Ridley Scott at the Venice Film Festival: "Sci-Fi Cinema is Dead"
Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Warner Brothers, Celebrities and Controversy, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Venice Film Festival
Ridley Scott, or Sir Ridley Scott depending on how you feel like addressing him, made a fairly provocative comment at the Venice Film Festival on August 30th. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the release of Blade Runner, in yet another director's cut, in anticipation of a 5 (five!) disc DVD release of the same this fall by Warner Brothers. (The previous link includes some reviews of the newest version at the Venice festival, including EW's Owen Gliberman's comment that Blade Runner is "the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental." Hey, Owen, what about this Fritz Lang classic, or this Russian masterpiece, or even this small-scale but extremely effective version of the Ursula K. Leguin novel ... eh, what's the use.) To get back to the original point about sweeping generalizations, Scott was in a no doubt expansive mood, and started to discuss the great films of sci-fi.
Here's how it went down, according to The Times of London on-line. In Scott's opinion, science fiction films are not just dead, they're "as dead as westerns...there's nothing original. We've seen it all before. Been there. Done that." Scott celebrates 2001: A Space Odyssey as the pinnacle of sci-fi and says that "over-reliance on special effects" and weak story lines are the culprit. Responses from the blogosphere came fast and furious; one correspondent, Donald Smith, pointed out that Shane Carruth's small-scale film Primer had been "low-key and highly intelligent" while being completely without high-tech bloat. What I haven't been seeing is someone making the point that Blade Runner is film noir dressed in a sci-fi costume, just like Scott's other famous sci-fi film Alien, is a monster movie set in outer space. When it comes to the essential matter of sci-fi -- what humans are, where we are going, and when will we cease to exist -- Scott is only slightly interested ... especially when compared to the Philip K. Dick novel upon which Blade Runner is based. Watching it, you have to recall Pauline Kael's comment that almost everyone in the film would flunk the Voight-Kampff empathy test that ferrets out skin-jobs. As the director of such a high-tech, low-emotion film, is Scott really in a position to nail shut the coffin of an entire genre?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-04-2007 @ 2:08PM
jordan said...
im sorry, but anybody who's seen the masterpiece children of men knows that sci-fi is most certainly NOT dead. sunshine was a nice start but had one of the most terrible out of left field endings i have ever seen. anyways, hearing that statement from someone who hasn't made a good film SINCE blade runner, is a little lame. sir my ass.
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9-04-2007 @ 2:11PM
John said...
2001 is the only movie I remember that is totally science based fiction. Every other movie calling itself science fiction has been really an action adventure/war/western/monster/comedy movie set in space. Kudos to "Close Encounters" for trying.
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9-04-2007 @ 2:32PM
Jason said...
Maybe Scott isn't ready to give up on sci-fi just yet. This Reuters article closes with a quote from Scott that he would, indeed, like to make another sci-fi movie.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070902/en_nm/venice_bladerunner_dc
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9-04-2007 @ 3:20PM
Kurt said...
Yes a short list of films that Ridley Scott should pick up on DVD to show him just how much of an ass he made of himself with that statement:
Pi
Primer
The Fountain
Cube
Code 46
Open Your Eyes / Vanilla Sky
The Prestige
Gattaca
Dune (the 1984 one, just after Blade Runner)
Children of Men
Dark City
12 Monkeys
and that's off the top of my head.
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9-04-2007 @ 3:24PM
frailmalesnailjail said...
Said the man making Monopoly: The Movie.
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9-04-2007 @ 4:12PM
ben said...
Said the man whos won the Oscar for best film director.
'frailmalesnailjail'... don't even write another comment. Retard.
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9-04-2007 @ 5:14PM
tikirob said...
I agree with him...all the new movies rely on SFX...Sunshine was good, special effects were good an then the story fell apart. I do think however a movie will surface that will be good, I think there it comes in burst. (BTW Serenity was really good, better than the new Star Wars crap)
Rob
http://www.movie-cat.com
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9-04-2007 @ 10:48PM
Cath said...
Scott's inability to imagine the next fascinating SF story is only a confession of his own deficiencies. I had thought that the western was dead and then Unforgiven came along. Human creativity is amazing but we have to be open to it. Besides, no one has made Phil Dick's Ubik yet.
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9-05-2007 @ 9:51AM
Michael Heilemann said...
This is what passes for 'film journalism' these days?
http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2007/09/04/cinematical-on-scifi-is-dead/
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9-05-2007 @ 9:55AM
Mr. R said...
Dark City is good too, cinema noir and all.
I have to admit that even though good sci-fi movies have been made, the true quality films of the 80´s are gone for good thanks to Hollywood's ambition of selling millions of tickets. The fact that only teenagers are flocking the movie theaters is a sign that Hollywood is overlooking intellectual and true science oriented scripts to make crap like Transformers or Day of Independence in which you can abuse suspense of disbelief because your target audience is plain stupid and non demanding.
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11-01-2007 @ 11:29AM
Baloo said...
I suppose this "sir" has never open a Sci-Fi book !!
Let's make "the Dumarest saga" from E.C. Tubb or "the time patrol" from Poul Anderson, or any Jack Vance stories and what's about books from Leigh Brackett, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Louis Sprague de Camp, A.E. VanVogt, Edmond Hamilton, Catherine L. Moore, Harry Harrison, Isaac Asimov, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Samuel Delany, George Langelaan, Carolyn Cherryh, Fred Saberhagen, etc, etc....
The lake of culture, knowledge of this "sir" and all his tin-town's collegues is just astonishing !!!!
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