4 Reasons Why Remakes of Sci-Fi Movies Are Doomed to Suck | Cracked.com

4 Reasons Why Remakes of Sci-Fi Movies Are Doomed to Suck | Cracked.com

The author was perceptive enough to make the main point: that the original point may no longer be current or valid decades later. Sci-fi movies are not really about the future or about other planets. The remote times and places are metaphorical ways to express ideas about what is happening on earth now. When that "now" is past, the points being made are often invalid, or at least not salient. Even the original sci-fi classics of the past tend to lose their emotional impact when their point has lost its immediacy (or, in the worst case, has turned out to be completely wrong). Even films of pure genius, like Blade Runner, cannot escape this limitation. When Blade Runner was made, it seemed that Times Square might, by 2019, look just like the depraved future L.A. of 2019 that the movie pictured. When I spent time in NYC in the 80s, about the time Blade Runner was released, Times Square was filled with multi-cultural and multi-lingual junkies, pimps, peep shows and porno theaters. Its decline into Blade Runner World seemed inevitable, but it never happened. Instead, Times Square now looks as innocent and commercial as Main Street in Disney World.

Blade Runner has so many great elements that it still works on many levels, but the street scenes no longer seem like they will turn out to be a realistic portrayal of any place in the United States in 2019.

Not even Detroit.