Sci-fi films are as 'dead as Westerns', according to Ridley Scott. He recently informed us of the future genre's demise while in Venice to present the 'definitive' director's cut of Blade Runner, which he began working on in 2000. One senses a certain desire for closure.

Of course, Sir Ridley's obituary ('There's nothing original ... we've seen it all before') for a genre that goes all the way back to Georges Melies' 1902 Le Voyage Dans La Lune didn't go uncontested.

In a recent article, Paul Howlett reminded us that 'there are plenty of modern sci-fi movies in which a superior intelligence can be discerned alongside the computer-generated imagery', citing Children Of Men and Sunshine among other recent titles. Howlett also pointed out that, rather like punk, the Western is not dead either. Two new Westerns, one a remake (3:10 To Yuma) and the other an adaptation of a bestselling book (The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) have just premiered to rave reviews.

Keeping up with film evolution

What interests me in this debate is not whether Westerns, or sci-fi movies, are dead or alive; it'll be 'oh yes it is' for some and 'oh no it isn't' for others until the cows (or the replicants) come home.

It's more rewarding to ask how people view genres, and to note how these perceptions always tend to lag behind the evolution of the genre.

Take the Western. Kids tend to mention cowboys and Indians, or cowboys with guns and horses, if asked to define the term. Later, a more workable and precise definition could be: frontier stories set mostly in the western United States in the latter half of the 19th century.

More reflective souls might then add that these stories are usually about the end of a lifestyle and set of values: a nomadic way of life, governed by a primitive code of honour, which is threatened by change.

The final refinement, generally reached only by those that attend film school or work in the industry, is the recognition that the Western doesn't even need to be set in the West. In script workshops, pitching sessions and film studies seminars, the idea that Star Wars is not a sci-fi movie but a Western set in space, is so common it's become a cliche.

Same difference

Now, genres don't often become extinct (film noir is perhaps the only example, but there's some argument about whether this was ever any more than a cousin-with-attitude of the enduring mystery family). What usually happens is that they evolve into something else. But because our perceptions of them are slower to change, we are sometimes fooled into thinking that they've gone away.

This argument needs more space than I can give it here, but for now let me just chart one such evolution. There was a time when the sweeping, tragic romance of thwarted passion and self-sacrifice could be set in the present or near present: Brief Encounter and Casablanca are classic examples.

But as film itself has lost some of the magical aura it had in the heyday of the star system, we had to provide the mythical distance required for such stories to have effect by pushing them into the past and grafting them onto the action epic (Titanic), or by presenting them as period homages (Far From Heaven).

Then someone had an idea: why not put a sweeping, tragic romance of thwarted passion and self-sacrifice inside a Western-style container' And we got Brokeback Mountain. And then someone did it again, but without the gay sex: and we got The Assassination of Jesse James, which is as much a tragic male love story as it is a cowboy flick.

Some would say that The Lord of The Rings is a tragic love story masquerading as a fantasy Western. But I don't buy that argument at all. It's more of a three-part rom-com with orcs.