Star Wars & Star Trek Need To Die So Other Sci-Fi Can Live

This is inspired by a few recent threads we've had in the forum:

1. A thread asking for recommendations of everyone's favourite Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels
2. A few assorted Star Wars / Star Trek threads

That got me thinking:

Star Wars and Star Trek, in their current forms, are nothing more than studio cash cows. There's no real creativity happening in either of those spaces, and the best that the fanbases can hope for is a fan-service laden homage to something that peaked decades ago.

I love both Star Wars and Star Trek, but at this point, I think that they have given all that they have to offer.

I am certain that there are newer, better sci-fi worlds out there to be built, constrained only by funding and exposure. But for those to flourish, we need to prune back the stagnant old growth that is choking out the seedlings.

I find myself craving those creative, oddball, one-offs that don't seem to get made anymore. Like, did anyone ever see a Rutger Hauer film called "The Blood of Heroes?" It wasn't high-cinema, by any means, but it was entertaining, and had a really fun premise. Same with "Edge of Tomorrow" which was highly underrated, and suffered from its association with Tom Cruise. Or Avatar, which was only possible because James Cameron had garnered enough credibility and personal financial muscle to pull it off. Stuff like that only rarely gets made anymore, because studios want the "safety" of an established franchise, with a fanbase that can't help but give money to anything with their favourite logo on it.

I think that the best thing that both fanbases can do is move on from the mega-franchises and let them die, for only then can the rest of Sci-Fi truly live.

 

I think this is partially correct. They can still use the universes of Star Trek and Star Wars, but they need original stories. Like the Mandalorian.

Otherwise, I'm with you on new subjects for sci-fi.

 

Utterly, and Absolutely Wrong. Rubbish. This notion pronounced Dead On Arrival.

 

The thing that needs to be trimmed back and pruned is “Reality Television ” in all its hideous mutations.

Then there will be more ‘Space’ for science fiction.

 

I wouldn't say letting them die would be a good idea, because if they die then there is always a chance they will be forgotten, and as long as new content is kept to a minimum it won't affect other series (Battlestar Galactica 2004 didn't clash with the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or The Clone Wars for example) but certainly reducing the amount of new stuff we get is a good idea. We don't want either of the franchises rammed down our throat. I'm certainly concerned that Disney are producing too many series too quickly for our liking, just as they were doing with the films earlier on.

I agree here, we just can't retread the same boring stories in these franchises, mainly because we already have those stories made once for those that enjoy them - why have a soulless repeat when we can have the original?

That's the reason why I still think the Force Awakens damned the Sequel Trilogy from the start, because it retraced the same story and clung to the Original Trilogy to please the purists, rather than doing something new.

By contrast Rogue One and The Mandalorian have certainly produced some new stories and they are great (well at least Rogue One is, I've still yet to see The Mandalorian). I'm hoping the Cassian Andor and Obi-Wan series will also provide some new stories, particularly Andor because we know so little about Cassian's past.

I haven't seen the Mortal Engines film yet, but I'm planning to soon - I've read the first book and it was great, now I want to discern the differences between it and the film, so you can expect my views on it at some point in the future. I can't say whether Jupiter Descending is based on a book or not.

Films based on books have an added pressure in that they have to remain faithful to the source material as well as being a good film in its own right, which you'd think would be easy but, if The War of the Worlds is any example, people are pretty darn incompetent at succeeding at one or the other. I wonder what the legend and father of wargaming that was H.G. Wells would have to say at the idea of his masterwork being mutilated by three subpar films and two subpar TV series over 100 years after it was published?

The original 1953 film is probably the best overall as a film, with creepy music and a lot of suspense, but it's attempts to Americanise it and the Martians being given free rein to fly around in invincible Tau Empire grav-craft rather than striding across the Earth in tripods severely damages it. Also Ann Robinson (not the terrifying presenter of the Weakest Link) screaming is an off-putter.

Two 2005 films were the next to adapt it - one, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg on drugs, is an abominable train-crash that sucks as a generic sci-fi film almost as much as it sucks as an adaptation of The War of the Worlds (not least because it found someone that actually surpassed Ann Robinson in the annoying-screaming department in the form of Dakota Fanning). The other was a much more accurate British version that unfortunately was made by a very small film studio that couldn't get any decent special effects or actors.

Finally there were two series made in 2019 - one, made by the BBC, had huge potential when they got the period right but fell flat thanks to wokeness, only three one-hour episodes and being sidelined to the shadows in favour of the bullshit that is His Dark Materials. The other, a British/French co-production made by StudioCanal, Fox and Urban Myth (who did have success with Merlin) I haven't even bothered watching because it's set in the present day again.

So with regards to Mortal Engines, perhaps it simply flopped because it dropped aspects of the book that were key to the plot working?

 

Appreciate everyone's responses and feedback to what is admittedly, a bit of a hot take

I love the idea of getting the franchises into the public domain. If that could happen, I'm sure that there would be some great stuff written and produced. Probably a lot of chaff too, but that's the point - great Sci-Fi should be taking risks and pushing boundaries, and that is naturally going to come with a relatively low success rate.

To Scalenex's earlier point - SciFi is a big bet for a studio to place. A much bigger, and riskier bet than, say, reality television, which is objectively terrible, but so cheap to produce, that the value proposition remains positive.

The thing is though, as Scalenex also pointed out, getting the franchises into the public domain is not gonna happen.

So, we need to find a way to get more (LOTS more) Sci-Fi / Fantasy properties published and produced. The more the genre teems with new ideas (regardless of the quality of execution), the more cross-pollenization and evolution can take place, leading eventually to fresh, new, and awesome worlds.

Disney and CBS aren't capable of that - The Mandalorian, while fun to watch, breaks no new ground. It's fan service, and we love it for that, but it's really just Lone Wolf and Cub in a Star Wars setting.

The most original SciFi of the past 15-20 years, have generally not succeeded. By this I'm referring to things like:
- Sense8
- Altered Carbon
- Edge of Tomorrow
- The Expanse
- <I'm sure I'm missing others>

Of these, only The Expanse has managed to hang on and develop into a mature show with a chance to build out its world, but it was very touch and go, and required a mobilized and active fanbase.

Having Star Wars and Star Trek persist in our pop-culture consciousness ties up a lot of the SciFi fan resources. I mean, just look at how many blog posts and magazine column inches get devoted to them compared to other deserving properties. There is a finite amount of attention available to us, and I think that, in the big picture, we'd be better served by directing that attention outward - Away from what got us here, and towards what we can have next.

 

Classics are just glorified cliches to be honest. Loved by some but still unnecessarily repeated.

Well if it’s a fresh take on sci-fi, why didn’t they simply name it as something completely different instead of referring to War of the Worlds when it, like most of the other ‘adaptations’ of it, also has very little resemblance to the original material? Independence Day did just that. It’s pretty much a reskin of War of the Worlds but it avoids actually referring to it in the title, which avoids it being regarded as an adaptation of it and saves it from a lot of criticism that would have said it’s nothing like the original work.

 

Need? It’s more like humans want such stories, rather than actually need them. We don’t need anymore repeats of the hero’s journey because we have loads since, as you say, the early days of written mythology (Jason and the Argonauts, Perseus and Medusa, Theseus and the Minotaur), though for some reason some people never seem to tire of hearing those stories so always like to hear them again with the characters simply reskinned with varying levels of difference and altered settings. Hence, glorified cliches. Why have remakes when you can have the original and usually best?

 

The 2-movie-split was a mistake, but a hard choice given the amount of content from the single book itself. That being said, after the success of 3 hour Endgame and 4 hour Snyder Cut, I think there would have been enough hype and good feeling surrounding the Hunger Games franchise, particularly after the first two strong instalments, to support a slightly longer film (and then an extended cut if they saw fit). The only downside of the Hunger Games is it became part of a trend of dystopian sci-fi y/a stories (some of which are great, don’t get me wrong) but they overran the market and now people don’t want to explore that facet of sci-fi anymore.

It’s unfortunate you only saw Mockingjay Part 1, as its easily the worst movie of the series, and the final movie is relatively faithful and I found it a satisfactory and good-enough ending.

Somehow I let some friends persuade me to watch The Purge. It was just a waste if my time, really. It wasn’t actively terrible, but it added absolutely nothing to my life except that part of my brain that’s wondering if all Americans would genuinely be willing to murder their neighbours at the drop of a hat and start an annual teenagers-killing-eachother-event...

Though the last episode (or first episode technically...) aired less than a year after I was born, I have been in love with this series since I first saw it. I’m not a strong believer in very long running series, because generally they deteriorate into rubbish (but I do enjoy being pleasantly surprised by subversions to this expectation), but Firefly definitely deserved at least one more season - preferably two - to explain some questions we never got answers too and explore a new and fun sci-fi setting.

But I’m sure he would have been a fan of the musical.

Here’re my main thoughts on this whole discussion though:

(I know basically nothing about Star Trek by the way)

There is so much Star Wars stuff out there. Like so much. My brother is a big fan of a lot of the games, reads most of the books (the older ones, not so much all the clone wars and rebels spin offs), and OH MY GOODNESS 2003 CLONE WARS IS A MASTER PIECE *chefs kiss* fabulous. There are bound to be misses, but there are also hits. I don’t have issues with the existence of Star Wars, but I do think that it can be damaging to sci-fi exploration:

COMPARISONS
When my dad first introduced me to firefly, he said Mal Reynolds is what Han Solo would be like if Star Wars wasn’t a fairytale. (Doesn’t matter if this is accurate or not) but this shows how everything sci-fi gets drawn back to and compared to Star Wars. I can’t think of another example off th top of my head right now, but you get the idea. I believe that a constant comparison to one of the largest and most famous franchises of all time can be discouraging and damaging to past present and emerging film makers, films, and sci-fi ideas.

I myself compare fantasy films to Lord if the Rings and Narnia quite a bit, so I guess I’m a hypocrite, but generally I compare characters (and archetypes within them) and world building laws more than the world’s themselves. When people compare sci-fi it tends to be a bit more nit picky and specific (eg. There are a bunch of swords that just look like swords in fantasy, but in sci-fi there are iconic guns belonging to characters, a styles of laser from one universe, a sound effect from another).

THINGS THAT ARE GOOD

Pitch Black
This movie is one of my favourites of all time. It’s clever, there are little things you can for a second and then it’s off again. A budget of 23 million (a year after Phantom Menace with a budget of 115 million), and of course we’ve come a long way in visual effects in the last 20 years, but I think it holds up well. There were unique things about it: shooting it using film, a more diverse than usual diverse cast (due to being passengers on a general transport), the whole solar eclipse every 20 or so years is really good and make s this an effective and memorable stand alone sci-fi (slightly horror) movie.

And then they made a sequel - completely different, but still relatively good. This sequel presents a new world with new laws, Judi dench and KARL URBAN YAY and it creates another unique sci-fi world (that sort of reminds me of Firefly in the way that present day earth religion is still relevant in a sci fi universe). The prison world with the burning sun, the ‘keep what you kill’ and necromonger stuff is cool

Then there was a third movie. It’s ehhhhhhhh I guess. They should have kept building the world instead of going back to the exact plot of the first film (except with rain and Dave Bautista) for nostalgia.

PACIFIC RIM
I like this movie a lot. I refuse to believe in the existence of a sequel. I know it’s nit a new genre, but this movie feels like a new and fun stand alone action sci-fi

DREDD
I know it’s a reboot, but could easily be a stand alone sci-fi action flick from that era

PRIMEVAL
This is one if my favourite TV shows of all time - yes partly because I grew up with it and nostalgia, but I think it presents a new idea, a fun cast, an intriguing plot (that gets a bit convoluted in the final two seasons, but 1-3 are excellent). Basically portals called anomalies start opening up and prehistoric creatures start combing through and this group of British lads have to deal with it.
If you’re into unique sci-fi creature design, minor spoiler but:

Spoiler: Primeval Creature Design

this is the design of the ‘future predator’ and it is phenomenal. One of the greatest sci-fi creature designs ever in my opinion.

I can’t find a video without somewhat major spoilers, but I would really recommend checking this show out. The movement and noises of the further predator are so creepy and effective.

Another issue with the sci-fi film climate is budget has a massive effect on who can make movies, what the movies are about and if the movies are new or if they’re a reboot/sequel.

 

Correct.

 

If there is one thing pandas understand, is the recuperative power of a good sleep.



I think the best way to save the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises is to take several years off. Wait for the hurt feelings to subside (both from the Fandom Menace and the Woke Mafia) and let a completely new batch of writers, directors, and actors breathe life back into the franchises.

The more the franchise's handlers mess up now, the longer the franchise nap needs to be.

I figure if Star Trek needs to sleep 5-10 years now. Star Wars needs to wrap up season 3 of the Mandalorian with a satisfying finale and any animated shows still running need to do likewise, then they take a 4-8 year sleep.