by brekin » Tue Mar 03, 2015 2:19 pm
Regarding the surge in reboots. After watching the recent inferior RoboCop I started thinking about cultural amnesia albeit in a gross pop cultural way. These reboots are ready made cash makers but I think they are pretty much always going to suck. Here's my Tuesday morning theory why.
Right now we have three major generations in play, Boomers, GenXers, & Millennials who I would say patronize these films. Boomers and Millenials with larger numbers create a reverse bell curve sandwiching Gen Xers who technically have a shorter time capture demographically (The two other, Matures and Gen Z'ers aren't in play so much with this I think.) It is pretty easy to refab these films for Millennial audiences, add more technological polish and faux social commentary but remove the complexity. Boomers and Gen Xers will see the films because of the off chance the films are improvements on the originals or at the very least will be clever homages to the source material. (Like the Batman franchise, sort of, its complicated.)
Gross generalization: Boomers grew up with the golden age of science fiction, which lets be honest, is pretty juvenile if not infantile at most times. George Lucas, Spielberg, Zemeckis, etc were weaned on the Flash Gordon serial types and 50's horror movies. That is why Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounters, Back to the Future, etc have such a enjoyable naivete and innocence to them. Another gross generalization: Boomers don't have high standards for sci fi because they made do with card board sets and in many ways actually own now some of the technology they saw as children on television. But they do have a strong human element that is core to even the most technological orientated narratives, if albeit simplistic. Growing up in a country where technology did indeed improve the lives of many and increased affluence and entertainment they are less critical of technology and treat sci fi (well excepting the orthodox sci fi fan) as more fantasy.
Into the 70's and thru the 80's though as technology started to encroach on people's lives, nuclear war, automation, drug epidemic, crime, aids, recession, etc there was more of a strain where sci-fi became more gritty and horror based. To reappropriate the word cyber punk for a moment, and not use it in a narrow genre a la William Gibson, but to liken it to the punk movement in music, some strains of main stream sci-fi stopped being operatic in their adulation of technology and became shocking, crude challengers of the mainstream meme that science will only improve life. Marbled in with Short Circuit, Back to the Future, and all the Star Trek films there was They Live, Alien Nation, Predator, Enemy Mine, The Brother From Another Planet, Blade Runner, Scanners, Escape from New York, RoboCop and untold number of post-nuclear futures. Not to mention all the sci-fi made in the 70's like Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, Logans Run, that were social commentaries that one tends to think were made in the 60's but weren't. Many challenged the simplistic narrative and added depth, realism and social questions.
This kind of continued into the 90's until the internet happened and The Matrix film was released. It was a return of sorts to the simplistic omnipotence of the golden age of science fiction that rescued the people stuck in the dark, orwellian dsytopians created during the 80's-90's. Watching sci films now it is hard to see any of them as social critiques because there is so much loving care and neat design given to the technology in the films. The recent RoboCop and even obvious social critiques like District 9 and Elysium dilute their critiques because we get lost in the relentless shining and polishing of the technology. For Millennials being exposed to these "new" films it seems whatever complex message that was in the originals from the 70s-90s (which may have been originally lifted and refined from sci-fi print stories of the 50 and 60's) is getting lost in a constant barrage of Sharper Image uber Gadgets and Heads up Displays.
Watching the recent RoboCop film it seemed to hold to the general trend of whether the argument of more technology integrated into corporations and people's lives seems like a non-starter now. It is more just who gets to control it, which is a puffball argument because that has already been settled. And when you constantly fetishize all this predatory military tech and invasive software I don't see how you can be running a free advertising campaign on the one hand and then say gee, maybe this stuff isn't such a good idea because what if the hero doesn't get to control it.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
I found it much darker, although it was like two films, the first before the ReQall event, which was very Blade Runner ish and the second which was like a two hour long chase / fight with zero imagination.
