Sorry, me not making myself clear now... it was a genuine question. I've not seen Avatar so I really don't know whether it's genuine sci-fi or just space opera.
But 'space opera' is a sub-genre of SF... I refer you to Brian Stableford in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, who argues: "as it was coined as a complaint about pulp cliche, it seems reasonable to limit its use to genre SF." Space opera is basically big, romantic SF. (BTW, this has an interesting cross-over with the term 'sci-fi' which is generally used by SF critics to refer to hackwork - so
Star Wars is indeed 'sci-fi'... serious speculative or science-fiction is 'SF' or 'sf'....)
Well, you could say that about films generally, not just SF.
You could, and I think it was the great SF writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who said "Ninety percent of science fiction is shit. Then again, ninety percent of everything is shit." But my I think the situation is more extreme with the relationship between SF film and SF literature.
By the way, Total Recall is a truly great film
I like it too, but I wouldn't go that far! It's a good and enjoyable romp. And it at least gets some of Dick's sense of humour (which most of the other adaptations of his work do not).
And I think you rather underrate Brazil, which is better than "moderately clever" - it's totally brilliant.
I'm not a huge Gilliam fan. Most of his stuff is flabby. But it's perhaps his best film apart from
Twelve Monkeys.
Gibson is partly responsible for that himself, since he wrote the screenplay. But surely all that proves is that his books don't translate well into films. Which probably explains why it's taken so long to make Neuromancer. Yet Blade Runner, which has many similarities to Neuromancer, is generally regarded as the best sci-fi film ever. Also look at the superb and rather Gibson-esque Videodrome. (I know Cronenberg isn't generally considered sci-fi, but I'd argue that much of his work has far more right to be called sci-fi than anything George Lucas has done.)
I know Gibson wrote the screenplay - but you should read what he wrote about writing the screenplay, and then what was done to it during and after filming and you will get more of an idea of why it turned out the way it did. Because of the response he got to his original serious script, Gibson deliberately messed around with his original story and heightened its unreality, making it very critical and satirical of Hollywood SF films, but then "Basically what happened was it was taken away and re-cut by the American distributor in the last month of its prerelease life, and it went from being a very funny, very alternative piece of work to being something that had been very unsuccessfully chopped and cut into something more mainstream."
It's now too late for
Neuromancer, unfortunately - especially after the (also hacky and unconvincing)
Matrix Trilogy. I'd agree on
Bladerunner being about as good as it gets in SF film, although I think the similarities with
Neuromancer end with the background world-building - the whole point of
Neuromancer is the cyberspace / meatspace divide. In fact, the original of
Tron probably has more visually in common with Gibson's depiction of cyberspace, but with no substance whatsover. So it's rather ironic that Hollywood has now invested massively in remaking
Tron rather than, once again, adapting an original and substantial SF work... same as
Avatar, it's all about pretty pictures and flashy lights.
I don't disagree with you about Cronenberg, except to say that most of his work is most definitely SF and is considered as such. The
Encyclopedia of SF (again) calls him "one of the most important practitioners of SF in any medium". Personally, I'm not sure I like his films much, even though I admire them.
A final note on Lucas - he did make one superb SF film -
THX-1138 - which is basically an unacknowledged adaptation of Zamyatin's
We that grew out of his final year film-school project. In terms of SF films about authoritarianism, it beats
Brazil every time for me... he seemed to go backwards after that.
