Battlestar Galactica fans are a funny old lot. Delve just a little way into the interweb and you'll find forum threads dedicated to demanding a revival of the original 1978 Glen Larson series, complete with robot Cylons with silly vocoder voices and ... apparently ... the original cast – even though many of them long ago shuffled off this mortal coil.

What's even stranger is that it looks like they may be about to get their wish: this report in Latino Review suggests that Bryan Singer's forthcoming Battlestar Galactica movie is going to take its cues from Larson's show, rather than the excellent 2004 take with Edward James Olmos, Katee Sackhoff et al. There are some very good reasons why this is a very bad idea indeed.

First of all, if you were given the choice between Cylons who look human and are able to do interesting stuff like create intrigue and sinister plots (not to mention Cylons in the form of six-foot blonde uber-vixens and Cylons who look just like your mates), or Cylons who resemble giant tin cans and generally don't get much past mouthing "By your command" in monotone, which would you plump for?

The original TV show also gave us a robot dog named Muffit and a male Starbuck, eliminating any potential for (hetero)sexual friction between its two leads. It only ran for one season and later evolved into the even cheesier Galactica 1980, a cheap follow-up which saw the survivors of the 12 colonies arrive on modern-day Earth.

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica update, instead, managed to do something nobody had thought possible: it took a much-loved but pretty hokey old show and transformed it into unmissable, cerebral TV: a space opera show for grownups that easily delivered the required bang for one's buck while transforming the age-old put-upon humans-fleeing-mean-robots storyline into a metaphor for America's post-9/11 siege mentality. The show asked all kinds of questions about the nature of humanity that wouldn't have been out of place in an Iain M Banks novel, and viewers often found themselves questioning their own morality. At least I can't be the only one who felt a pang or two of guilt at the thrill of watching one of the more hot-tempered characters (and there were more than a few of these) decide to hang diplomacy in favour of simply putting a particularly irritating enemy out of the airlock.

The other problem here is Singer, who inexplicably retains the veneer of a film-maker with vision despite a back catalogue that, for the most part, ranges from deeply average (the X-Men films, Apt Pupil, Valkyrie) to painfully dull and derivative (Superman Returns). Only The Usual Suspects rises above these standards. How many other film-makers retain Singer's standing based on just one strong movie out of seven?

The only saving grace here is that Singer has a habit of setting up projects that never quite see the light of day. Latino Review reckons he's also interested in a big screen outing for The Six Million Dollar Man (ingeniously retitled The Six Billion Dollar Man to account for inflation). What next? A Fall Guy movie? They wouldn't, would they?

Perhaps Singer thinks aping the simpler 1970s Battlestar Galactica is an easier challenge than trying to bring a more sophisticated effort to the multiplexes. In a way, that's an approach that worked rather well for JJ Abrams's Star Trek, which eschewed the TV shows' occasional penchant for social satire in favour of a straight-up action adventure take. TrekMovie.com reports this week that the sequel to it will begin shooting on 15 January for a 2013 release date, with Abrams returning to the director's chair. The writing team of Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof are currently working on a third draft of the screenplay, while Abrams has apparently been scouting locations in Hawaii for potential scenes on a jungle planet. Is Star Trek II about to get all Avatar – or worse, forest moon of Endor – on us?

It was revealed earlier this month that producers are hoping to persuade Benicio Del Toro to take the role of the main villain, but there's no suggestion at this stage he will play Khan, the bad guy from the last movie to be titled Star Trek II (generally recognised as the best of the William Shatner films).

"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again", as the 2004 Battlestar Galactica repeatedly told us, and it seems that Hollywood follows pretty much the same mantra when it comes to big-budget science fiction in 2011. Abrams's Star Trek proved that doesn't have to be such a calamity. Let's hope Singer's Battlestar Galactica, if it ever sees the light of day, manages to reinvent the show with as much vim and verve as the later series. And gives the robot dogs a miss.