Don Kaye at MSN actually offers up an
insightful piece on the dumbing down of the science fiction movie in going from text to film. Kaye even goes so far as to recognize the New Wave movement, which heralded the interesting shift in sf from the rocket ships of the so-called Golden Age to issues of interior space: psychology, culture, etc.
I also completely agree that most of Philip K. Dick's stories and novels have been over-simplified by Hollywood in moving them to a film format, for example: Paycheck (urg) and Total Recall (not as bad as Kaye says - it at least makes you wonder about reality). And he's right that Next looks like it will be a horrible action movie instead of an exploration of genetic mutation.
But Kaye ignores the few that are fairly good: Blade Runner, of course, doesn't do the exact same thing as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it does deal with the same theme: what does it mean to be human? [Okay, he mentions it later on as a box office failure - but has it been a DVD failure?] Minority Report (as much as I don't care for Tom Cruise) does an interesting job of again tackling Dick's fascination with 'what is reality?' - the same issue confronted in A Scanner Darkly.
Kaye also blames the entire return to space opera on the original Star Wars trilogy, which I happen to love, I'll admit. I think they did do interesting work on the issue of the ability to resist totalitarianism while also focusing on creating communities. [He avoids the new trilogy, and I have to wonder why - it actually proves his point that the more mindless sf movies make money.] I think it's too simplistic to blame this on George Lucas - I wonder if this trend has occurred only in sf. Perhaps the dumbing down of all genres of Hollywood movies from the 70s to the present should be looked at as well. I watch Catch-22 or One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and wonder if I've seen anything made in the 90s that dealt with social issues as well or as seriously.
And here I diverge into a point I mentioned above - that there's a difference between the immediate Blockbuster that puts butts in cinema seats and the favorite that lingers on to shape the genre. DVD sales are going to change the shape of the industry eventually. Serenity was made based on a failed TV series, Firefly. Why did Universal decide to risk the money? Because the DVD box set of Firefly sold like hotcakes at Amazon.com. Serenity itself only broke even in the theaters, but the DVD sales placed it in Amazon's top ten for quite some time. What will people still watch 20 years from now? If we look at Blade Runner, an on-going cult favorite as an example, they'll be watching the movies of substance. And the DVD sales mean that movie studios, in all of their profit-driven glory, will have to slowly but surely start to recognize as much.