DONALD CLARKEsends his film avatar far into the future

ALL HAIL OUR lizard overlords! Bow down before their herald, Procurator Screenwriter! Once again, as authorised by Skalon the Magnificent, I speak to you on the subject of cinema.

It is more than 200 years since primitive monkey-men from the decadent gastro-colony then called France first projected images of hurtling trains on the wall of a rude dwelling. How mighty they felt. Little did these shrugging, barely cognisant marmosets suspect that, a century and a half later, an army of superior intergalactic voyagers would perfect their sub-society through a process of benevolent annihilation and progressive enslavement.

Today’s subject is the decline of the art form that has developed from those crude animated cave paintings. This is a time of great crisis for the beautiful medium. Blame counter-revolutionary humanoids and their reactionary reluctance to serve as our rulers’ main food source. The active debasing of high art will not destabilise our happy equilibrium.

There are nothing but sequels, reboots and remakes in the cinemapods.

Pirates of the Caribbean 142: Avast Ye Landlubbersshows a marked decline in standards. The great Pirates reboots of 2034, 2186 and 2199 invested fresh energies into this great sequence. Not for nothing did New, New, New Wave gastro-colonist critics praise the series as the finest Americaland films since the great days of Brett Ratner and Michael Bay. But Avast Ye Landlubbers just feels like more of the same.

Let us be honest. Even the great Rush Hour sequence began to seem a little tired when it limped into its second century. Only the most fervent fans admired the eighth Decalogue of Transfomersfilms.

The Harry Potterfilms never suffered in this way. High Chancellor Rowling, granted eternity by rulers enamoured of her mystic adventures, delivered a total of 147 Potternovels. It was entirely just of our rulers to institute the death penalty for any critics – via the so-called "My Little Boy Loved Them" edict – who dared to issue bad reviews of those glorious entertainments. Dissent is the luxury of doomed societies.

Elsewhere, however, a terrible addiction to repetition has set in. This is a new phenomenon. You never heard critic-bots making such complaints in cinema’s golden period at the beginning of the 21st century.

And yet. While this message is being broadcast directly into your brain by quasi-organic technologies; while television is now available as a handy pill; while pop music is applied as a soothing unguent, cinema enthusiasts still travel to gargantuaplexes to fully appreciate the week’s big new releases.

We should not be altogether surprised. Young entities still need a parent-free space to practice their developing mating rituals, as well as somewhere to shelter from attacks by the wasp-beings of Bezeltium.

All hail the overlords!