I’m right that this is a thing, aren’t I? First, there’s the awesome-looking trailer for X-Men: First Class, which, like Mad Men, appears to be a movie about people with secret identities living in Westchester County in the 1960s:

Now, we’ve got the World War II awesomeness of Captain America: The First Avenger, which looks terrific and cartoony-but-not-cheap in the way the beginning of Hellboy was:

I sort of wonder if this is all due to Pirates of the Caribbean, which is getting back to its period roots (I actually think part of what made the first movie effective was the sense of English gentility badly transplanted into a world where the line between natural hazards of a new colony and the supernatural were delicately shaded) by looping in Edward Teach in the fourth installment in the franchise:

Jack Sparrow legitimately counts as sort of a superhero, right? Particularly when they remember to make him competent and crazy, instead of fey and annoying?

Anyway, I’ll be curious to see if this becomes a genuine trend (Watchmen obviously has the opening credits, but the movie does take place in contemporary times, even if they’re not precisely our own). I don’t know if we’re reaching back into the past for trials that seem to require sufficiently superheroic response, or if we want the world around our human cartoons to be exaggerated and stylish as well.

I don’t actually have it yet. But I feel a twinge of disappointment on learning that SyFy’s development slate is so heavily stacked with stories about people with extraordinary abilities. If we’re really thinking about what’s going to happen in the future, it doesn’t just involve changes in what it means to be human, a category of change of which superpowers are really only subset. It betrays a lack of ambition, or perhaps an extreme narcissism, that those appear to be the only themes we can think of.

We need a Red Mars adaptation.We need a great Ender’s Game adaptation. We need an awesome, weird, movie series based on Mary Doria Russell’s Rakhat novels. I would also really like adaptations of Steel Beach and Brothers. And this is just the adaptations. Stories about exploration of other planets, about encounters with aliens that don’t just involve blowing up downtown Los Angeles, stories about environmental degradation, about the advancements of medicine and their costs—there is so much we have to do with science and speculative fiction. I hate the lack of ambition people have for the genre. Romantic comedies are about fulfilling specific urges and cliched narratives. Science fiction ought to be part of the way we dream ourselves into our own future.

This looks unfortunate:

Or rather, Kim Cattrall looks like she gives pretty good performance in what is otherwise a fairly obvious-looking movie that pretends to be daring by combining sex and the countryside.