The top-grossing film of the year, by a huge margin, was The Dark Knight, which also got treated with a good deal of respect by critics for a superhero movie, mostly because of the late Heath Ledger’s riveting turn as the Joker, bringing a scary intensity to the part that surpassed and probably supplanted even Jack Nicholson’s famous interpretation of the role. You have to wonder if Christian Bale, who played Batman, and whose movie this ostensibly was, was bemused at the fact that nearly every review of the film spent all of its time raving about Heath Ledger and often didn’t mention Bale at all. (Still, at least he gets to collect his residuals, which may be some consolation.) Ledger’s performance will be long remembered by fans and would alone push The Dark Knight into the realm of classic superhero movies such as Spiderman and The X-Men, although the rest of the movie is pretty good too, dark and creepily elegant, but overlong and perhaps a bit muddled. The sly and frequently amusing Iron Man finished in second place in the top-grossing list, mostly because of a snarky performance by Robert Downey, Jr. The Big Green Angry Guy did better in his second outing as a film star, The Incredible Hulk, easily outdrawing Ang Lee’s muddled and overly complex previous Hulk movie, although not doing as well as his fellow superhero and Avengers teammate Iron Man (you could see them setting up the forthcoming Avengers movie throughout both Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, by the way). Although it seemed like two movies jammed together, neither of which the filmmakers really knew what to do with, Will Smith delivered enough of a star turn as a degenerate drunken superhero to put Hancock into fourth place. Wanted was about a guild of super-powered assassins.
(These totals are somewhat misleading, since they’re only talking about domestic grosses. If you add the foreign grosses to the domestic grosses, you have to shuffle the rankings around some. Indiana Jones (combined total: $786,001,411), Hancock ($624,386,476), and even Kung Fu Panda, which only finished sixth on the domestic-gross list (combined total: $631,465,619), coming in ahead of Iron Man ($581,804,570). Nothing can come close to unseating The Dark Knight, though, whose combined total is $997,012,892! And top-selling computer games such as World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs make even more money than the movies do. Little wonder that print science fiction, and even print fantasy, have come to be seen by many as poor cousins, with even print bestsellers not coming even remotely close to earning what SF and fantasy do in other media.)
Sequels or new installments of established franchises often did only so-so this year. The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did the best of any of them at the box-office (although even fans of the franchise seemed only lukewarm about the new Indiana Jones; Harrison Ford looked tired throughout, and I suspect that the producers would like to carry on the franchise using Shia LaBeouf instead, but he doesn’t show enough charisma here to convince me he could carry the franchise by himself). Below this point, things get dicier. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian placed a respectable thirteenth on the top-ten domestic earners list, but although it earned $141,621,490, it cost $200 million to make, which might have been bad news for the continuation of this franchise, except that foreign revenues bumped its combined total to $419,646,109, which might have saved it, as foreign revenues have saved a couple of movies in the last few years. It was a similar scenario with The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which cost $145 million to make but earned only $102,277,510, until foreign revenues boosted its combined total to $290,903,563; of course, this franchise has been going steadily downhill since the original movie. Things were even more stark with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, in at thirty-eighth place, which cost $85 million to make but earned back only $75,791,785, and even with foreign revenues, could make it “only” to $158,954,785, which might have made it a failure in Hollywood terms. Too bad, as the original movie, Hellboy, was one of the most successful films of its year, both commercially and artistically; but the sequel, although it featured absolutely stunning visual effects, lacked the headlong narrative momentum and much of the rough humor of the original movie, and often got bogged down in confusing and perhaps unneccesary subplots. Star Wars: The Clone Wars could only make it to seventy-ninth place, in spite of the Star Wars name. And the “long-awaited” sequel to the last X-Files movie, this one called The X-Files: I Want To Believe, fell out of the top hundred list altogether, only managing to make it to one hundred and seventh place, not enough people wanted to believe that this was something they really wanted to see, and this may well have been a case of waiting too long, until after interest and enthusiasm had cooled, before trying to do another sequel.
Cloverfield, a postmodern version of an old-fashioned giant-monster-trampling-through-a-city movie, widely referred to as “the Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla,” hauled in a combined total of $170,764,026 but cost only $25 million to make, rock-bottom cheap by today’s standards, so I’m sure that its producers are happy with its performance. There actually were some scary moments in this, if the constantly swirling and somersaulting camera didn’t make you flee the theater with nausea or vertigo first. The execrable 10,000 B.C. is what you get when you’re sitting around in a pitch meeting and somebody says, “Hey! Egyptians meet mammoths!” The even more dreadful Speed Racer was another misguided attempt to make a live-action version of a campy old animated TV show, not unlike last year’s Underdog. The Happening was another fundamentally incoherent and not-particularly-scary M. Night Shyamalan movie, and Igor and the prophetically titled The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything were the year’s animated movies that didn’t make lots of money. There was a YA steampunk movie called City of Ember released late in the year that I haven’t seen, and a film version of another well known Young Adult fantasy novel, The Spiderwick Chronicles, which ditto.
The Magic Realist movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, came out right at the end of the year, to mixed but generally pretty good reviews; you’re on your own there, since I haven’t seen it either.
The best hope for a science fiction movie for next year seems to be the upcoming Star Trek prequel—which is kind of sad. Not surprisingly, there are a number of superhero movies in store for lucky audiences as well.
Coming up on the more-distant horizon are a version of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, directed by Ridley Scott, and a version of John Wyndham’s Chocky, directed by Steven Spielberg. On the even more distant horizon is a version of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, directed by Roland Emmerich.
The Writers Guild of America strike swept over the television industry early in 2008, leaving downed trees and wreckage in its wake, and probably contributing to the demise of a few already shaky shows—but even though some of the biggest genre shows on television, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Torchwood, were forced by the strike to go “on hiatus” until 2009 or even (in the case of Dr. Who) until 2010 (as were some lesser shows such as Kyle XY and Fear Itself)—ratings are down across the board this season and some of last season’s biggest hits are wobbling in the ratings and in danger of being canceled—there’s still plenty of genre shows to watch, with a large number of hopeful replacements waiting in the wings, and yet another row of potential shows looming beyond that. In fact, it’s clear that genre shows—mostly fantasy shows, although there are still actually a few science fiction shows left here and there—have come to dominate the TV airways to almost as great a degree as they dominate the Hollywood top-grossing films list, although cop/forensic/detective shows are still holding their own (last year’s wave of hybrid fantasy/SF cop shows largely failed to establish itself, with only Saving Grace surviving).
Shows like Moonlight, New Amsterdam, Cavemen, The Bionic Woman, Journeyman, Flash Gordon, and UFO Hunters were swept out to sea by the writers’ strike, and show no sign of coming back; many of them, like the jaw-droppingly awful Caveman, probably wouldn’t have made it even without the strike.
Jericho, a watchable after-the-atomic war show that had been given a new lease on life after a massive fan write-in
campaign, was granted a partial new season, still failed to attract audiences large enough for the network, and finally died for good, although the usual rumors that it might be picked up by another network swirled around for a while before fading away. One of last season’s big hits, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, has struggled in the ratings this year, having become even more grim and apocalyptic than it was before, and may be in jeopardy; I’d like to see it survive because it’s one of the few new SF shows in a sea of fantasy shows. Eureka, another SF show, seems to be doing well, although it’s pleasantly quirky and even comic instead of dark, intense, and violent, which may explain why.
They also seem to be darkening Heroes, which made it through the strike intact, but which has been taking substantial hits in the ratings recently, which may be cause and effect (in economic hard times, audiences don’t particularly want grim and depressing, getting enough of that in everyday life; the show has also become recomplicated enough that it’s almost impossible to keep track of the plot, which probably doesn’t help), and which has sunk low enough quickly enough that it may actually be in danger of being canceled, in spite of its Mega-Hit status last year; toward the end of the year, there was a big shake-up at Heroes, with several writers and producers fired, and we’ll see if that helps, although it may be too late. Smallville lost villain Lex Luthor when Michael Rosenbaum, the actor who has played him so vividly since the beginning of the series, decided to move on, a major blow that may eventually sink the show, although they’re gamely carrying on at the moment. Battlestar Galactica and Stargate Atlantis, both on hiatus at the moment, have announced that their upcoming seasons will be their last, although heartbroken fans can console themselves with the fact that each show will be followed by “two-hour special events” set in the same universe, and later by new spinoff shows, Caprica for Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe for Stargate Atlantis.
Perhaps the best of the new SF series is BBC America’s Primeval, which has been accurately referred to as “Torchwood meets Jurassic Park,” with a Torchwood-like team of investigators dealing with the incursions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts who for some unknown reason are popping through “anomalies” and wreaking havoc in the modern world. It’s a cleverly written show, intense and fast-moving, and the producers have been smart enough to vary the Prehistoric-Monster-of-the-Week formula with the occasional monster from the future, as well as bringing in time-travel paradoxes and Alternate Reality scenarios. Dr. Who and Torchwood are on hiatus (although, unlike most shows that go “on hiatus,” they’re expected to actually return), but BBC America also has a Young Adult Dr. Who spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures, ongoing as well.
If last year was The Year of the Cop, this year seems to be the year of the updated X-Files clones, with new shows Fringe, Eleventh Hour, and, to some degree, Sanctuary (with a splash of Hellboy thrown in), all repeating variations of The X-Files formula, some pretty blatantly. It’s too early to say if any of these shows are going to establish themselves, but although Fringe has the biggest guns behind it and has gotten the most praise and press coverage to date, Eleventh Hour seems to actually be edging it in the ratings. A hangover from the Year of the Cop is Life on Mars, about a present-day cop who’s mysteriously thrown back in time to 1973; this is actually the American version of the popular British limited series of the same name, and, unsurprisingly, I’ve already heard connoisseurs saying that the British version was better, but the American version may yet establish itself.
The campy old seventies’ show Knight Rider, about a crime-fighting boy and his talking robot car, has come roaring back from oblivion revved up and ready for action, although the question that haunted the old series haunts this one as well: With everything the car can do, what do you need the boy for? (The answer: for the love scenes and the occasional fistfight.) So far, its ratings have been unspectacular, and it may be sent back to the garage. Star Wars: The Clone Wars is the series TV version of this year’s feature film with the same name, and so far seems to be doing better than the movie did.
My Own Worst Enemy and Chuck danced on the borderline between SF and the spy thriller, with My Own Worst Enemy having perhaps the most SF-like element, technology that can infuse two very different personalities into the same person’s body, which they time-share unwittingly until the barriers between them start to break down; in spite of an interesting premise, though, My Own Worst Enemy has already been canceled, while Chuck seems to be doing fairly well.
Pushing Daisies was still much too self-consciously and self-congratulatory “weird” for my taste, and perhaps wore out its welcome with the rest of its audience as well, since ratings plummeted from last season, and its was canceled late in the year. Perhaps inspired by the initial success of Pushing Daisies last season are two new supernatural shows more lighthearted in tone than the rather grim Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, a Thorne Smith–like show called Valentine, about the problems faced by lingering mythological figures in dealing with the modern world, kind of like The Beverley Hillbillies with Greek gods instead of hillbillies, and The Ex-List, about a woman inspired by a prophecy to seek her One True Love. Valentine is doing very poorly in the ratings, and its future is doubtful, and The Ex-List has already been canceled. Legend of the Seeker, a rare high fantasy show, something not often seen on TV, is based on a Terry Goodkind novel, Wizard’s First Rule; and HBO is giving us a small-town Southern take on vampires, True Blood, based on the bestselling “Sookie Stack house” novels of Charlaine Harris. I still can’t deal with the returning Saving Grace (cop talks with her own personal angel) either, and I never warmed to the lawyer-has-vivid-hallucinations-or-visions-perhaps-sent-by-God show Eli Stone—which was canceled by the end of the year anyway. I don’t pay much attention to the long-established “supernatural” shows such as Medium, The Ghost Whisperer, and Supernatural, but they all seem to be doing fine, as are a number of “reality” shows based on investigating weird phenomena, such as Ghost Hunters, Monster Quest, and Paranormal State. The newer supernatural show Reaper is wobbling in the ratings a bit but still has a chance to survive.
Most of the buzz about upcoming shows seems to be being generated by Josh Whedon’s Dollhouse. The creator of former mega-hit Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Whedon gained a huge cult following for Buffy and for other shows such as Angel and Firefly, and a lot of people have high hopes that Whedon’s return to series TV, whose cast is peppered with Buffy and Angel alumni, will produce something similarly good. The premise doesn’t look promising to me, and its “downloading fake personalities and memories into spies to make them more effective agents” gimmick has already been preempted to some extent by My Own Worse Enemy, but Whedon is an extremely talented writer who has spun unlikely thread into gold before, so it’ll be interesting to see if he can do it again with Dollhouse.
A TV mini-series version of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic was released in the United Kingdom, but if it’s gotten on to the airwaves in the U.S. yet, I so far haven’t been able to find it.
Coming up from AMC is a new version of the old British show The Prisoner, another cult favorite, which Prisoner fans seem to be either dreading or looking forward to with anticipation, depending on who you talk to, and mini-series versions of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones from HBO and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars from AMC. Let’s hope that they can do a better job with them than the Sci Fi Channel did with Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
The 66th World Science Fiction Convention, Denvention 3, was held in Denver, Colorado, from August 6 to August 11, 2008. The 2008 Hugo Awards, presented at Denvention 3, were: Best Novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon; Best Novella, All Seated on the Ground, by Connie Willis; Best Novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang; Best Short Story, “Tideline,” by Elizabeth Bear; Best Related Book, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, by Jeff Prucher; Best Professional Editor, Long Form, David G. Hartwell; Best Pr
ofessional Editor, Short Form, Gordon Van Gelder; Best Professional Artist, Stephan Martiniere; Best Dramatic Pre sen ta tion (short form), Doctor Who, “Blink”; Best Dramatic Presentation (long form), Stardust; Best Semi-prozine, Locus, edited by Kristen Gong-Wong and Lisa Groen Trombi; Best Fanzine, File 770, edited by Mike Glyer; Best Fan Writer, John Scalzi; Best Fan Artist, Brad Foster; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Mary Robinette Kowal.
The 2007 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown in Austin, Texas, on April 26, 2008, were: Best Novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon; Best Novella, Fountain of Age, by Nancy Kress; Best Novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang; Best Short Story, “Always,” by Karen Joy Fowler; Best Script, Pan’s Labyrinth, by Guillermo Del Toro; the Andre Norton Award to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling; plus the Author Emeritus Award to Ardath Mayhar and the Grand Master Award to Michael Moorcock.
The 2008 World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on November 2, 2008, during the Seventeenth Annual World Fantasy Convention, were: Best Novel, Ysabel, by Guy Gavriel Kay; Best Novella, Illyria, by Elizabeth Hand; Best Short Fiction, “Singing of Mount Abora,” by Theodore Goss; Best Collection, Tiny Deaths, by Robert Shearman; Best Anthology, Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow; Best Artist, Edward Miller; Special Award (Professional), to Peter Crowther, for PS Publishing; Special Award (Non-Professional), to Midori Syner and Terri Windling for the Endicott Studios Web site; plus the Life Achievement Award to Patricia McKillip and Leo and Diane Dillon.
The 2008 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Downtown Radisson Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 29, 2008, were: Best Novel, The Missing, by Sarah Langan; Best First Novel, Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill; Best Long Fiction, “Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway,” by Gary Braunbeck; Best Short Fiction, “The Gentle Brush of Wings,” by David Niall Wilson; Best Collection, Proverbs For Monsters, by Michael A. Anzen and 5 Stories, by Peter Straub (tie); Best Anthology, Five Strokes to Midnight, edited by Gary Braunbeck and Hank Schwaeble; Non-Fiction, The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange & Downright Bizarre, by Jonathan Maberry and David F. Kramer; Best Poetry Collection, Being Full of Light, Insubstantial, by Linda Addison, and Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet, by Charlee Jacob and Marge B. Simon (tie); plus Lifetime Achievement Awards to John Carpenter and Robert Weinberg.
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