looking back to the future

My heart sinks at the trailer for Tron Legacy. Apart from purely commercial reasons, why would you want to create a futuristic aesthetic based on something that might have looked interesting twenty years ago but was still highly flawed?

I’m not against retro-styled futurism per se. The Edwardian look in parts of David Lynch’s Dune worked well, as did the 1940s styling of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but they were both conscious attempts to create something new that was influenced by the past. Both, too, had major weaknesses, but they felt like genuine attempts to try something different.

The Flash Gordon film was a more self-conscious tongue-in-cheek echo of the 1950s, and suffered as a result. Perhaps we’re due a 1960s based vision next? Then we’ll be back to the 1970s and Space 1999, which is currently being broadcast on ITV4 and looks badly dated.