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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Hollywood, as we know it is dead for 10+ years. The mass of super hero movies is appalling.

Where are the action movies and funny comedies, that were so great in the late 1980s, 1990s and earlier 2000s.

Last year's San Andreas was pretty good, but so many other movies are just boring, unfunny, too dark, too shaky camera, too much CGI, etc. That TV series got too much attention by Hollywood studies hurts movies a lot. The only TV series I saw last year was Silicon Valley, I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series - I would trade TV series for great movies all day.

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Forget the action movies and funny comedies, where are the sci-fi movies??? And I don't mean some stupid movie about a guy living in what appears to be the modern world sans display screens and talking to his earphone, I mean movies with spaceships (and especially spaceships with elaborate corridors). The 70s and 80s were chock full of these movies. And no shaky-cam back then either. So far, all we've had is Star Wars--blah (yet again, Hollywood milking an old franshise), and Prometheus in 2012 (again, milking an old franchise).

Supposedly we're going to get a few spaceship sci-fi movies this year, including "Passengers" which looks promising. But we've gone quite a long time now without much in the way of sci-fi.

That's funny, I was just looking at a list of big budget releases in 2017 and I was thinking that sci-fi is making a comeback in a big way. At least half of the films in the list had some sci-fi element to them. Of course, the two biggest (blade runner and ghost in the shell) are unnecessary sequels/remakes, but any port in a storm, right?

Edit: Can we get a Red/Green/Blue Mars miniseries on HBO, please? That would make my decade.

"Edit: Can we get a Red/Green/Blue Mars miniseries on HBO, please? That would make my decade."

(spoilers follow, although this book is 24 years old so if you haven't read it, you're probably never going to read it. Also Vader is Luke's father)

I also enjoyed that trilogy but the problem is the studio execs don't define "adult" as above room temp IQ or for actual adults, they define it as using the word Fuck every five minutes, disgusting bloody gore, and plenty of ratings boosting sex, because in their twisted freak world that is in fact the only difference between kindergartners and adults. "Hollywood" is too screwed up to relate to real people.

So imagine KSR's series absolutely brutalized and... I don't want to think about it. Imagine 30 minutes of steamy sex between Hiroko and Coyote (Vlad's home life is probably even more photogenic) then Phyllis has every spoken phrase contain the word Fuck and when Maya kills her we get at least five minutes of gore-pr0n of dismemberment and blood and organs lying on the ground. And to save money they rewrite the entire story to be a scientific research station in antarctica and vampires are still hot so we'll add some of those. Just horrible.

If you really want a mind-warper, imagine modern degenerate media execs trying to do a on screen Bible.

We're in an era of narrowcasting where only trash is made and only trash sells.

> imagine modern degenerate media execs trying to do a on screen Bible.

Actually, they'd probably treat it well: sex, violence, vengeance, sodomy, incest, torture. Sounds like a perfect script for a Hollywood movie. Just ask Mel Gibson how well "Passion of the Christ" did.

Spoiler alert dude!

> Can we get a Red/Green/Blue Mars miniseries on HBO, please? That would make my decade.

OMG, yes.

I'll just add as a reply to you and GP, science fiction isn't about the spaceships or technology; it's more about the "what if?", and the best scifi are human stories at their core. Almost all of the time the "what if?" is precipitated by technology, but it's still a human story. I don't give a rat's ass about a story "with scifi elements" I want real science fiction, with the science front and center, not hand-waved, religified, demonized, or taking a backseat to the action or romance. If I wanted veneers, I'd go to the dentist.

I did mention that we're supposedly going to get some big-budget sci-fi movies this year, but that's only just this year, and also this year has only started, so there's no guarantee it'll happen. Where have all these movies been for the past 15 years or so? The only ones I can think of are a couple of Tom Cruise movies (ugh), Prometheus (based on 1970s franchise), and The Martian. Given the easy availability of CGI, it's really curious why there's been such a dearth of space-based sci-fi, and personally I think it's because our society has basically lost all the optimism it had back in the 60s-80s.

I think the reason we are seeing so many coming out this year is exactly because people are regaining that optimism because of SpaceX and the Mars colonization plan. Which is why I would like to see an adaptation of KSR's Mars trilogy. It could galvanize support for manned Mars exploration.

I've been reading the books for the last few weeks and I've found them especially gripping because it feels like we are so close to making it a reality.

> Can we get a Red/Green/Blue Mars miniseries on HBO, please?

It was going to be coming out this year, but production was abandoned last year at the last minute after the showrunner quit: http://deadline.com/2016/03/red-mars-pushed-spike-tv-showrun...

Yeah but not on Spike! If they make it I want it to get the production quality it deserves. It could inspire the generation of children that actually do colonize Mars.

My parents have traded "regular TV" for netflix series. It's surprisingly easy to consume it quickly once you remove ads and other interruptions, as well as setting the schedule to fit your own.

No more wasting 15 minutes for it to start, no more waiting between episodes, no more waiting during the episode ...

> I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series - I would trade TV series for great movies all day.

This is where streaming without commercials wins big. In the space of a typical two hour movie you can watch:

* 2 episodes of an HBO/Netflix type show where "hour long episodes" are actually an hour

* 3 episodes of a TV show where "hour long episodes" are 40 minutes

* 6 episodes of a sitcom type TV show where episodes are 20 minutes

With series, it's much easier to try it out and decide if you like it. Then, when you find something you do like, there's more content for the viewer to enjoy plus the possibility for storytelling and character depth that movies simply can't match in 2-3 hours.

I get there are people who want to see more of the same.

Do you like stretched stories over many episodes? I don't, I want movies, 90-120min, with superior quality unseen in low budget TV series. Comparing to 1980s TV series, they had a lot of stunt work and felt higher budget than most todays TV series.

> Do you like stretched stories over many episodes?

Calling it stretched seems to imply that you're lowering the quality to make it last longer. That just isn't the case (most of the time). Look at a show like Stranger Things on Netflix - you could certainly trim and compress that story to make it work in a two hour movie, but it would probably be a very different story than what you get with the eight hour series.

> with superior quality unseen in low budget TV series

I don't know what your experience is with newer TV series, but there are plenty of them out there with large budgets and product quality to rival movies.

I really like the long arcs of today's top end TV. It's funny, I was thinking the other day that when I just want a short self-contained piece of entertainment, I reach for a movie. Which is a complete reversal from 15 to 20 years ago.

Also, have you watched any of the newer TV shows? They have astronomical budgets, better than some movies. And certainly better than 1980s TV. Knight Rider may have had practical car stunts, but it also had bad writing, bad acting, and bad directing. Modern TV has elevated all those things dramatically.

I was this way with books too. I went through several phases where I just couldn't get into a good series, but could read "stand alone" books all day long. These days, I feel like just as I get to know the characters, the story is over.

Enjoying both, I find myself leaning toward the "drawn out" stories, because they let me interact with characters that I like, for much longer periods.

At first I was annoyed at how TV series seem to have gone from 20+ episodes a season to down to as few as 8 per season (less than 4 in some cases, IIRC), but the almost "mini-series" style of shorter seasons makes less filler, but without the rush a movie has.

I agree with you if the content is actually stretched out (like filler episodes), but I find a lot of TV made for streaming is lacking filler content and is just telling a longer story. It's to the point now where when I watch a 90-120 minute story a lot of the plot development feels seriously rushed because it has to fit that 90-120 minute timeline.

One example that springs to mind is in the first Thor movie. I didn't even realize the love interest was actually supposed to be that because it felt like they met and interacted for a grand total of 30 minutes (in their world, not screentime) before the climactic ending with Thor and love interest kissing.

I watched iBoy on Netflix as well (90 minutes) and despite any other criticism of the plot or production value, it just felt like things escalated incredibly quickly without any time for character development or fleshing out any plot details.

Try West World, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Taboo and tell me they don't have feature-film-level production quality.

> I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series

Netflix exists solely because people want to binge watch their favourite series.

They're betting that once people have finished binge watching all of Friends in a weekend and are wondering what to watch next, they'll pick a Netflix Original™ from the list of suggested shows.

I don't have Netflix and rarely watch series (except those like Silicon Valley) but I know a lot of friends who do have Netflix and will happily spend an entire weekend watching a series from start to finish.

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