BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (2003) Frack! Perhaps only Manimal can compete with Battlestar Galactica when it comes to stuff I liked so much as a kid and so little as an adult (actually, I haven't seen Manimal since then, but I don't intend to either). I still like swashbuckling space-opera adventure, but watching that show again today, I can barely stand it - mega-cheese writing, bad acting, oft-repeated stock-footage special effects...a poor man's Star Wars? It's barely a poor man's Megaforce. I mean, this is the show that once featured a planet that was in constant danger of exploding if anyone set fire to a small part of it. (probably shouldn't have built a bar on this planet then) Visually speaking, it wasn't bad - lots of great spaceship models! - but the plots were retarded and the characters were...well, suited to the plots. So I initially reacted with a lot less scepticism than most people when I'd heard that the new miniseries update on the series would be making a lot of changes. The hype was not only would this "reimagining" shake up the series, but the entire space opera genre! Oh man, such a boast can only come from the truly clueless - people, if you haven't seen this yet and your expectations have been bolstered by such extravagant claims, you might not ever dare hold high hopes for anything again. There is not a single detectable original idea in the three hour (plus commercials) running time of this miniseries. Some things are ripped off from just a few years ago - some of these clichés are so old they defy carbon dating. Nothing will come as a novel development to anyone with a passing familiarity with Farscape, Space: Above And Beyond or pretty much any Star Trek series. As a general overall premise, the miniseries is pretty faithful to the original series; the great Battlestar Galactica and the fleet of refugees it protects are the last remnant of human civilization after mankind got spanked by the pesky robot Cylons. Lots of things will look familiar - many of the refugee ship designs are taken right from the original series, the old Viper fighter crafts show up as museum pieces (seriously!) until they're called into duty, and even the 70's versions of Cylon technology can be seen in that museum. The quest for Earth is only brought up in the last ten minutes or so. It's all the specifics that are different. Most obviously, the characters' races and genders have all been shaken around seemingly at random - which is cute but is only really striking in that Starbuck is now a woman (so is Boomer, but who cares about Boomer?). Villainous Lord Baltar is now Dr. Baltar (James Callis), who doesn't cruelly sell out humankind with no apparent motive as in the original, but is an unwitting dupe of a Cylon plot (so much for being "one of the greatest minds of our time"), digging a slightly deeper hole for himself each time he covers his ass. Even the refugee kid Boxey shows up again, with the same damn haircut, since it's been so long since the original series that it went out of style and came back in again. No robot dog, though; cute robots never got back in style. The Cylons are REALLY different - in the 70's, there were basically two kinds, the always well-polished chrome Centurions, and the sarcastic, caped Imperious Leaders. Lucky for us, the Imperious Leaders are gone. No Centurions outside of that museum though; there's an updated (CGI) model of metal Cylon, whose design is fine but the effects aren't good enough. Most of the Cylons we see on-screen have taken human form - cheap bastards. Ship and costume design for the humans is much in the same spirit as in the TV series, but updated; sleeker, simpler, less jagged. The Galactica herself still looks like a stump-tailed skink, but a somewhat more graceful one. The Viper fighters (and there are old ones too, museum pieces that have to be called back into service) and pilot helmets and the like are also basically the same idea, just slicker. The convoy of ships the Galactica finds herself leading contains a lot of familiar-looking vessels. Of the cast, maybe 2 ½ of them acquit themselves nicely. Most prominently is Tricia Helfer (an Alberta girl!) as Number Six, the Cylon robo-babe who seduces the supposedly brilliant Baltar into repeatedly playing into the Cylons' hands. Being sexy is at least 80% of the job here, and Helfer has that covered in spades. I think we can all agree that she's certainly the sexiest sci-fi character with a number for a name since Seven Of Nine. The humaniform Cylons have formed themselves in their creators' image, and have no easily identifiable robot traits or behaviors, so maybe there isn't much more to this role beyond that. Beyond her, a slightly hotheaded chief tech (whose identity I cannot now find, and thus, I can't find out who the actor is), often seeming on the verge of exploding under pressure, and the half would be Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck, who I can't buy for a moment as a cigar chomper but she does have a certain tomboy charm. Her personality clash with the alcoholic Colonel Tigh (alcoholic!) is the only such conflict I can buy as having any legs. There are other such personality clashes, but they're more or less resolved by the time the show's over; few TV shows in this genre dare to feature two characters on the same side who just plain don't fucking like each other. They usually end up at least "appreciating" and "respecting" each other - yuck. The script by Star Trek vet Ronald D. Moore (fire this guy, right now) and first-timer Christopher Eric James makes good on the promise of this being a reinvention of the original series, and that series needed all the reinvention it could get. It's still not very original (a PG-rated version of Starship Troopers' co-ed shower, an implanted "neural clone" a la Farscape), or scientifically plausible (all these people seem in pretty good shape for being surrounded by mushroom clouds), and the dialogue isn't very good (the term "world-famous" must not mean much when your society spans many planets), but it does shake up the circumstances and characters of the series into something a little more intriguing than a straight remake. And surprisingly, they've so far resisted the temptation to include a cute robot like Moffet or Twiki. The Cylons apparently want to destroy all of humankind, and attempt to do so (on the planet Caprica, anyway) with nuclear bombs. Big bombs (not even that big) that make mushroom clouds! While I can't think of a more effective way to destroy a planet at my species' disposal at the moment, anyone writing for a centuries-advanced robot civilization should be able to do better. Their ship-to-ship battles are kind of fun to watch, briefly, with that hand-held, jumpy look (think Saving Private Ryan or Gladiator, in outer space) and missiles that always leave a long and clear vapor trail so we won't get too confused about who's shooting at who - though this technique often makes everything look very, very far away. New Cylon fighters look totally different from the old ones, but they have the oscillating red eye of the old Centurions, sure to please die-hard fans of the series. Still, I'm not too sure about Number Six's role in things beyond her obvious sex appeal; there's one scene where she kills a baby. A baby! Not sure why she did that - there were hundreds of people around, not like she was helplessly a slave to her programming and she had to kill every human she came across. I can only imagine it was to remind us that she's the villain, when it'd be easy to cheer for the continued survival of anything that foxy. Well, I'm still cheering for her. Battlestar Galactica was a bad TV series, but it's the bad stuff that calls out for a remake, so good ideas that were squandered in the original can be better exploited. Most of the time it's good stuff that gets remade, and it doesn't need to. The thing here is, we already had more or less an update on Battlestar Galactica; it was called Space: Above And Beyond, and it wasn't that bad. And it had Kristen Cloke, who unfailingly set my loins aflame with her space-hottie ass-kickery. It got cancelled. Clearly, this is intended as a pilot for a series, which may well have been greenlighted by the time I get to posting this on my site. Lots of plot threads are left hanging, questions left unanswered, possibilities unexploited. One of the more promising ones: one of the refugee ships contains five hundred prisoners. The Starbuck/Tigh conflict has possibilities too. Will they be exploited to their potential? Probably not. Pilots for TV series are usually weak compared to later episodes, but this has a ways to go before getting good enough to keep me coming back every week. As it is, I'm sure I'll check it out from time to time, like Enterprise. Like Enterprise, it'll probably be played very, very safe. Enterprise hasn't had a cute robot yet though. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE