By itself, Ender's Game wasn't bad. Taken with Ender's Shadow and the whole thing improves. Since the movie will be incorporating both books into itself, I'm hoping for the best. Check out this blog.
I also hope they don't do to it what was done with Starship Troopers. Played straight, the movie could've been much better than it was.
Sucks to see what's going on with Blood and Chrome. I was really looking forward to watching that series. I like fantasy. I like superheroes. Done right, I can even watch supernatural shows (no tweeny new age Twilight angst for me). But the studios can't seem to deliver on the one thing I crave the most: a good space opera.
I adored starship troopers primarily because I didn't take it seriously. That said, the tv series was better.
Even as a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the novel, I couldn't get past the fact that the Lost in Space remake (released at about the same time) had more powered armor than Starship Troopers.
Grim and gritty SF need not be expensive to produce (i.e. Falling Skies, Jericho). The problem is not with pleasing/alienating fanboys, either. The problem is getting a big enough audience (i.e. mainstream) to want to be depressed week after week. Not impossible, of course--look at all the gritty cop shows. But they are much more accessible to a casual viewership.
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I liked those Dune adaptions Sci-fi did about ten years ago. Be nice to get something of that quality again. Shows that stick around these days seem to be on shoe string budgets with lame CGI and stories that have no direction.
Say whatever happened to that rumor there was going to be a cable Star wars show?
I don't know, really. I am honestly doubtful of the entire concept of Sci-fi TV series.
There are a few amazingly good ones. Chief among them in my mind (today) is Babylon 5 and Firefly. Serenity was very good, and some of the B5 movies were okay.
Babylon had a cast of very experienced actors, and if they were to remake it, you'd get a very young cast of hopeful and all-plastic-surgerized morons without any kind of experience trying out the different roles, and probably a big star in his eighties as captain of the station. With the far bigger budget today, Straczynski would have no creative control, and explosions would replace the dialogue the turd actors would not be able to deliver. B5 was also a very interesting show in that it started out with abysmal plots and no arc, but as time passed, more and more arc made people like it better and better... until the end of season 4. The finale was done, but worse, they lost Claudia Christian. Season 5 hankered along with a few good episodes, but nowhere near the previous praise, until the very last episode... because Claudia Christian returned. No. Let B5 be what it was, any remake will probably stink to high heaven.
Firefly stands out as an amazing show partly because it did NOT run forever. Certainly, there are a lot of stuff I would want to know more about and see, but every series sags eventually. Part of its legend is that it never got old, and it was killed before its time. It's the James Dean of sci-fi.
I think that it's a sad paradox at work. Sci-fi comes in two types: short fiction and world-building. Short fiction maps to movies and there are quite a few decent examples out there. World-building, though, gets a problem because with 42-min episodes, the setting can't diverge all too much from a very basic concept, preferably one that needs to be explainable very quickly. Even if the occasional show might work, most of what we'll have to look forward to is people holding plastic sci-fi-ish equipment, standing around in a park somewhere with the houses edited out, with cheesy dialogue, a few explosions, and calling each other names taken from characters from the book with the same name as the film. See: League of extraordinary gentlemen.
what book would make a great sci-fi movie that would get the mainstream to see it like they did Avengers.
Dr Who was gritty at one time and i miss those days. 4th dr series someone died almost every episode. Now the DR's run around and if someone important dies they tend to come back. They also need to bring UNIT back.
Farscape at one time had grit but also humor and that lasted for a while
I don't know, really. I am honestly doubtful of the entire concept of Sci-fi TV series.
There are a few amazingly good ones. Chief among them in my mind (today) is Babylon 5 and Firefly. Serenity was very good, and some of the B5 movies were okay.
Babylon had a cast of very experienced actors, and if they were to remake it, you'd get a very young cast of hopeful and all-plastic-surgerized morons without any kind of experience trying out the different roles, and probably a big star in his eighties as captain of the station. With the far bigger budget today, Straczynski would have no creative control, and explosions would replace the dialogue the turd actors would not be able to deliver. B5 was also a very interesting show in that it started out with abysmal plots and no arc, but as time passed, more and more arc made people like it better and better... until the end of season 4. The finale was done, but worse, they lost Claudia Christian. Season 5 hankered along with a few good episodes, but nowhere near the previous praise, until the very last episode... because Claudia Christian returned. No. Let B5 be what it was, any remake will probably stink to high heaven.
Firefly stands out as an amazing show partly because it did NOT run forever. Certainly, there are a lot of stuff I would want to know more about and see, but every series sags eventually. Part of its legend is that it never got old, and it was killed before its time. It's the James Dean of sci-fi.
I think that it's a sad paradox at work. Sci-fi comes in two types: short fiction and world-building. Short fiction maps to movies and there are quite a few decent examples out there. World-building, though, gets a problem because with 42-min episodes, the setting can't diverge all too much from a very basic concept, preferably one that needs to be explainable very quickly. Even if the occasional show might work, most of what we'll have to look forward to is people holding plastic sci-fi-ish equipment, standing around in a park somewhere with the...
Season 4 was what it was because they stripped out half the plot from season 5 and shoved it in because they were told they wouldn't have annother season. Then they did. The final episode was orriginally going to air as the final one for season 4, and was shot before it. Claudia is noticably missing from the final episode of season 4 because she signed on to only do so many shows and her contract negotiations fell through when she demanded to be paid as much as the male cast. She was supposed to be in Lyta's role with the tele-goths.