Sci-fi blockbusters no longer bust blocks like they used to. Despite the futuristic zeitgeist us new-millennium folks are supposed to be surfing, the champion of today's box office is just as likely to be wielding a Roman broadsword as a laser gun. Historical epics are back, and they're more epic than ever. More importantly, they're easier to make than ever.
Ever since Jurassic Park, the blockbuster formula has been simple: old idea, new effects. Once the computer-generated image became an industry standard, all you needed to do was salvage a story from the sci-fi scrapheap (take your pick from dinosaurs, alien invaders, meteorites, natural disasters, killer sea creatures), slap on some "state of the art" effects, and laugh all the way to the bank. It's worked for the past decade or so, but in recent months, the formula has gone wrong as often as it has gone right. Brian de Palma's $90million space turkey Mission To Mars, for example, was a transparent attempt to feed us Kubrick's 2001 again, and no one bought it. Walter Hill's $70million shambles Supernova suffered a similar fate - aside from the novelty of zero-gravity sex scenes, it was basically Alien again. (At least Hill had the foresight to take his name off the picture, just as the studio had the foresight not to hold any preview screenings.) The forthcoming Pitch Black, while a substantial improvement in the originality stakes, still failed to set the US box office alight. And let's not go into Battlefield Earth. In fact, the most successful and imaginative sci-fi flicks of recent times have been Star Wars Episode I (call that new?), The Matrix (which, tellingly, had snappy new special effects) and Galaxy Quest, a sci-fi spoof.
Like spoilt toddlers, audiences need new toys on a regular basis, and the more prescient industry players saw the ugly spectre of sci-fi fatigue rearing its head a long way off. They realised that the way forward was not forward at all. If computer power could be used to create those tired old sci-fi futures, why not use it to re-create the real-world past? Hey presto! Titanic!
If former sci-fi diehard James Cameron could score big with a 90-year-old sinking ship, and win an armful of Oscars to boot, what else could be done? Spielberg ditched the dinos and went to war for Saving Private Ryan, and he came out with an Oscar too. French event-movie master Luc Besson tried next, but the tactic didn't quite pay off. His The Fifth Element was one of the best examples of the modern-day effects movie, despite one of the dumbest storylines ever committed to screen (goodies must stop baddies from destroying earth: they do). This year his ambition, and his faith in leading lady Milla Jovovich, got the better of him when he attempted to join the ranks of the "serious" directors with his own Gallic-flavoured historical epic, Joan Of Arc. And of course, leading this year's charge, sci-fi great Ridley Scott struck gold by going ancient for Gladiator.
Where others had only hinted, Gladiator brazenly demonstrated that full-scale historical epics were viable again - and they hadn't been for more than a decade. The historical epic of yore required a cast of thousands, enormous sets, and pedantic historical accuracy. Big bucks, in other words, which was fine in Cecil B de Mille's day but became increasingly hazardous as time went on. There was so much to get wrong, and when it did go wrong the results were catastrophic. Ask Michael Cimino, who never really recovered from his $35million flop Heaven's Gate, or Hugh Hudson, who took down Goldcrest Films with his Al Pacino-starring 80s effort, Revolution. The failure of that civil war epic prompted critic Leonard Maltin to quip, "Thanks to this megabomb, it'll be 2776 until we get another one." He was out by 776 years.
There's no better indication of the turning tide than producer-director team Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. They gleefully rode the wave of sci-fi revamps with the chest-beating Independence Day, then they were forced to eat their slogan - "size does matter" - when their hulking entry into the big reptile market, Godzilla, came crashing to the ground (size doesn't matter, you fools, effects do).
This year they scored big again by switching to the historical formula. No doubt encouraged by the knee-jerk patriotism which made Independence Day so popular in the States, they decided to simply make it again, this time based on the real independence day. Hence the Mel Gibson-starring civil war epic, The Patriot. Like the rest of the sci-fi defectors, Devlin and Emmerich recognised that computer animation has eliminated the risks which scuppered "old-fashioned" historical epics, and the two genres have become interchangeable. So why "kick ET's butt" when you can kick a child-murdering Limey's butt (with historical justification)? Why blow up an alien spaceship when you can blow up an 18th-century battleship just as easily? Why hire 1,500 extras for a battle scene when you can just dress up 50 and fill in the rest with a computer? Costs down, profits up, audiences happy. You might even win an Oscar.
This week we're back in the Colosseum for another lavish sandal-fest, Julie Taymor's Shakespeare adaptation Titus. Although much of the production gloss is real rather than computer-rendered (the director was responsible for the stage version of The Lion King, after all), many of the same themes that made Gladiator so popular are present - power struggles and revenge tactics in ancient Rome, bloody combat with primitive weaponry, grand interiors and costumes, emperors with eye-shadow. Although its application is more subtle, computer rendering is still widely deployed: for the multi-layered dream sequences; for the plot's intermittent dismemberments (so difficult to achieve with the conventional long sleeves and false stumps); and for adding a Matrix-style, bullet-time zip to the climax.
Titus is a particularly distinguished example of how the historical epic can be resurrected (ie with some restraint and intelligence), but the studio bean-counters are currently throwing millions of dollars at a new (computer) generation of these movies. The related world of swords-and-sorcery epics is due to come into play again soon, with game cash-in Dungeons And Dragons and Peter Jackson's hugely ambitious Lord Of The Rings trilogy in production (he's apparently using the whole of New Zealand as the set). In real history, there's Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer's second world war epic Pearl Harbor on the horizon, with Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin and Kate Beckinsale among others, which already has the dubious distinction of being the most expensive movie since Titanic.
If the historical craze continues, aside from making intellectually challenged movie moguls even more money, what will be the consequences for history? Perhaps movies will distort it beyond all resemblance to factual reality - after all, that's what movies do best. People will assume that all Romans had fringes and spoke English (some with Australian accents), that the British are the sole cause of evil and injustice in the world, that slaves enjoyed being classified as property and that the second world war was won single-handedly by the Americans (who defeated the British, of course). Perhaps they'll even forget that people used to make movies about spaceships and dinosaurs. Then we can start all over again.
• Titus is out on Friday
