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The future looks very familiar. Science fiction, by its nature, is a celebration of the new, but you wouldn’t know that by watching Hollywood’s space operas.
“Star Trek,” for instance, is on the way back to theaters next summer in hopes that moviegoers will still want to boldly go where millions and millions have gone before. And it’s been more than 30 years since “Star Wars” made film history, but the Force is still very much with us with a seventh film in theaters this past summer, one of the year’s bestselling video games and a new weekly animated TV show (there’s also talk of a live-action series in the next year).
And that’s just the tip of the meteorite.
The “Terminator” and “Robocop” franchises are being revved up now for more mechanical-man mayhem, and classic films such as “Forbidden Planet” and “When Worlds Collide” are in the remake pipeline, while the new take on “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” starring Keanu Reeves, reached theaters Friday.
Even “Battlestar Galactica,” which began as a small-screen “Star Wars” knockoff in the 1970s, has been revived with spectacular results and will break new ground in 2009 with the TV movie “Caprica” on Sci Fi, with a series to follow.
So why does Hollywood keep looking to the past?
“Science fiction should be about ideas and what it means to be human, it should always be about the new and the challenging,” actor William Shatner said.
So why does Hollywood keep putting its money in the same old Enterprise?
“ ‘Star Trek’ connected with so many people for so long, and ‘Star Wars’ is the same way,” Shatner said. “There’s a thrill for fans to see the heroes they know.”
Shatner won’t be one of those heroes in the new “Star Trek” film – a sour point for the actor who played Capt. James T. Kirk on TV and in seven films and had hoped for a cameo.
Paramount Pictures is hoping that the new film, directed by J.J. Abrams (“Mission: Impossible III,” TV’s “Alias” and “Lost”) will have the warp power needed for a 21st century “Star Trek” franchise built around young stars such as Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Mr. Spock).
It’s difficult to find a sci-fi project in recent years that wasn’t based on an earlier film or TV show, although “Minority Report,” “Signs” and “Children of Men” did buck the trend.
Ronald D. Moore, creator of the modern “Battlestar Galactica,” said that commercial priorities push risk-adverse studios toward properties with established names, but he said it’s wrong to presume that artistic ambition is stifled.
Moore’s version debuted as a miniseries in 2003 and took the core concept of the creaky 1970s show – a ragtag fleet of humans fleeing an implacable foe of their own making – and added dark layers of complexity with themes of religion, government-sanctioned torture, class struggle, terrorism and bioethics.
“In the same way that Shakespeare’s plays can be revisited again and again in new ways and settings, with things like ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ there is enough of the core mythology there that you can change and adapt all the things around it for something very new and worthwhile,” he said.
“New generations can make it their own. Strong new interpretations build on the past; they don’t repeat it.”
Perhaps, but returning again and again to the same ground leaves new frontiers unexplored. There’s also the risk of franchises becoming calcified, campy or too self-referencing.
Because of intensely networked fans and all those fans-turned-creators, the galactic trio of “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and “Battlestar Galactica” are tied into one another more than ever.
“Battlestar’s” Moore, a huge “Trek” fan through the years, said the military life and quest nature of classic “Trek” helped shape his show, and Moore himself was a key producer on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “Star Trek: Voyager.”
And, of course, the airing of the original “Battlestar” in 1978 was clearly intended to draft off the popularity of “Star Wars,” released a year earlier.
Moore gleefully visited the set of the new “Trek” film, and Abrams even confided that there is “a shout-out” to Moore in the film that “Battlestar” fans will absolutely catch.
“These are people who really care about these characters and these stories and the details,” Abrams said. “But I have to tell you … I’m making a movie for fans of movies.”
