Why did science fiction stop moving forward?

In the originals, the battle for the Death Star holds up.

In the prequels, you can see Jedi wildly waving their lightsabers at nothing because the CGI team forgot to animate in certain places.

In the originals, Yoda was a puppet, and his skin and clothing reflected light realistically. So what if his mouth movements had all of the nuance and subtlety of a novelty nutcracker? Imagination bridged the gap between what we saw and what we experienced.

In the prequels, Yoda was CGI, so he didn't have physical depth in the way the other actors did, and didn't reflect light in the same way as the physical cast, and it gave him an eerie, Photoshopped look.

CGI can make special effects look more realistic, but they also have a way of preventing things from actually looking real.

Didn't realize how much this is true until I saw the video 'lfowles posted. That's a good point.

It now seems the high costs are more plausible, but then again - shouldn't the diminished need for sets offset that? Or is renting (or building) e.g. a prison yard so much cheaper than doing it in CG?

Are you sure? For example, from the ILM history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_%26_Magic we see:

1975: Resurrected the use of VistaVision; first use of a motion control camera (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope)

Following the link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_control_photography gives us:

> The first large-scale application of motion control was in Star Wars (1977), where a digitally controlled camera known as the Dykstraflex performed complex and repeatable motions around stationary spaceship models. This enabled a greater complexity in the spaceship-battle sequences, as separately filmed elements (spaceships, backgrounds, etc.) could be better coordinated with one another with greatly reduced error.

That doesn't sound like a normal camera.

The text immediately before that quote is:

> The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey pioneered motion control in two respects. The film's model photography was conducted with large mechanical rigs that enabled precise and repeatable camera and model motion. The film's finale was created with mechanically controlled slit-scan photography, which required precise camera motion control during the exposure of single frames.

And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the mothership was made of wood, plastic and metal, and wasn't cheap.

Now, to be sure these are high budget movies, but your broad description makes it sound like it was true for all movies in the 1970s.

I think a better comparison would be to look at the model-based special effects in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the CGI effects in Babylon 5; both produced at about the same time. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine :

> DS9 was the first TV show in the Star Trek franchise to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) for exterior space shots. Although a few other television series, like Babylon 5, were using CGI exclusively to avoid the high expense of model photography, the Star Trek franchise had continued to use primarily physical models for exterior space shots because producers felt models provided more realism.

Are there wrongs? Absolutely. But we can tackle those when we have clear evidence and direct corrective action. Striking out at anyone with a will to discuss and have legitimate concerns is not a way to bridge the communication gap.

British colonialism specifically argued for Anglo-Saxon superiority, and the Kipling's "The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" used a similar logic to argue that the US should take over the Philippines.

Those are racist/culturalist jabs meant to signal ingroup status to other bigots.

There is no deeper meaning behind why white and Victorian as opposed to Arab and working to establish the Caliphate or numerous other examples we can draw.

It's simply safe to express that kind of bigotry (and even popular in some groups).

The claim is that Star Trek's premise is a problem because it makes the flawed assumption that one culture can be better than another, and by extension, that all cultures must be valued and respected equally. Without going into the cultures of humanity in Star Trek versus the Klingons, you can examine similar claims closer to home even where some cultures are deeply invested in medieval-level cruelty like stoning of homosexuals and adulterers, female genital mutilation, and inhumane punishment by knife and cane. But these realities don't fit the author's narrative, and therefore must be ignored for the purposes of the thesis. Like Klingons, they're a benign minority who are simply misunderstood by their would-be cultural oppressors.

The article's ostensibility about science-fiction, and managed to stay on point for the first couple paragraphs, but it quickly devolved into the author's pet theories on race and gender. I really had trouble with these sorts of broad and totally unfair generalizations:

> Uhuru was a service worker and Worf was a punching bag; when the show made a black captain, was it a coincidence that the show also became “darker” and less optimistic, when its characters started to be “flawed” and “ambiguous”? Voyager had a female captain, but it marooned her to the farthest reaches of the galaxy (and the less said about the garbage politics of the reboot movies, the better).