Remember that ComicCon 2010 buzz about Tron: Legacy helmer Joseph Kosinski being “the new James Cameron“? After Tron made the rounds he began to look like the new Peter Hyams. And now Kosinki’s latest project, a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing called Oblivion, has been scuttled by Disney.

Kosinski, 36, will bounce back and may even make something good some day, but it’s entirely possible that he won’t. He’s one of the gamer/comic-book generation directors (Battle LA‘s Jonathan Liebesman, 35, is another) and I just don’t trust these guys. At all. Their heads are all about hard-drive visions and jizz-flash sensations, and they all seem to have some kind of cheap CG virus running through their veins.

The rap against the early ’70s whiz kids (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma, etc.) is that they weren’t bringing any real-life experience to their films — only love of other movies. But in retrospect their output seems quite fertile and meditative compared to that of Kosinski and Leibesman and their ilk — born in the 1970s and reared on the infantile fantasies brought about by Lucas and Spielberg, and nurtured by action figures, video games and computers, and destined to bring so much anguish to the likes of myself.

Everything that I love, admire and cherish about the Spanish and south-of-the-border fraternity (Inarritu, Del Toro, Cuaron, Lubezski, Amenabar, Bayona. etc.) is missing in sound-and-fury empties like Kosinski and Liebesman and their slick-operator elders Guy Ritchie and Michael Bay, et. al. They and the suits who support them at the studios are nothing less than a scourge, a pestilence…the spawn of Hollywood seed pods. And who pays to see their films? The ComicCon culture. This is why I’m not entirely kidding about F4 Phantoms strafing the faithful in San Diego, etc.

As God is my witness I never want to see a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing ever again.