Are There Truly Any New Ideas?

 

As I gather my ideas for my zombie monster film On the 7th Dawn, I find just how difficult it is to create a strinkingly new and original idea, something that hasn't been beaten to death, or  at least touched on, previously in either movies, books, or comic books. Even if the idea has never been used in the context in which I'm doing it, it has somehow been done in some way, or something like it.

I plan for this flick to be dynamic and original, but can anything really be original? If something is too original, it will fail because no one can relate to it, since it is completely original and foreign to the audience. Something so unique, though a failure in its day, will one day be said to be "ahead of its time." But only in the future. Of course, this still won't help the movie, because it was still a failure in its day.

If we can't relate a thing to something else, we have no reference. And if we have no reference, we can completely blind to it.

For example, if we see a movie play in the fourth dimension, we wouldn't even know what we're look at, if we see it at all. So playing a movie in the fourth dimension would be useless to us.

But let's say a fourth dimensional being pops into our universe, we may not know what it is, we don't recognize it, so we don't see it. We may see something from the corner of our eye and turn to look and then see nothing, believing it to be our imagination. But 300 years in the future our society now lives with fourth-dimensial beings. We now see them walk in and out of our reality, and seeing this is completely normal. Now we watch fourth-dimensional movies like no big deal, because we can relate it to something else: our fourth dimensional friends.

Hmmm...maybe that was too far out there.

I guess the mission would be to create something that has the feel of something new, but be based on things we can relate to and are familiar with.

The movie Cowboys & Aliens. Is this a new idea? Or two familiar ideas put together? We know aliens. We know cowboys. Put them together and you have a 'new' movie idea. We can relate to it. We can't relate to a movie called "Sifflex of the 19,412th Dimensional Portal of Orr-Van Dool vs. The Blockaal Miuune of Triasta." We have no reference so we can't relate and it will be a flop. But in 1000 years it'll be the best things since sliced you-know-what, a cult classic.(and don't even think of stealing that title, dude, or I beat you!)

But if we knew that Sifflex and Orr-Van Dool were the names of a populated planet and city in another galaxy and Blockaal Miuune is an intergalactic warlord of his planet called Triasta, theeen we can make sense of it because we can relate to it.

How do we create something uniquely original? And as movie-watchers and filmmakers, do we truly want something original? Or something old, packaged slighty different? The verdict is still out on that one. I'd love your thoughts on it.

 What's an original movie in your opinion and why?