Battlestar Galactica

[Furiously]

http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/11/battlestar-galactica-movie-starts-coming-together/

Can Jaws be that far behind?

[Setanta]

While I enjoyed the reboot on its own merits, nostalgia kicked in as soon as I saw what looks like the original vipers. As long as they leave the stupid robotic dog out of it.

Then again, I wouldn't mind a Flash Gordon reboot. Timothy Dalton and Brian Blessed could reprise Vultan and Barin.

Nah fuck it - that movie was perfect - reboot Buck Rogers instead or start afresh with some 2000AD material. :D

[Shannow]

How do you do this as a movie?

Sounds like a bad idea.

[Father mike]

Wasn't it a movie before it was a TV show?  Or was the pilot just shown in theaters?

[Engels]

It was a full blown movie. You young 'uns, I swear. Also, a Flash Gordon remake would be a reboot of a TV series and I agree, the film needs no improvement.

[Ruvaldt]

The original movie was a pilot that was released theatrically in the international market, but broadcast on TV by ABC in the US.  It didn't get edited and released theatrically in the US until a year after its broadcast on ABC.

[jgsugden]

Yep... and 1 the original concept was a series of television movies, not a tv series. If you think about the major beats of the stories as they've been told, I think a trilogy would work fine:  Maybe Cylon uprising in one, the journey in the second, and defending Earth in the third.

[Venkman]

Can't wait. Reboot was awesome.

How do you do this as a movie?

Sounds like a bad idea.

Like this

[eldaec]

Yep... and 1 the original concept was a series of television movies, not a tv series. If you think about the major beats of the stories as they've been told, I think a trilogy would work fine:  Maybe Cylon uprising in one, the journey in the second, and defending Earth in the third.

If they have any sense they will never do 'finding earth'.

Just keep doing more journey movies till everyone gets bored, then leave it hanging. There is no way to end a Battlestar story well.

In fact I wonder if part of the logic behind this is someone wanting an eternal franchise like Disney.

[Teleku]

I'm mentally way too firmly entrenched in the reboot universe as the real Battlestar Galactica for me to give this movie a fair shake, no matter how good it is (and I watched the original movie before I saw the reboot).   

Though I'm willing to bet money it will probably be pure shit like most of the "we have no ideas left, lets rape the childhood of every age demographic and see what sticks" type movies Hollywood has been pumping out the last 15 years.

Yep... and 1 the original concept was a series of television movies, not a tv series. If you think about the major beats of the stories as they've been told, I think a trilogy would work fine:  Maybe Cylon uprising in one, the journey in the second, and defending Earth in the third.

If they have any sense they will never do 'finding earth'.

Just keep doing more journey movies till everyone gets bored, then leave it hanging. There is no way to end a Battlestar story well.

In fact I wonder if part of the logic behind this is someone wanting an eternal franchise like Disney.

Well (spoiling both Battlestar series endings, don't click if you haven't seen):

[eldaec]

If they'd stopped after the second season I'd agree with you. But everything from the boxing episode on was so bad I'm more than happy to see someone else try it it out.

All of this has happened before.....

[Jade Falcon]

They need to arrive back at earth and find skynet and terminators in charge.Now that no one would see coming 

[shiznitz]

As long as all the terminators looked like...

[Teleku]

If they'd stopped after the second season I'd agree with you. But everything from the boxing episode on was so bad I'm more than happy to see someone else try it it out.

All of this has happened before.....

I largely agree with you.  After the new caprica arc ended, series went in a direction I did not like, and I would have been a lot happier if it was all scrapped and something different was done.

But having said that, oddly, I still enjoyed watching it all the way through.  Even if the over all plot went off the rails and got stupid, the third and fourth seasons were still fun for me.  The characters were still being themselves and doing the shit I enjoy, some good battles, ect.  Several little arcs they used were actually good, if only the overall stupidity of the plot was taken away.

So with all that, I still have fond memories of it all the way through (even if it fell apart for the second half), so it's hard for me to associate it with any other version now.

And yes, sexy robots are better than walking trashcans.   

[eldaec]

A science fiction series that was more than 50% watchable and not called Star Trek The Next Generation remains almost unheard of.

So I'm happy it existed.

But I'm unconcerned if someone else wants to reboot it. It is a much better reboot candidate than Star Trek, and a fantastic premise for at least the first movie.

[jgsugden]

A science fiction series that was more than 50% watchable and not called Star Trek The Next Generation remains almost unheard of.
...

Babylon 5.  The FX are as dated as TNG at this point, but 75% of the episodes were good.  Google the recommended episode watch list and follow it for ~ 60 hours of good story.

[Merusk]

Some folks 'round here never cared for B5 or Farscape, but both meet that >50% watchable line for me.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. Both have a strong narrative line that holds up even with the weaker stuff and the aging FX.

[HaemishM]

Nothing after the New Caprica storyline was worth a good goddamn. Characters acted completely in opposition to their history and established personalities because... reasons. And that's not even getting into the utter stupidity of the "Final 5" or the "I'm an Angel" or "the Missing Link." Just utter fucking shit.

And I will cut the first motherfucker says B5 wasn't awesome.

[Johny Cee]

I did a rewatch of B5 a few years ago.... I actually typed it up as a thread here.

B5 might not break the 50% mark.
- Season 1 is terrible, outside of a few storylines and some story arc setup.  
- Season 2-4 is the meat and potatoes, but there are some real turds...  and some of the storylines are awful.
- Didn't rewatch Season 5, since I remember it being pretty blah.
- The effects early seasons are painful.  They upgrade mid-run to moderately inoffensive.
- Holy shit is some of the acting terrible.
- That show was really saved by Londo and G'Kar, and the associated Centari/Narn storylines.  You were invested enough in their stories in the "B" storyline that it rescued some really atrocious "A" storyline nonsense.
- Blatantly borrows much of the story beats from LOTR, and later Moorcock.


Basically, you are forfeiting 2/5s of your series out of the gate.  If you have an adverse reaction to a couple of the long-running storylines (and there a few terrible ones!) then good luck.  The dialogue is flat out hokey.  Some actors make it work (Boxleitner) and some are just....   ughhhh.  

The effects are really, really bad.  The upgrade turns them into meh effects for the time, but they are well below even contemporary series.

[HaemishM]

I can't ding B5's effects - season 1 is a bit jittery but the others were really good for the time. FOR THE TIME. Now they look dinky as shit but they were pretty impressive when I first watched them.

Londo and G'Kar are fantastic, but I thought others did really well. Season 5 suffered from stuffing too much into one season and not being able to develop any of it properly. Honestly, they probably could have skipped season 5 other than Sleeping in Light and it would have been a better overall narrative unless they were going to take their time with the storylines there. Probably should have just been season 5 and 6, covering some of the stuff they started with in Crusade.

[Johny Cee]

Nothing after the New Caprica storyline was worth a good goddamn. Characters acted completely in opposition to their history and established personalities because... reasons. And that's not even getting into the utter stupidity of the "Final 5" or the "I'm an Angel" or "the Missing Link." Just utter fucking shit.

Some of the nonsense wasn't their fault...  Starbuck took off for a network tv show (Bionic Woman) and had to be written off, and then they wrote her back in after that was cancelled.

After New Caprica, the show was very much defined by some great highs and lots of meandering.  Poor Gaeta, poor Dee, finding ruined Earth, the mutiny, some of the trial of Baltar stuff.  The showrunners became really inept at moving between the awesome bits.

I've always thought a bigger problem SF fans have with BSG is that at a certain point, they didn't bother with the fig-leaf SF conventions and went unabashedly fantasy.  Certain categories of SF fans hate that shit.  I mean, Star Trek is obviously fantasy (teleporters, that can magically transport you between dimensions or rebuild bodies from scratch [conditional to plot]! FTL as fast as we need! Magic boxes that can make anything! Godlike aliens! Time travel!) but they've always maintained the technobable and sufficiently advanced technology handwave.

[jgsugden]

BSG was a grounded series that lost touch with the ground when the fantasy elements were too intense.  If you were going to have those elements in the series, they needed to be better laid out - like GRRM did with Song of Ice and Fire.  The very first chapter involves the Walking Dead - and then nothing else magical until the last pages of the first book. 

B5 - for the time - was amazing.  If you watch only the episodes that JMS wrote, you get a pretty good series.  They're not all great, but they all fit - and once you get to the end of season one the studio interference is lessened and it really hooks.  Claudia Christiansen, Michael O'Hare's situation (which was managed as well as it could be) and the networks screwing with the final 2 season plans took their toll, but I still think of it as my favorite series because it was soooo much better than everything else out there at the time.  When I rewatch it now, I watch the Pilot and then skip to Geometry of Shadows.  Then I watch until the end of season 4 (taking the few bad with the good) and then watch a handful of episodes in Season 5 - mostly G'Kar and Londo focused episodes. 

[Riggswolfe]

BSG is a good example of why Ron Moore is a great writer and series lead but also needs somebody to tell him "no, that's a stupid fucking idea". At one time he pitched the idea that that awful DS9 episode where Sisko is a writer from the 50s who made it all up and may have been insane was actually the reality of the show. Seriously, if he'd gotten his way DS9 would've had a St. Elsewhere ending. Luckily, the people at Paramount said "fuck no!"

Apparently the people at SyFy didn't have the balls or the brains to do that and we got one of the worst endings to a great TV show ever made.

[Jeff Kelly]

I'm confused now, which iteration of BSG will be made into a movie. The eighties version or the 2003 remake?

Babylon 5's biggest problem is that the constant meddlling of the of TV execs and the fact that it was almost always on the brink of cancellation is noticeable in the seasons. It also shares the same issue a lot of other 90's shows - especially sci-fi and fantasy shows - had. The first season is truly terrible and awkward to watch. Thze same can be said for TNG Season 1 though.

The highs of B5 are so high though that I can deal with the low points. They also made a few decent 'made-for-TV' movies after the series ended its run.

BSG (2003) would have been considered a classic even after New Caprica (or the "we blew our entire budget already, so bottle episodes from here on out" season) if they had ended mid season 4. Basically cut to black when they find earth completely destroyed. Would have made fans really angry at the time but would be leagues better than the "it was god all along" shit it ended on.

I personally dislike it when Sci Fi does that, that's why I'm not a fan of Arthur C. Clarke who does that all the time (The Rama series of books is basically that. "Aliens" so advanced that they're pretty much a stand in for God did all that). The problem with BSG is that it started out as a treatise on post 9/11 America and ended up as a sort of twisted take on the book of Mormon.

[Merusk]

I can't ding B5's effects - season 1 is a bit jittery but the others were really good for the time. FOR THE TIME. Now they look dinky as shit but they were pretty impressive when I first watched them.

Yeah, we've become far too jaded with regard to computer animation in the 20 years since. To understand just how amazing the graphics were, consider that nobody had a 3d card in their high-end machines. The outcry of a mandatory graphics card for EQ was still 4 years away. The Pentium processor was less than a year old and the web was still 6 years from being a thing more than a few geeks knew about.

As for the story, I don't count S1 of most shows against them. TNG S1 was so awful I just skip any episode I see a beardless Riker. DS9 season 1 was also kind of hit-or-miss. B5's S1 set the characters and the interactions very well. It opened up wonderfully after that. *shrug* Some people disagree. I'm good with enjoying it and Farscape on my own.

[eldaec]

I'm confused now, which iteration of BSG will be made into a movie. The eighties version or the 2003 remake?

There was no eighties version, but my understanding is that this is neither the 1978 version nor the 2004 version - it is an entirely new version.

[MahrinSkel]

I'm confused now, which iteration of BSG will be made into a movie. The eighties version or the 2003 remake?

There was no eighties version, but my understanding is that this is neither the 1978 version nor the 2004 version - it is an entirely new version.

Never forget.

[Triax]

 
Agh!  the flashbacks to my traumatized childhood are flooding in....Ugh that show was so godawful, and that IS in comparison to the original Battlestar Galactica.

Those motorcycles were the worst.

[Fordel]

Londo and G'kar saved B5 from utter mediocrity. They are soooo good they managed to mitigate so much bad in the series. The Centari and Narn conflict, the Centari internal conflict, the Centari conflict with the Shadows, the Narn's utter desperation as a people. The 'B-Plot' of B5 was actually the main plot in disguise. The only things I fondly remember from B5 that aren't somehow driven by any of the above, are the battle of the line, the president attempting to literally scorch the earth and that one scene where Deleen tells EarthGov to fuck off. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvkgfBXHPA )


The modern BSG series was great as a plot driven show until the writers realized they ran out of plot and attempted to turn it into a character based show, except the characters were nothing more then devices to drive the plot and had little to no internal consistency. Then magic space angel hallucinations stopped being hallucinations and 

[Sir T]

I dont really get the "Ripped off X" arguments. Every writer steals stuff from previous writers, hell I've seen places talk about where Tolkien ripped off previous writers. What matters to me is if its well done. And in general B5 did it fairly well. Hell the B5 movie "Thirdspace" basically ripped off Lovecraft, but that does not stop it being a really good movie.

What irked me though was when some subplots were canned because of where JMS or someone wanted to focus on the Earth conflict which was frankly the least interesting parts of B5. Season 4 had the shadow war and the Minbari conflict reduced to a few episodes whereas the Earth civil war shit took up most of the season and got so boring I decided to stop watching as I really couldn't care less.

And I'm sorry but the effects were the shit, and in general they still look pretty good today. And the scary thing is that the effects house went out of business after that, which is a damn shame.

[eldaec]

Whenever I hear someone complain that a thing is a ripoff of another thing, I assume what they really meant is "this was so boring that to pass the time I started analysing story structure and thinking of other less boring things that had comparable elements".

[HaemishM]

Yeah, writers ripping shit off of other writers? Every writer ever has done that whether they know it or not. There are innovations on story structure and what not but for the most part, thousands of years of human civilization has produced an inability to be truly unique and original. I'm not going to ding a writer for being unoriginal unless it's so derivative that there doesn't seem to be any reason for the story to exist on its own.

[palmer_eldritch]

Nothing after the New Caprica storyline was worth a good goddamn. Characters acted completely in opposition to their history and established personalities because... reasons. And that's not even getting into the utter stupidity of the "Final 5" or the "I'm an Angel" or "the Missing Link." Just utter fucking shit.

Some of the nonsense wasn't their fault...  Starbuck took off for a network tv show (Bionic Woman) and had to be written off, and then they wrote her back in after that was cancelled.

After New Caprica, the show was very much defined by some great highs and lots of meandering.  Poor Gaeta, poor Dee, finding ruined Earth, the mutiny, some of the trial of Baltar stuff.  The showrunners became really inept at moving between the awesome bits.

I've always thought a bigger problem SF fans have with BSG is that at a certain point, they didn't bother with the fig-leaf SF conventions and went unabashedly fantasy.  Certain categories of SF fans hate that shit.  I mean, Star Trek is obviously fantasy (teleporters, that can magically transport you between dimensions or rebuild bodies from scratch [conditional to plot]! FTL as fast as we need! Magic boxes that can make anything! Godlike aliens! Time travel!) but they've always maintained the technobable and sufficiently advanced technology handwave.

I'd forgotten about poor old Dee. The show was always pretty "dark" and adult. Season One has the human race close to extinction with the two leaders at each other's throats and simultaneously colluding in a big lie (the mini series ends with Adama admitting he has no idea where Earth is and Roslin agreeing to keep his secret). But it was still fun to watch and this is true of a lot of dark drama - eg the Sopranos, things the Cohen brothers do.

Even Saul getting his eye scooped out was interesting, it was character development in a fashion. When he murders his wife it's horrible but really gripping, it's a great story.

When Dee shoots herself it seems to be nothing more than an attempt to upset the viewer. It's not interesting. Horrible horrible.

[HaemishM]

The last two seasons of BSG were full of that kind of shit, though. Things that just made no sense to the character, like Gaeta's mutiny or that shit where he got his leg hurt in the first place. Or the Starbuck angel shit. Or that entire boxing episode.