The Star Wars collection owes as much to classical golden age Science Fiction as the
Harry Potter and Tolkien movies do. The only truly Science Frictional element is
the production company's use of CGI and other really nifty Special FX.

Flicks like 'Repo Man', 'Alien' and Ridley Scott's 'Bladerunner'
are more true science fiction than "Fifth Element" or "Minority Report".

Let's think about this. What device, in any of the 'Star Wars' live action cartoons,
would you truly like to have in your life today. Outside of R2D2 or C3PO, I mean.
Would you really like a functioning Millenium Falcon? Or a light saber?

DNA dealt with this in his various incarnations of the HHGTG. In the movie,
the light saber becomes merely a bread knife that toasts one side of the bread
at the same time. The absurdity of attempting to use said knife for buttering
said bread is not dealt with... nor should it be.

In the Dune books, you get the still suits, which are theoretically possible,
but eventually unnecessary. Why? Because that particular sort of desert doesn't exist.
Nor do the Sandworms. One of the movies uses a thing called a "Weirding Module", but
basically it is just a thought-activated pistol... The sort of thing I know I wish I had
on a daily basis.

One of the finest writers of speculative and innovative fiction during the last four decades
is Harlan Ellison. He says he does not write Sic Fic. Maybe. I'll take his word for it
because even at this advanced age, I hear he still bites as hard as he barks. His
novels and stories and graphic novels and screenplays deal with a dystopic vision
that was based more on his myopic view of his own society than on the 'pie in the
UFO' wet dreams of his co-peers. Actually, Ellison has more in common with
George Carlin than he does with Micheal Moorcook or Robert A. Heinlein or Doc Smith.
For he is a comedian. As one of the few of the so-called 'New Age' fiction mavens
from the sixties who has maintained his own personality
in his writing while flashing his influences, which range from Proust to Dawkins,
Pliny the Elder to Shel Silverstein, Ambrose Bierce to Lovecraft, Ellison also continues
to ignore his peers and harbours the fanboy innocence and enthusiasm
that got him involved in fanzines and fan fiction in the first place, back when
he was an angry young writer with a mean typewriter in the early fifties.

Ellison is important because he rarely invents any toys in his stories and novels. He just takes what is and gives it a gentle twist, not enough to break it's little neck, but enough to make the
bulging little orbs look in another direction. Science Fiction in it's truest and more useful form is speculative, with a 'what-if' quality that transcends fantasy (which is mostly role-playing nonsense of the most infantile sort) and art (which is crafting sentences for the sake of pretty grammar) and makes us put down the book or magazine and look out the window with new lenses in our eyes. Pretty special FXs and cute toys are not the stuff of thought, but of novelty. Real writers want you to take your brain and your beliefs out and look at them under a bright light. Any one can perform illusions in front of you and make you believe that magick is possible, but it takes a real artist to make you wonder if the illusion is even necessary.

Back in the bad old days when movies were a novelty, the movie directors had to keep pushing and pushing the envelope in order to stay innovative. When you consider that over three thousand shorts were made in the first year of true film on a reel movie making, and most of them were pretty damned boring, but people were willing to pay a nickle or an apple to sit still and watch two minutes of this idiocy over and over again, and that within the first five years of true movie making, almost half a million shorts and two reelers had been made world wide... most of which are no longer extant as they had a tendency to go up in flames or flake into dust... then you get some small idea of what kind of competition the directors were up against. Comedians like Buster Keaton spent years designing gags and special effects for one and two reel movies, coming up with visual jokes that are still astounding for the amount of work involved for a few seconds of laughs. Douglas Fairbanks spent millions of dollars and started his own studio with Chaplin and Mary whatsherface in order to create in such movies as 'The Thief of Bagdad' an unnatural world that had a wonder or a trick every second for an hour's running length.

Modern movies very often function at an artistic level that is only centimetres beyond the greatest hits of 1912. Some of the one's involving music and sound tricks are barely an inch beyond the major works of 1927. It is the story and how it is told that expressed innovation or a marvelous variation on a theme. Shakespeare plagiarized every damn thing he could thing of, from the Bible to classical Greek mythology. He wrote parodies of extant personalities and he inverted tried and true formulae. He also didn't hesitate to modify and mutilate the language he was using. There was nothing sacred to him, except what the censors actually understood, so he had even more reason to be funnily obscure.

People like Frank Capra and even Woody Allen have proven capable of Shakespeare-like reaches into the psyche and the hippocampus. Luc Besson has taken hackneyed concepts, beaten them thin and then pierced them with new light. While George Lucas and Steven Spielberg recreated the same old stuff with new computer tricks and weird colour palettes without once treading new ground intellectually.

"Ghostrider', a relatively new flick by, um, whatshisname, Nick, uh, no... Nevermind. 'Ghostrider' proved once again that you can make the same old movie that has been made a thousand times and get the same people to troop to the theatre to mouth along with the words and go "ahhh" at the same places they did before. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.

The future will not be found on the silver screen nor the flat screen. The future will be found in the eyes of your children when you bother to turn off the TV and the computer and actually talk to them about reality. Because what is going on in a child's mind is really what should still be going on in your's. Once you learn to communicate as a child, then maybe you'll be able to realign your thinking about what is expected of you as a putative adult. The future is now and it stinks.