• Inside Entertainment,  Media Rants

    Respecting Canon

     Warning: this blog contains a spoiler for Terminator: Dark Fate. (However, the spoiler covers the opening minutes of the movie, so it’s not that much of a spoiler!)   Who started the Hollywood reboot? I’ve been trying to puzzle this out – who’s truly responsible? We’ve always had remakes of movies – although I’ve never understood why. If you have a good movie (or a good song), why remake it? Wouldn’t it be more logical to take a property that didn’t quite work, and remake (and fix) that? I understand the financial implausibility – a studio is unlikely to fund a remake of something with no proven commercial viability, but…

  • Inside Entertainment,  The Grim Reboot

    To Bleak or Not To Bleak

    The original Lost in Space series (1965 – 1968) began as serious science fiction, before descending into campy humour and outlandish storylines. But it worked because it found its voice, and has since become a cult classic. The rebooted Lost in Space (2018 – ) has not only gone the serious route, but has also become gritty, bleak, and largely joyless. It’s a motif a lot of contemporary movies and series use. Arguably, the template for this began with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), and was popularised with the follow-up, The Dark Knight (2008). Then just about everybody decided this was the way to go, as if it was a…