But as the years went by the film industry had a bigger and bigger problem with the spectacle. History education was not what it once was. A filmmaker knew exactly what it cost to put a Viking on the screen, but was less and less sure that the viewer in the audience actually knew what a Viking was. You know, they seem to be a lot like old-time Klingons. So the big, often dumb, spectacle films are moving from historical themes to science fiction ones.
Science fiction is the mythology of our age.
Let's show a giant monster trampling New York City. But a bigger and bigger piece of the spectacle output is also science fiction. So by proportion it looks like special effects are taking over the science fiction film. In fact we are getting about the same number of decent science fiction films that we have gotten for decades and the spectacle films that at one time would have been historical are now in large part science fiction. Several months ago Porter, played by Mel Gibson, was double-crossed and left for dead after he participated in a robbery.