Strange news from another star: Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Photograph: Kobal Collection
Sir Ridley Scott believes that the science fiction movie is a spent force; an extinct race; a decommissioned battlestar. Talking in Venice, where he was presenting another new cut of Blade Runner, the director declared the genre as dead as the western.
"There's nothing original," says Scott. "We've seen it all before. Been there. Done it." Asked to pick out examples, he said: "All of them. Yes, all of them."
Scott - who has been responsible for two sci-fi classics (he also directed Alien) - went on to add that no film in the genre could ever beat Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, "the best of the best".
Scott's comparison of the two genres will not have been accidental. Both Westerns and science fiction deal in stories of heroic pioneers, fighting battles that act as parables for our own times. In the 70s when sci-fi flourished, interplanetary exploration - played out through the Cold War's space race - must have seemed much more relevant to people's everyday lives and concerns than the cowboy films they replaced.
Yet that hasn't stopped great westerns like Unforgiven and Brokeback Mountain being made since, and it seems insane to write off an entire genre of films just because one generation of film-makers has moved on.
Sure, so most sci-fi movies are now adapted from comics rather than novels (let's not even go near that hot potato), and get franchised and merchandised to within an inch of their genetic make-ups.
They might not always live up to the same intellectual and artistic heights that Scott and Kubrick's best work in the genre achieved. Few films do. But the likes of Starship Troopers, Serenity - even Sunshine - tackle complex intellectual questions: they also understand that it's also really cool to show stuff getting blown up.
And whatever the malaise among movie sci-fi, on the small screen the genre has never been in ruder health with Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who and lots more to look forward to in the new TV season. So what do you think?
