From what I saw with the previews, they only wanted to copy the legend. There was nothing about adding value and building on what came before.
That's why it's so flat.
I think sci fic tv series are getting main stream.
But all too often I see just action films masking as sci fic such as the current star trek incarnation.
I want those space opera and space ship and hard stuff.
I've been watching The Expanse on SyFy lately and it's quite good! I enjoyed it so much I'm now reading the book series it's based on, and really enjoying that as well. They're slightly different, but both good in their own way.
As for the world, there seems to be a lot of nonsense tech such as see-through cell-phones? No way to even hide what you are doing, even crucial characters and VIPs have see-through communication devices, whilst they steal/look at top secret information? Why is AR (using HUGE eyeglass-like devices) reserved only for very special engineers/scientists? Haven't the shows creators heard of Hololens? It's like they took VR/AR and took it back to the 80s. Why do they need to do so many things manually, yet not completely manually e.g. control an antenna, but they can do it remotely they just have to be within 20 meters? How can they open solid metal doors without electricity in zero-g? It feels a bit like Star Trek back in the 60s, before they had any clue about what was to come, except it's 50 years later and they are still using similar ideas without adding anything new. I understand compromises need to be made to adapt to the screen so that viewers can understand the world, but it seems like there are tons of areas where a bit more creativity should be order.
I'm sure that's just for TV viewers to be able to see their screens. It is better than projecting the screen over the face or reflecting it on the glasses of the actors like other TV shows do.
If you don't like it, that is OK, no one is forced to like anything. I don't like The Walking Dead, and it doesn't mean a lot of people is wrong, just that we have different tastes.
But to be fair the show is ages ahead of Star Trek TOS in terms of plausibility.
In fact, the lack of the fantastic technologies indistinguishable from magic that are present in Star Trek is very much part of the appeal. Is what makes the show more real. There's no faster than light space travel for a start. They have to use orbital mechanics to move around. They have to accelerate half of the way and deccelerate the other half. They have to dock very carefully instead of saying 'beam me down'. It is a very welcome change.
I really enjoyed the first 3 so was disappointed. Does it get better? Was it a temporary drop?
Things get rather interesting in 5&6 though. Scale gets quite good!
Thanks!
Yeah. The "mainstreaming" of sci-fi has been kind of a mixed blessing. We got all the PEW PEW PEW lasers and blinking computer lights but none of the thought-provoking stuff.
God, I want some space opera. Doesn't even have to be "hard" sci-fi that aspires to realism (though it's a bonus)
I liked the first Star Trek reboot movie, but I saw STAR TREK EXTREME or STAR TREK BEYOND or whatever it's called a few weeks ago and it was just atrocious. Just mind-numbing, generic action. Reminded me of the Transformers movies. I love me some giant robot fights, but the Transformers movies are just a big visual mess to me.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but then I also saw a couple of big Hollywood sci-fi movies this winter that were actually thought-provoking.
1. Arrival - adaptation of a really challenging short story. Drops most of the physics stuff, but keeps the linguistics, and the human element. Only adds a little action.
2. Passengers - lots of action, but centers around an ethical conundrum that will give you plenty to talk about afterwards.
Agree on the new Star Trek reboot. It really offers me nothing of what I like about Star Trek.
But I agree, there are some pretty bad films being made under the science fiction genre. I want movies referencing hard science fiction (was wondering the other day what an adaption of 'The Three-Body Problem' might be like) and space operas too (Culture series is dying for a film adaption).
But in terms of science fiction, I think it's great seeing non-space material being made too. Stuff like 'Dark Mirror', 'The Man from Earth', and 'Safety Not Guaranteed' are pretty good indicators to me that good science fiction has gone mainstream.
There was a recent discussion in /r/TheCulture about who Culture fans would like to see direct a movie adaptation of one of the books [1]. I'm dubious a live action film could be successful and at the same time live up to one of the books; it would take some mighty fine screenwriting to not slip into excessive expository minutiae about The Culture, and so much of the attraction of the books to many fans was the reader wasn't repeatedly hit over the head with explanations of the setting.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/comments/62g6mk/if_you_c...
Any movie treatment of The Culture runs the constant risk of only getting the glossing highlights reel version that Dune received, and I'd be concerned that the mechanics of the story setting, neat as they are, in a movie would get in the way of telling the real story of Banks' more interesting themes via his incisive commentary delivered by holding up The Culture mirror-like, comparing to our own civilization.
The earliest science fiction I recall set in a post-scarcity environment is "Star Trek: TNG". Granted, the socio-economic impact of replicators is not a focus of the series or the movies, replicators are more of background/world-building device ("Tea, Earl Grey, hot")
Even more important than the sheer existence of the Minds was their egalitarian disposition and relationship to their pan-human co-citizens, and interesting tangentials like the Minds' polite yet firm declination to Sublime. I will sorely miss Banks' weaving of the tales of the proto-Culture, and how the early Minds came about to that position.
Post-scarcity and post-singularity are orthogonal - The Culture is both, Star Trek TNG is post-scarcity only, Rapture of the Nerds[1] (Stross & Doctorow) is post-singularity only.
1. http://craphound.com/rotn/Cory_Doctorow_and_Charles_Stross_-...
I do think Use of Weapons could make a splendid movie - but it might be tricky hiding the basis for the twist at the end?
Use of Weapons might work too. I can't see Player of Games translating to the big screen well, though. So much of it is about the game itself and the protagonist's thinking around it. And I do think the rest would be hopeless.
After posting that comment I spent a while wondering which novel would be best to jump start that sort of franchise and agree it's tricky to condense a novel into a movie. A lot of science fiction probably works better as a mini series or full TV series (could be interesting to have Culture take an approach like American Horror Story where each season is a self-contained story)
If only animation automation got sufficiently good and economical enough that long-form (40+ hours) video storytelling was practical for more stories. I sometimes wonder if there is a Sapir-Whorf-style equivalent hypothesis for how we exchange our stories, where the storytelling modality (starting with just the time length our formats allow, but going much further afield with complexity management/expectations, formulation of models, etc.) shapes how our aggregate civilization thinks.
It's how they deal with not having the budget to actually put people in a desert so it's rather visibly a desert backdrop at some points, it's why the lighting is often so strong and monochromatic like a theater's lighting, it's why the acting is with all the characters projecting as if they are speaking to an audience rather than in a TV production. At one point they even use a very theatrical special effect based on backlighting through a thin cloth representing a tent to show Paul's hallucinations/thoughts, rather than even a simple bluescreen or conventional image compositing effect.
The effort is interesting, but I'd have to call it ultimately a failure (even if I personally ultimately enjoyed it) as it almost completely failed to speak to its audience. I also think you can't really follow it if you didn't read the books, which I consider a major flaw of an adaptation.
Hollywood has a real problem with science fiction. It almost always waters it down into a creature-feature, with the usual generic sex and weapon play.
Deeper questions about culture, mystery, and identity tend to be removed at the screen writing stage.
There are exceptions - Contact and Arrival - but the trend at the moment seems to be towards shallow empty spectacle with a lot of running, jumping, shouting, shooting, and CGI. Add a few wisecracks and skin-tight costumes and you're done.
For a different take I'd recommend anything by Tarkovsky. Stalker and Solaris are brilliantly imaginative masterpieces with no modern CGI at all.
But definitely not science and hardly fiction (as in fiction books).
They're in same category as Twin Peaks or Lost - an unencumbered and hardly explained flights of imagination.
I've enjoyed the new Star Wars movies so far and I'll go see the next one, but I can't shake the feeling that they're sucking up the oxygen that might go to something better. Out of the whole list, the only one that really interests me is Valerian.
Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Battlestar Galactica, Space 1999, Buck Rogers in 25th Century, ET, Back to the Future...
And I'm going to get massively downvoted if I don't mention Dr. Who....
Only to the extent that any actual science fiction of substance has been watered out to the point that its just gloss, a layer of paint on top of something utterly conventional.
There's rarely any mainstream movies which are science fiction at core.
It's a pity that establishment literary circles still mostly ignore it outside of a few token examples. This drives educational circles and now most literary curricula (even K-12) leave any kind of serious analysis or discussion off the list.
Science Fiction requires some very different analysis tools than many other literary genres and as a result, readers (consumers) are so ill prepared that they often can't even recognize it when they're consuming a genre piece, or consuming something with science fiction elements, if it doesn't explicitly involve Star Wars like space opera cliches. But literary criticism, by largely ignoring the genre, is failing to develop those analysis tools.
There's plenty of people who'll say "I hate sci-fi" and then go on to binge watch several seasons across several shows that are all members of some sub-genre of sci-fi.
Note: IMHO I have a very expansive view of what Science Fiction is. I consider the genre to be basically any story where some non-existent "technology" (or science, or engineering or medicine, etc.) exists, and the story is set in motion around that technology. The technology can be as inconsequential as a grain of sand in the story, or a major plot driver. It can be so important to the story that the entire setting of the story becomes incomparable to anything that we can currently experience, or so mundane that the world of the story is exactly our world, but with this one twist. And I assume technology can be anything from physical stuff to cognitive concepts.
As an example of how expansive my view on this is, I would consider a show like NCIS to be sci-fi because many of the plots can only exist or move forward based on some impossible or non-existent forensic or cyber technology.
"Walking Dead", sure I consider that sci-fi because it relies on the assumption of some nonexistent disease to drive the entire show.
The "James Bond" series (and many spy movies and series) are basically sci-fi because the stories can only function in the presence of non-existing or impossible technology.
An amazing number of Horror, Spy, Police, Thriller and Action stories all fall into the same category.
If you disagree with me on this, that's fine. But I'll put this another way, "The Man from Earth" is a movie that essentially takes place in one room of a small house. There's no technology, gizmos, spaceships, aliens, or other things that can't exist in this world. It relies on a single premise, an improbably genetic condition, that without which the entire story can't exist. Every other single thing in the story is entirely plausible as a small-set drama and if you conclude that the main character is lying or crazy, then the story is still science fiction because it still causes the viewer to consider an improbable science. In fact, I think the genetic condition is only mentioned once in the entire movie.
So if NCIS can get away with 15-20 minutes of impossible forensics and hacking per episode and not be sci-fi, then "The Man from Earth", which dwells on the genetic twist for a few moments can't be either.
Lit Fic people don't often understand this.
When you find politics in Lit Fic it's usually historical and/or located in a distant country, and provides a backdrop for the personal lives and emotions of the characters.
In Science Fiction the politics is often the main point, and the characters are there to dramatise the political and social reality they live in.
The set that manages to overcome those hurdles and achieve the sublime—feelings of awe, of sudden revelation, of such beauty in the use of language that you have to stop reading and just absorb it for a minute—with fair frequency is much smaller still.
But hey, it manages to produce good (in a literary sense) stuff at a better rate than some genres (ahem, fantasy) at least. In fact I can't think of any other "genre" fic that beats it.
I don't mean, of course, that deliberately "literary" work, especially of the last few decades, doesn't have its own problems. Lit journals often read like self-parody, certainly.
It is true that if your fiction has more to do with sociology or political philosophy than individual psychology you're already fighting an uphill battle if you want recognition from academics. It's been decided, rightly or wrongly, that the proper place for those topics is in works of history—plenty of which end up as honorary entries in the canon of "literature", even! The strongest reason I can think of for this (in the whopping few minutes I've been thinking about it, just now) is that the personal perspective on which fiction thrives isn't nearly as useful for revealing insights about objects of that perspective—especially the more distant and abstract they become—as it is the subject in relation to those objects.
Huh?
The problem is anytime you pick up one of these sci-fi works that's supposed to be a deep philosophical masterpiece it is really not that and could only be thought of as that by someone who only reads genre fiction.
Don't get me wrong. I have read the entirety of (and enjoyed most of) the Sherlock Holmes books. But I'm not convincing myself that they were deep and challenging works.
Even in 1995 the ideas in ghost in the shell had already been explored thoroughly, Dick and Gibson were all about that sort of thing. What made Ghost In The Shell exceptional was the story and the visual style.
The new film brought that style to life beautifully, I got exactly what I paid for. And even under the best of circumstances, a two hour film isn't enough time to do more than a superficial examination of some philosophical concept or another.
You only need a superficial touch on a subject to intrigue someone who is interested to fall further down the rabbit hole.
Personally I can say that the 95 movie introduced a child-me to philosophical ideas about self; and that snow-balled into hours in the books exploring the ideas deeper.
Two hours isn't a long time to teach a broad concept in any in-depth manner, but it initiated an exploration of philosophy that spanned many thousands of hours for me, and I credit the Oshii film for having whatever it took to hook a very young kid into some very heavy ideas.
Take Mr. Robot, for example. It's has a LOT of classic cyber punk tropes, with one big difference - it's not "science fiction" anymore. It's just a present day, present technology fiction.
IMHO Mr.Robot doesn't really work and just uses the classic "hackers == Juvenal idealistic freaks" trope which is getting old. Black mirror is a better show. But none of them deal with the loss of humanity through cybernetic enhancements which is more what GitS is about. We don't really live in that era yet.
> just uses the classic "hackers == Juvenal idealistic freaks" trope which is getting old
I would argue that it indeed uses this trope - among many others. If you're looking at the show from the political perspective (and not from the mental disorder perspective, for example), it plays the tropes beautifully. First you see a sympathetic group of young rebels ready to defeat evil empire, and when they finally achieve it you see all intended and unintended consequences of it, and the stupidity of these naive "good" and "bad" labels in general.
> We don't really live in that era yet.
There are bionic arms and legs, but they don't make anyone loose their humanity. Also, I remember GiTS mainly from the manga, and I would say that it's more about the general concept of soul and conscience.
In GitS they were, for most intents and purposes, better than the real thing. You could have a cybernetic eye with built in night vision and multispectral imaging. You could have a better/faster brain. You could have ultra-precision hands, fantastic for certain tasks.
But it puts into perspective, at what cost do these improvements come. If at a certain point, you replace your body wholesale for improvements, can you be sure you are who you think you are? If you cybernetic eyes lie to you, how do you know? If you have brain improvements, can they influence your thoughts or implant biases? There is also the whole "Ship of Theseus" thing going on. If you upgrade/replace your brain and body slowly, are you still you?
There definitely is a lot of soul/conscience stuff thrown around as well, but the above is what stuck with me all these years.
They would have done it justice.
In a way, Matrix is the Wachowskis GitS.
That they did not wallow in obsolete philosophical tropes saved the film from bathetic anachronism.
Same issues examined, but it is very different in tone. It's very ADHD, almost, with tons of hyperactive detail, motion, and dialogue crammed into every panel. It makes me really nostalgic for those early cyberpunk days.
The 1995 movie, by contrast, was very somber and serious and dreary. I love much of the animation, but otherwise I think it's kind of a snoozefest.
There were so many homages to GitS movie, but done so badly! My favorite scene in the original is the museum tank fight scene, where you can feel so clearly how desperate the situation is (from many small details). The same scene in the new movie just doesn't give you any feelings at all about the situation.
Perhaps it's a decent action movie if you don't know or like the original.
The highly praised philosophical content is ridiculously short. Barely a few sentences. There is not much talk at all in the movie. Google up the script. It's short. Really short. Most of the movie is action and slow shots where nothing happens and this is the best part of it.
Actually when I saw the anime for the first time on VHS, there were those hardcore manga fans complaining in the same way about it. Now today I see the whole /r/scifi going up in fire on how shallow that was. Just to praise the next super hero reboot a few weeks later.
I've been in the cinema to watch GitS and I rarely go there. I expected crap. What I got was a beautiful designed cyperpunk action movie that delivered more of a story to one of my favorite characters then the original movie. It couldn't end up being better with all those messed up reboots currently so popular out there.
You say the dialogue was bad? So I guess you speak Japanese because all translated versions of the anime I've seen were...let's say: basic stuff blown up.
Hope none of your friends who would listen to you were GitS fans because this is a must see for those.
> Did you ... even see the '95 movie recently?
Dude...
>Did you (and all the critics going this way that I guess will become the mainstream) even see the '95 movie recently?
The most sad thing is that the authors of the movie didn't.
I mean the movie is just a stupid fan service, just an ill-conceived mishmash of images taken from original movie.
Original movie had a well-built composition of images. Each image was appropriate, each scene was a logical and necessary part of the whole picture.
And those scenes and images were brought to the new movie in such a silly and thoughtless manner (typical for Hollywood in general), that they lost all meaning.
For example the last image, the image of the Adam and Eve under the tree of knowledge was dictated by the plot. In original movie the antagonist was the computer program recognized itself alive that risen against its creators. The Christian images of the fall, the archetypal image of the tree, all that religious parallels emphasized the central motive of the film, the motive of recognition of being alive and having a free will. And in the new movie the plot is different, there is no Puppet Master and no attempt to reproduction, so the image thoughtlessly taken from 1995's is void.
And so the full movie is void, each image is void and so the composition itself. Tbh there is no composition at all.
Without that "mishmash" and scenes from the different animes, it wouldn't be GitS and people would complain about that. Hell, I wasn't ready to leave the room until I've heard THAT song. It came at the end and I nearly lost a tear. Same for the moment we saw the plane between the buildings of this superb designed city (did you look close? There is stuff happening behind the windows!). I'm sorry for you not being able to enjoy this. I'm not sure how I could believe you to like it in the '95 anime.
> For example the last image....And in the new movie the plot is different, there is no Puppet Master
Really now? You do realize that there are more then the '95 movie and the manga do you? In most of them there is also no Puppet Master and the main character has a different character. The main plot is different and they deliver different messages. They all are an interpretation of the manga. This one was too. Or did I miss the part where someone told us is was supposed to be the exact real life copy of the '95 anime interpretation?
This is all or the best you could come up with to support your harsh and rough criticism? A sign of missing knowledge? Man, your comment is void.
I'm not against allusions and references if they do their job i.e. being a method of art. References are good and appropriate in the Ulysses or Eco's books, but in this movie all the references are maid for one single purpose: to refer. It's the main difference between fan service and postmodernism. In a postmodern art references are used to create the new, independent piece of art. In a fan service references are used just to play on nostalgic feelings and earn some money.
>You do realize that there are more then the '95 movie and the manga do you?
Of course. All I mean is that in original movie these images are appropriate while in the new movie they are taken out of context so they lost their meaning. The original scene with the Puppet Muster did carried an ideological and aesthetic sense, while in the new movie it's just meaningless.
Kuze is not meaningless. There is a story for that. Did you miss it? To make it clear to you and your focus on a single character: "it's like the puppet master with a background". Almost like Motoko with a background. Actually just like it. This is the plot of the movie. The meaning of the iconography which is not christian in this interpretation but doesn't have to be. Did you have your eyes closed in this dark part where they finally find Kuze? Those people sitting in the circle being "hooked up to the light"? This is classic glorious cyberpunk.
I could say the comments you've made here, with your just for this occasion created account are meaningless. They don't catch the diversity that GitS has become since (and including) the manga. They bluntly ignore the context of the movie as if you haven't even seen it and your colorful language is probably aimed at a larger audience while simultaneously jumping on the hate train. Guess it's some kind of postmodern trolling or maybe a simulacrum of a review. I don't know and it doesn't matter since I don't know you and you probably haven't seen the movie but it looks so intelligent...
The new movie totally missed the point too. If they wanted to make a full up action movie they could've done that.. but instead it was a bad attempt at reimagining the original for a wider audience - which I think is contradictory because the original movie HAS a wide audience while still retaining depth.
Not to mention the editing was horrible.. it felt like Batman Vs Superman all over again.
They did not want to make a full up action movie. They made another GitS visual interpretation and since every of those is strongly focused on action, this one was too. This interpretation of her was the first one that really showed a decent human part of her. Something that was actually missing for most other interpretations or was (seen from a western perspective) pretty ridiculous.
I haven't seen Batman vs. Superman. What was it exactly that you despised so much about it?
I think that's something the '95 movie did really well, the long drawn out shots of the cityscape with random people walking. It paces the movie really well, and helps create the illusion that the movie is in a real world.
I think it's even more of a shame, because they really nailed the special effects in the 2017 movie. I thought the SFX were awe-inspiring. The movie had way to much packed into it, and would've benefited from slowing down every now and then to introduce better pacing.
Regardless, I loved both the original and the new movie. I have no idea why people are giving it such flak, other than being bum hurt that obviously a Hollywood adaptation is going to make the story more accessible. They did so, while still being mostly faithful to the mood and atmosphere of the original.
I found the new movie to be fairly formulaic, and the ending ridiculous and offensive - summary execution is not justice - and leaving out the merging of the consciousnesses seemed like it was just creating an opening for a potential sequel. The visuals were the best thing about it.
Another thing is the concept of "Ghost", which western viewers often misinterpret as some spiritual soul but should be understood as "self-aware (part of the) mind/consciousness". From what I heard this is obvious to jap. viewers. But this is hard to translate regardless of how you approach it.
Anyways I recommend watching it with any fansub you can find online - any of them will be of much higher quality than the bundled subtitles.
I was prepared for a new interpretation of the material, and that never bothered me because between the films and TV series it's always been a bit confusing to me if there ever has been a cannon story, but have always really loved the match of philosophical ideas of mind and the visual atmosphere (and the spider tanks are just great fun).
Opening sequence of this film I was really excited because it was visually stunning, but 5 mins later I was questioning if I should stay or leave because the dialog was really really bad.
I stayed because I really wanted to like this adaption but I felt like it was 2 hours of my life wasted, I wouldn't recommend any of my friends to watch this, even later when it's released digitally.