Cymric wrote:
I'm not sure I agree with this all the way. I think it is the other way around. My girlfriend and I had a little discussion about theater admission fares after seeing the visually spectacular but storywise extremely weak Van Helsing. She remarked people want to be entertained after a stressful day---and entertainment rules out engaging your brain in difficult stories and Deep Thought About Life's Truths. I think she has a point. Hollywood cares a lot about this and knows the difference like no other. (They make billions of dollars out of it, don't they?)
I think the "people only want dumb entertainment" mantra is a rather empty one. People are usually portrayed en-mass as a non-discriminating lowest common denominator mob, who will suck up any rubbish as long as it has enough special effects. Make unoriginal crap, hype it, show it, get the money. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Yet this doesn't seem to be always true. The new Matrix movies, for instance, and the new Star Wars ones - it didn't take film critics for people to judge those as crap. Could it be that even tired, working people want more than boom boom bang bang? These films were successes, but only because of hype. No-one will remember them fondly.
Without going to the other end of the scale and believing everyone will appreciate films like Solyaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey, or god forbid those artsy fartsy films (in my view usually pretentious, not clever), it does indeed seem like people do appreciate good scifi. This appreciation often seems to translate into pure dollars. In the case of Jackson's Lord of the Rings, even with the maimed story, the films are a massive commercial success.
Star Trek viewing figures have crashed, despite the obvious masturbation-bait to desperately grab more. Unoriginality and banality are directly to blame. Seems the masses do actually know good sci-fi when they know it - at least, "okay" sci-fi.
Star Trek is tired and shows it, and people do notice. Even 14 year olds.
