Agreed, Ridley's all-time favourite sci-fi film, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is probably the supreme example of the genre, and maybe nothing has topped it in the four decades since its release, but that doesn't mean you can write off all modern sci-fi films ("yes, all of them," as Ridley put it) as "nothing original ... we've seen it all before".
Ridley has a point, when you consider the overblown, mega-star blockbusters of recent times. Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, in which regular guy Tom Cruise points out to the military how to bring down the Martian tripod-monsters, springs to mind, as does the Will Smith vehicle I, Robot, which retains only the title - and the robots - from Isaac Asimov's cerebral classic. And, straying into the realms of science-fantasy, Star Wars I, II, III and even VI are a dunderheaded mess of ewoks, drippy love-stories and Jedi council meetings. The problem with all these films is that the emphasis on space-age special effects blasted any interesting ideas and themes - in fact all mind-matter - into deep space.
But there are plenty of modern sci-fi movies in which a superior intelligence can be discerned alongside the computer-generated imagery: look at another Spielberg/Cruise project, Minority Report. Yes, it's a huge, glossy Hollywood production that basically sets a thrilling Hitchcockian chase movie in a future world - but what a superbly realised future world it is, complete with cyber-glove computers, creepy spider spy-robots, and individualised street ads that see you coming. And it's also mindful of its origins in a brilliant Philip K Dick story (as, of course, was Scott's Blade Runner and any number of others, including, if I remember correctly, Total Recall, which entertainingly gave Arnold Schwarzenegger identity headaches). Aside from the standard fight'n'flight business, Minority Report's depiction of the problems arising from the use of otherworldly "precogs", who can predict crime before it happens, is thoughtful about the desirable limits of law enforcement and personal freedom: ie, it's concerned with ideas, as well as action. (And by the way, isn't Samantha Morton's precog, eerily suspended in a flotation tank, modelled on Kubrick's star child?)
Another sci-fi movie that remains true to - or at least doesn't dispense with - its intellectual origins is Solaris, based on Stanislaw Lem's novel, about a watery planet with a consciousness that exerts its morbid will over the crew of an orbiting space station: not the somewhat dense, near three-hour 1972 Russian version, but Steven Soderbergh's sprightly 2002 adaptation, starring George Clooney, which still manages to pack in plenty of philosophising on time, identity, love, grief and everything.
Closer to home (it's set in a polluted, barren, riot-torn 2027 London that looks as if Thatcher had gone on and on as prime minister) is Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 adaptation of PD James's sci-fi excursion, Children of Men. It's vaguely reminiscent of that other rather literary piece of sci-fi, The Handmaid's Tale (from Margaret Atwood's book), but Cuarón knits grungy futuristic action, religious allegory and a drama of personal redemption into a spellbinding film, with exceptional acting too (Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine).
Danny Boyle is another director bringing fresh ideas to the genre. In 28 Days Later (2002), he cross-breeds sci-fi and zombie flesh-eating horrors into a bloody, chilling entertainment, but it's this year's brilliant Sunshine that moves up a warp-factor or two. Having a bunch of scientists, 50 years hence, trying to reignite our dying sun by piloting a megabomb into it, is an inspired concept. Never before has our life-giving star loomed so large, fiery and frightening; never before has a ship's crew (excluding that of the Nostromo in Alien, of course) been sent on such a terminal one-way ticket as that of the Icarus II.
The sci-bit in Sunshine is nonsense, but the brilliant thing about the fi is that it is crammed with references/homages/borrowings from earlier sci-fi classics: there's a sweet-voiced computer out of 2001; a crazed creature creeping about like a reject from Alien; a deep-space gardener out of Dark Star; and astronauts suffering acute loneliness and desolation, as if they were aboard the Prometheus, orbiting Solaris. And out of all these cherry- pickings, Boyle creates a gripping, intellectually and emotionally involving sci-fi adventure.
In fact, maybe this originality business isn't all it's cracked up to be. After all, the western, throughout its golden age, endlessly reworked themes of courage, integrity and loyalty against a beautiful, unforgiving landscape; maybe the same goes for sci-fi. The creativity is not in forever finding new things to say, but new ways of saying them. Which would account for why Pitch Black (released in 2000), in which a crash-landed Vin Diesel fights horrible night-time killers on an inhospitable planet - an Alien rip-off if ever there was one - still makes for fantastic sci-fi.
One other thing: Pierce Brosnan currently stars in the critically praised Seraphim Falls, and we'll soon be seeing Brad Pitt in a new Jesse James movie and Russell Crowe in a remake of 3.10 To Yuma. So who says the western is dead?
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