Are we any closer AT ALL to the Logan's Run remake? That sumbitch has been in development hell longer than any film I've heard of. It's probably gone through hundreds of actors by now. I don't know who they'd even cast these days.
Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes and other SciFi Classics
- Thread starter Kilana2
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It did have a connection. Logan meets a couple of the now-adult people he'd met previously in Cathedral (one of the Cubs and Mary 2 - in the novels she's Mary-Mary 2).
In Logan's Run, there's a part where they meet up with a group of "pleasure gypsies" - the ones who ride the aforementioned devilsticks. A similar, though much deadlier, group shows up in Logan's World, although this group calls itself the Borgias.
As for the Old Man... discussing him would involve too many spoilers for those who haven't read the novels. I'd prefer not to do that.
At any rate, I've got all three novels at hand right now, and it's obvious that I've forgotten a few things about the movie. It's been quite awhile since I last saw it, so I should remedy that.
But, done the right way with the right cast, don't you think it would fit between the Blockbusters and the "Cinema du Livre Comique"? Kind of an "Escape From New York" meets "The Island". Nah, you are correct. Shoot! Would like to see it.
I recommend it! For what it is and is not, it is a decent "watch"!
I don't know. I think that popcorn sci-fi flicks always outnumbered the more highbrow fare. For every Shape of Thing to Come, you had Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe or The Blob. For every Forbidden Planet, you had Cat Women of the Moon or whatever.
The only difference these days is that that that comic-book adventures and B-movie fare have much bigger budgets.
Which is exactly the point. The lowbrow fare has always existed, but it used to be kind of a low-level background noise. The big, high-profile genre pictures that we did get tended, proportionally, to be more intelligent and ambitious, like 2001, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Logan's Run, The Andromeda Strain, and the like. But post-Star Wars, a much higher percentage of the big, high-profile genre pictures became lowbrow action/FX flicks, and the more thoughtful films were more likely to be lower-budget indie pictures.
Although I think there's a recent trend toward smarter genre pictures, things more in the vein of Inception and Interstellar. Heck, you can kind of plot out the evolution of intelligence in genre films just in Planet of the Apes alone -- compare the quality and intelligence of the original series to the Tim Burton reboot to the current incarnation.
That's really endemic of the whole industry, and to a greater extent, pop culture in general. Don't blame star wars for formulaic filmmaking. Action films, comedies, drama's, are all less than they were. They have devolved in to barely more than a smattering of their respective genres tropes.
The same can be said of the music industry. It's called capitalism. Blame money. Money is more important to studio's than artistic integrity.
I once used to think that the baby was a clone, but I didn't finish my toughts except asking myself `how do they procreate in that regime?´
Other SciFi movies deal differently with this problem: surrogate mothers carrying children to term, having to give them away to wana-be-parents......
Someone asked in another thread: why do women give birth to children the way they do nowadays? It was mentioned when we talked about The Doctor (Voyager) beaming Sam Wildman's child out of her to save its life. It's obvious that the beaming method is just a modern version of a C-section and only for emergencies.
You can blame it because it made such film making too successful to ignore, so in the rush to imitate, the now well-funded sci-fi schlock was big enough to redefine the genre to the average audience, where only in the decade before, formulaic and/or schlock never took center stage in the culture as the "must see" / big event films of the era.
Big event / "must see" sci-fi was no longer that random accident that a studio could gloss over in favor of their scheduled Oscar-wannabes or prestige films. For the record, there were global hits pre-Star Wars in the 70s, but those random blockbusters (Jaws, Irwin Allen's biggest disaster movies, The Godfather, The Exorcist, etc.) did not--like a storm--carry the industry with it in such a forceful march to clone with anything they could find.
Some historians cite Jaws as creating the summer blockbuster film, but again, aside from low-rent imitations (Orca, and even Jaws 2), the industry did not trip over themselves (and their banks) to crank out as many similarly themed films as possible. Star Wars was the central catalyst for that.
One problem I have with the whole "STAR WARS ruined SF movies" thing is the assumption that, if not for STAR WARS, we would be drowning in literate, cerebral SF films, as the studios fell over themselves to give us lavish cinematic adaptations of Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Larry Niven, or whomever.
Which was never likely to happen. Films like Things to Come or 2001 were always anomalies, coming along once every few years or so, and always outnumbered by more popular monster movies and alien-invasion flicks, with "prestige" SF films largely confined to dour dystopias. STAR WARS meant we got a lot more space opera and comic-book flicks--but not necessarily at the expense of "serious" SF films, which were not exactly a growth industry at that point.
What really happened, perhaps, is that Hollywood stopped churning out westerns--good, bad, and mediocre--and started churning out sci-fi adventures instead . ...
Which was never likely to happen. Films like Things to Come or 2001 were always anomalies, coming along once every few years or so, and always outnumbered by more popular monster movies and alien-invasion flicks, with "prestige" SF films largely confined to dour dystopias. STAR WARS meant we got a lot more space opera and comic-book flicks--but not necessarily at the expense of "serious" SF films, which were not exactly a growth industry at that point.
What really happened, perhaps, is that Hollywood stopped churning out westerns--good, bad, and mediocre--and started churning out sci-fi adventures instead . ...
i would be surprised if that were true, considering how much nudity there was otherwise. The nude people in the ice cave, for one. It wasn't a movie for kids. But then, I have no idea what the limit for an R rated film in the 70's was.
Yes. It was a rather bold move for the time period to have what I took to be a critique of organized religion in that the computer did what it needed to maintain order by controlling people's behavior, but promising a paradise at the end that may or may not exist. Not to say that is how all religions work, but the film threw no bone to the idea that in it's world any religion was valid, or even still existed.
Yes. It felt like a Star Trek episode, with Kirk talking a computer into killing itself, except even dumber. In reality, any computer would simply disregard information that does not fit it's programming. It's like if a Windows program asked you your time zone, and you entered "New York", and your laptop exploded.
It's always fun to see or read in classic science fiction a computer from the time period doing things that even computers today cannot do. My cell phone probably has more processing power than Colossus, and it hasn't become sentient and evil (that I know of).
I've always wanted to start a blog about such technological and scientific anachronistic errors in movies and novels from otherwise visionary minds. For example, I'm read the 1950's Poul Anderson story Call Me Joe, where a disabled man uses a "psyonic" helmet to controls an engineered cat-like creature (sound familiar) exploring the "surface" of Jupiter. Computers in the story still use vacuum tubes, and a specific type of tube creates difficulties for the protagonist.
But the trend before Star Wars came along was towards to more cerebral type of science fiction movies 2001, Solaris, The Omega Man, The Forbin Project and even Planet Of the Apes turned away from the alien/atomic horror movies of the previous two decades. Star Wars was a throwback to the serials of the past, which of course it was meant to be.
A fair point, I suppose. But to some extent it's a question of visibility -- what the public thinks of when they hear "science fiction film." Star Wars wasn't even meant to be science fiction -- Lucas's own term for it was "space fantasy."
I guess the main thing I regret, as I said, is its impact on the Trek franchise. TMP was considered disappointing because it wasn't the action film audiences expected, and as a result, the sequels we got set their sights much lower. Sure, maybe the ratio of smart, prestigious films to lowbrow B movies would always have been low, but I kind of wish Trek had stayed more on the former side -- or at least straddled the middle ground, as the series did. I guess TVH and TUC somewhat managed that, having something to say as well as being crowd-pleasing adventures -- and TFF at least tried to be both meaningful and spectacular, though it did poorly at both. But I feel that Insurrection suffered from the insistence on tacking gratuitous action and battles onto a story that needed to be more quiet and intimate. On TV, the various Trek shows have had the freedom to range between drama, action, and humor as needed (although both TOS and TNG suffered from the need to tack on gratuitous action, manifested as random fistfights in the former and random cosmic anomalies and tech breakdowns in the latter). But most of the movies have been obligated to include space battles and gunfights to fit the Star Wars paradigm -- even though one of the most successful and popular films in the series, The Voyage Home, was all but devoid of violence.
Context matters, though. Nudity in a sex scene will get a higher rating than nudity in a non-sexual context like someone changing clothes. Even if letting the audience watch her change clothes is intended to titillate, it's still considered less mature or intense than a sex scene with overt nudity. Also, the number of bodies on display at any one time could be a factor.
For that matter, so do most people. I think I read recently about a study showing that people who are given hard evidence contradicting their beliefs are likely to double down on those beliefs rather than changing their minds.
The less understanding people have of a technology, the more they imagine it can do. In the original Star Trek, the ship's computer was treated as borderline oracular in its ability to explain things and suggest solutions to problems. By the movies and the TNG era, the computer was paradoxically a lot more limited.
Or Asimov's stories set hundreds of millennia in the future where people still use wire recorders and computer punch cards. And, yes, vacuum tubes. And, of course, where the ultimate in computing is a single vast central computer running a whole planet, rather than billions of personal devices.
...And where women are still limited to being housewives and husband-hunters, and virtually everyone is white.
"The Final Countdown" was one of my "guilty pleasures"also. I would love to see a remake with the CVN Enterprise. I remember a while back that Peter Douglas was going to try to remake it, so I think that means that, at least, it is not tied up with multiple Rightsholders and OptionTakers, like some of William Gibson's tales!
Nice idea for a thread, Kilana2! Fun to remember...
Since CVN-65 is on her way to the breakers, they'd have to wait until CVN-80 becomes operational and that won't be until at least 2025. They could use the Gerald R Ford (class leader and only active ship of the type) as a stand-in. The question is: would the Navy let them? It would have to be a love-fest of Michael Bay proportions to even get them to think about it.
The Last Ship has to use whichever Arleigh Burke-class ship is available at the time for it's "location shots" (IIRC, they've used at least 3 so far).
Which, btw, is my submission to the list of "classics". Yes, it's contemporary, but it's the only other show I know besides SG-1 (which I also would nominate) that hit the ground running in a way that drew me right in and didn't let go.
Interesting how perceptions differ. I don't think Stargate SG-1 really found its voice and started getting good until season 2 or 3.
I don't want to see another Star Trek movie where the actors stare at the special effects and nothing happens. But I also don't want to see another Star Trek movie that comes down to fighting a "bad man with a big gun." A bad man whose desire for revenge increasingly makes little sense.
Agree. Albeit, I hope LR is remade with the age cut off at eighteen for the population. At least that would attract the teen moviegoers.
Agree. Albeit, I hope LR is remade with the age cut off at eighteen for the population. At least that would attract the teen moviegoers.
Though of course all the under-18 leads would be played by actors in their mid-20s...
Agree. Albeit, I hope LR is remade with the age cut off at eighteen for the population. At least that would attract the teen moviegoers.
Though of course all the under-18 leads would be played by actors in their mid-20s...
There are actors who can play it quite convincingly. Sissy Spacek was in her mid twenties when she played the teenager Carrie......
If they remake The Final Countdown, they should get Michael Douglas to reprise the role his father played. It's almost eerie how much 2015 Michael looks like 1981 Kirk.
Not sure about Charlie Sheen playing *his* father's character. Although Warren Lasky was a pain in the ass...just like Charlie. So I guess it fits.
Not sure about Charlie Sheen playing *his* father's character. Although Warren Lasky was a pain in the ass...just like Charlie. So I guess it fits.
