Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I hate to say it, but there seems to have been some sort of dumbing down as far as movies go.
Hollywood has the idea that movies have to be dumb. But especially movies for or about teenagers have to be really dumb!
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
There are very few films that work like a novel.
Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.
Films must all have the same structure. All of this to guarantee box office bonanza, which of course it never does, but that's another discussion entirely.
I think sci-fi films have become rather bleak, and understandably so - I think we've made some big mistakes globally with how we're developing, and we deal with that guilt by creating these very dystopian futures in films.
It's ironic: In movies, the most successful films of all time have been sci-fi or fantasy. By far. But a lot of people won't even read science fiction books.
It's actually smarter to make a dumb film.
SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.