider that average age of the characters is constantly decreasing. For instance Kirk was around 35 in the first series of StarTrek (dating back 1966!), the first Dr Who was an old man. Now almost every character is a teenager.

So, to me the SCI-FI has been horribly flattened, and presented for a pre-teen market, ergo: it sucks :(

(And I hope that Stan Lee will retire stop pretending to be a legend. He is just old and pathetic, and he never was that good, I say this even if I love the classic spiderman).

Anyway, I love SCI-FI and there are current examples of GOOD SCI-FI (in my opinion of course): check our the recent mini-series "The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280770/). It is only 6 episode, but in each one there is a lot of stuff happening and the few characters do not take 1 episode to say 3 words :D :D

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