My friend contends that the last scifi movie that actually was 'new', in terms of its ideas, was 2001. Meaning, that anything after that point had already been done, to some degree, in past scifi movies or tv. What do you think? What do you think was scif's last inovation in terms of story, not effects? Rob
I'm not aware of any precedents for Back to the Future II's doubling of characters, especially not in classic sf/f literature, though I'm sure some forgotten paperback probably used it at some point.
The Matrix was fairly unusual. Wall-E I thought was unique. How about Idiocracy? Dumbing down of society to the point where water is just something in a toilet, not something people drink and they can't figure out why plants are flourishing on the future "gatorade" type drink. And the Incredibles. Super heros forced to retire because of insurance liability concerns.
Looking at Star Wars 'now' we can say Lucas took from early sci-fi (and even some current sci-fi), but back in 77, it was something new....especially to this poster.
I thought Dark City was pretty interesting too...and had never been done (came out before matrix) Rob
Films are unlikely to break new conceptual ground on account of the fact that literature is cheaper to produce and not run by committee.
The Matrix was a compendium of cliches. It's the last movie I would point to as original. Its most unique quality was the volume of cliches they managed to cram into two hours. A love story + environmental message? Hardly unique. Even Lucas wouldn't claim that Star Wars is unique. Like The Matrix, it succeeds because of the number of popular tropes it draws upon: Star Trek, Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers, WWII films, Westerns, 50s-60s California car culture, Arthurian legend, Lord of the Rings. I'm sure leaving something out, but my fingers are tired. Oh yeah, that's right: Marvel comics. Darth Vader is an obvious steal from Doctor Doom which was a steal from The Man in the Iron Mask. Vader also had a family structure suspiciously similar to Magneto... This debate all depends on how you define a movie. If you want to get detailed and claim that The Incredibles was about insurance instead of, say, "troubled family bonds under adversity," then everything is unique. Movies rarely copy other stories down to the fine details - even remakes don't do that.
This is a difficult question to answer. Has there truly been anything unique since the very first scifi story was put down on paper? I would say that the vast majority of material, since that time, has drawn inspiration from each other at some point. If I had to pick though, I would probably opt for the movie Contact. It was definitely something unique when it came out.
Close Encounters and Terminator I think are both fairly unique for their time. Every movie/story has influences from prior works to some degree though.
Quantum Leap, maybe? Wherein the time traveler (for the most part) only seems to be able to travel within his own life time (although I think he went further back then that?) and not with his own body?
Unusual, but I dunno about new. New to film, maybe, but virtual reality worlds is old as computers in science fiction. Unique in its celebration of authoritarian decision-making in a children's film, but built on what may be the oldest tropes in the book. The theme of a ruined Earth and a subsequent interstellar exodus has been explored in countless fictions, and I can trace the film's central notion, that the twin advances of technology and automation are a great moral danger to humanity, to at least as far back as The Machine Stops (1909). Indeed, even the visual aspect of the fat Americans of the future was excessively similar to "Blobs!", the Harvey Kurtzman/Wally Wood comic adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic. It's a marginal opinion, but as far as I'm concerned Wall-E was a tremendously unoriginal film, with an extremely questionable and undemocratic bent to its moral. Sort of like Planet of the Apes, but I'll give it credit for being a very original take on the future (if obviously a crock, sociobiologically speaking) and a good, allegorical cautionary tale, as well as a great comedy. Very similar to the premise of Watchmen (forced to retire because of social backlash against vigilitanism), although I think it was probably new there. As for 2001, it probably wasn't new (its techniques were new, to be sure!), but I suspect there had been stories of apotheosis-via-alien before, although I might be wrong. And Dark City--I'm sure that Dark City wasn't the first time the "world" turned out to be an alien spaceship or some other camouflaged environment, for the benefit of human prisoners or zoo exhibits. I can't think of any film sci-fi off the top of my head with any really new ideas. Edit: Clearly, I wasn't thinking hard enough! The Truman Show, Gattaca, and Simone--Andrew Niccol's works, although suffering from a slight to severe disconnect from how the real world actually works (corporations adopting a child to basically raise him as a slave in Truman, pointless anti-qualified-normal bigotry in Gattaca, Frasier-esque comedy of errors in Simone) have usually been extremely original and thought-provoking, and reflective if not exhaustively descriptive of social trends. Dude's probably the smartest, best science fiction writer in film history. Okay, it's not an especially high bar... I wonder if Vonnegut's Player Piano was the first work to anticipate the economic dislocations that would occur after complete automation in a capitalist society? Probably not, although it's the first example I can point to. Here's a contender, though--Stranger in a Strange Land might be the first work to have an alien messiah come down and tell us what we need is to fuck more often and more generally. (Apropos of nothing, does that book have a completely worthless last fifty to a hundred pages or what? They have the feel of an inferior sequel instead of an integral part of the narrative. I understand I have the restored version, and I wonder where the original publishers' edit ended--there is a pitch-perfect note to end on well before the book actually terminates, where Michael discovers why we laugh. Everything past that is unnecessary, occupied primarily with the mundane, boring details of Michael building his religion. He's Space Jesus, I get it, Robert. Indeed, this has effects beyond the immediate book--the awkward, pointless last eighth of Stranger has kept me from continuing to read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress past the part where the Loonies actually win. I'm not sure I want to spend time with the mundane, boring details of building Space Libertarianism.)
I like the selection of Close Encounters...Terminator 1 I'm not so sure. I think I saw an older movie that was about something like that..cant remember... I think Close Encounters really made that 'alien from space' genre very believeable. Rob
"And Dark City--I'm sure that Dark City wasn't the first time the "world" turned out to be an alien spaceship or some other camouflaged environment, for the benefit of human prisoners or zoo exhibits." Orphans In the Sky-R.A. H. It's all variations on a theme-see below. I heard once that every possible plot theme is represented in the collected works of Shakespeare-and that there isn't anything new under the sun. Rob, your friend needs to define "new" -which I suspect can't be done. Without a completely alien (to humans) reference point there is no way to come up with "new" in this context. We all think alike in various ways and there is 50,000 years of Humanity behind us that also had the chance to think-probably nothing new springing to life these days, just clever innovations and variations on age-old ideas. Terminator, btw, is just Westworld carried to the extreme.
Well, the OP did narrow it down to original movies so technically we can ignore every book ever written.
yeah, I kept it to movies since books are far more reaching. But, then again, I wouldn't mind a few 'last good idea' in a book thoughts too... Rob
Well, in terms of originality of movies, you probably have to get away from judging via plot. The number of plots in the world is very small. Even 2001 is just the age old man vs. machine embedded in a rebirth scenario. Stylistically, it was innovative - for a major Hollywood production. Keep in mind Hollywood doesn't do original, ever, except in the form of providing technology to create visual effects at a scale and depth smaller filmmakers can't usually achieve. Even so, the visual stylistics of 2001 derive from a variety of movements in painting such as Futurism and Abstract Expressionism. But Hollywood (and unlike a lot of others, I don't necessarily see this as a horrible flaw) has always been about adapting from other works with an eye toward very broad appeal - which means presenting a level of familiarity to the audience. Most people don't really want to have to work too hard to enjoy their entertainment. There are, occasionally, refreshing films, that manage to present interesting ideas in thought-provoking, or emotionally stirring ways. Forbidden Planet's monsters from the Id was pretty good, as was Terminator's temporal loop love story combined with scary badass cyborg from the future. Planet of the Apes (1967) presented some scenes that were effectively shocking in their daring, such as the human hunt, and Alien did a great job of genre-mixing (one of the best ways for films to do something interesting) by putting a trapped in the horror house with monster scenario in a space ship. Children of Men's dystopia was intriguing. Blade Runner achieves a fascinating psotmodernist pastiche about what makes the self. I've never seen La Jetee (the original short from which Twelve Monkeys was derived), but I understand it's pretty innovative in style. A Boy and His Dog was wild fun as was The Road Warrior - though how SF they really are is probably debateable. And you have to give some props to Fantastic Voyage as an SF idea. Which brings us to where SF still has to go - which is into cyborg territory. Nanotech and biotech altering human bodies and selves is still waiting to be really significantly explored on film. The Matrix brushed up against this in the midst of a bunch of flashy badassery, and it will be a long time before the audience is ready to go beyond "natural humans = good, machines in our bodies = bad" SF movies have always loved turning technology into terror and isn't usually up to any complex exploration of enhanced humanity. Honestly, I think our imaginations are grappling with the future right now. We can't seem to break free of the frontier mythology, which means imagining far flung space travel - which doesn't really seem possible any time in the near future and perhaps ever. Which means hard SF has to imagine interesting things right here on earth or in this solar system. With our increasingly crowded planet and no real colonization options, we haven't reformed our ideas of what the future could look like, except in dystopias, which are a drag after a while. But after the expansive wild west inspired dreams of the (fizzled) Space Age, that somehow doesn't feel all that compelling to most people.