Science fiction movies have died because video games make more money than many movies. Movie makers have taken the wrong idea from this. Instead of focusing on what a movie can give that a video game cannot, they try to make movies like video games. Personally, this makes going to a science fiction movie on par with watching someone else play a video game.
CGI has also struck a near fatal blow to science fiction films. Instead of using visual effects to tell the story, the visual effects are used to wow the audience. The best example of the proper use of special effects in a film is Forrest Gump. It is not a science fiction film, but the story of a man's life who happens to get involved in history. The special effects are there merely to advance the story. the most amazing one being Tom Hanks shaking hands with a man who had been dead for over twenty years (JFK).
There is no inherent conflict between books and film, even if they try to tell the same story, because they can tell the story in different ways. The best way to understand this is by watching the old Asterix animated films. Particularily, Asterix the Gaul and Asterix and Cleopatra. Asterix the Gaul was apparently made by cutting the book up into a storyboard and animating everything between the panels of the book. Goscinny and Uderzo hated it, because the film presented nothing that they could not have done themselves. Asterix and Cleopatra had a song and dance number, and otherwise remembered that, in a film, the pictures can move and there is a soundtrack.
|