NOTE (July 2008) -- What happened to this movie. It hasn't been made. Thank heavens I suppose.

On Friday the 2nd of September 2005 I learned from a movie-fan friend that Stephen Spielberg was planning a remake of When Worlds Collide (1951). A quick Internet search produces these links to links on the original movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044207/
http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/w/whenworldscollide.q.shtml
http://www.zyra.org.uk/collide.htm

I'm going out on a limb and I'm going to publish a movie review just delivered by a tragic accident with a time-machine and a postal worker.

When Worlds Collide (2005-6?)
Dir. Stephen Spielberg

Hollywood ran out of new Sci-Fi and Fantasy movie plot ideas in the early 1990s. Fans of these genres have suffered remakes of Planet of The Apes, The Time Machine, Lost in Space, Rollerball, Solaris, Godzilla, War of The Worlds, The Stepford Wives, The Wild Wild West, The Avengers, Willy Wonka (aka) and The Jetsons (amongst many others). All of these remakes have been pallid, politically correct, brain-dead worthless, forgettable, big-screen eye candy that is released on DVD before they have time to stuff the last reel of 35mm film back into the cans.

Spielberg has produced a string of Sci-Fi movies in the last decade that consistently miss the mark of everything required to make a cult movie. Movies like A.I and Minority Report had the potential to be cult classics, but Spielberg turned them into overlong, jumbled sentimental mush, as he does with all of his modern works. Everything Spielberg has produced since the late 70s has been hackneyed and predictable. Even Spielberg's attempts to "break out" and be taken seriously are corny nonsense; Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List are classic examples that reek of his predictable sentimentality, despite their seemingly lofty pretensions

So now Spielberg is going to remake When Worlds Collide ... Oh lord save us genre fans! I can see it already, as clear as the plot of Titanic. There will be a quirky scientist who no one understands at first; a painfully nice kid (girl or boy) with a round face and that damn bobby hairdo; a nice grandpa with white hair who will sacrifice himself; a rich and evil character who is redeemed at the end; a few constipated side-plots involving terrorism; an overload of jittery digital special effects; a barely saved romance; hope for the American world view of humanity; buckets of sentimentality; blah blah. You just have to combine Independence Day, Deep Impact and Airport 75 (or maybe Flying High by the Zucker brothers) to predict this one. The movie will blast us senseless over the screens for a several weeks with those irritating quick-cut rock-video style promos, then go live, then be released on DVD a few weeks later.

We can only hope that the nice kid with the bobby hair gets to take the potentially doomed white-haired grandpa into space on the last rocket out-of-town along with his puppy. This is roughly what I expect from Spielberg.

This movie will suck and blow. It will be an insult to fans of the Sci-Fi genre, dumbed-down, boiled in cheap oil and served on cold toast for a listless audience who will buy a ticket to anything that has enough marketing hype. Skip the movie release and rent it on DVD when it hits the $2 weekly rack a several weeks later. In any case, I must wonder who the hell is funding Spielberg's endless string of Sci-Fi dreck, and I can't imagine what crazed marketing machine is steering this insanity. Someone must be making money out this mess.

By amazing coincidence, 2 days before writing this web page I re-read most of the book End of The World News, the 26th novel by prolific author Anthony Burgess. I say "most of" because I skipped the Freud and Trotsky threads of the story to concentrate upon the "end of the world" part. Burgess is not generally known as a Sci-Fi author (except perhaps for the singular and peculiar A Clockwork Orange), but he has quietly produced a gem of a story that describes the end of the world in a touching, frightening and poetic way. Novels like Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer and Childhood's End have documented startling end-of-the-world scenarios, and Burgess has cut through the melodrama of the other authors and has produced a concise and chilling vision of the end of the world, with a strange and tantalising hint of hope at the end.

There is no doubt, Spielberg's remake will be disappointing, easily digestible and forgettable junk.

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