Is Sci-Fi Out of Ideas?

I AM LEGEND The Will Smith movie is the third screen version of a novel from 1954

Is Sci-Fi Out of Ideas?

What movie genre is most in need of a savior as the New Year begins? For once, the answer isn't the musical: With Tim Burton's arterial-auteurist Sweeney Todd splattering audiences nationwide, Dreamgirls and Hairspray each topping $100 million in grosses last year, and the success of the all-obliterating international multiplatform Chiclet-toothed juggernaut that is High School Musical, we can finally take musicals off the endangered-species list. Instead, let's turn our attention to an unlikely candidate for a heart-and-brain transplant: science fiction.

Sci-fi is in trouble, though it's not the kind of trouble that can be measured at the box office, where it looks as healthy and robust as a T. rex must have seemed five minutes before it realized that there was nothing left to eat. The genre has been around for as long as the movies themselves, and flourished for the last 30 years. The problem is, none of the ideas are getting any newer. Scratch that: The problem is, there are no ideas.

The season's big movie hit is Will Smith's I Am Legend, the third screen version of a Richard Matheson novel that was published in 1954. In television, fans await the final season of Battlestar Galactica, a spiffy, politically freighted update of a dopey piece of TV debris from 1978; they're also anticipating the promised launch of a new series that will extend George Lucas' Star Wars franchise into its fourth decade. Our most popular sci-fi comic-book movies are based on characters that were created more than 40 years ago — or, like Transformers, were inspired by pieces of plastic manufactured in the 1980s. This Christmas' guilty-pleasure DVD indulgence was a multidisc collection of five different versions of the 1982 film Blade Runner, which is itself based on a 40-year-old Philip K. Dick novel. Personally, I'm holding out for a SuperPlatinum Deluxe Psychotic Edition, which will arrive in a crate containing 47 discs and Ridley Scott himself, who will hang out with you and then rewire your home sound system.

If you're truly desperate for a trip down memory lane, you can check out Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, another attempt to crossbreed franchises that are now, respectively, 29 and 21 years old: In sci-fi terms, this is like staging a cage match between Grandma and Grandpa. Even J.J. Abrams, whose series Lost (along with The X-Files) comes as close to a genuinely new idea for sci-fi as any major piece of pop culture in the last 20 years, is attempting to reboot the moribund Star Trek for the big screen next year. I'm interested in what he'll do with it, but I also wish he weren't boldly going where we have all gone so many times before.

NEXT PAGE: ''Ideally, sci-fi's next rescuer should be someone whose ideas about the future derive from somewhere — anywhere — other than old sci-fi.''