New Battlestar Galactica Premieres Monday 483
An anonymous reader writes "In several
news articles, 'Battlestar
Galactica' returns in a new four hour mini-series on the Sci-Fi
channel this Monday. However, there has been fan furor over some
changes to the story. Aluminum Cylon enemies look more like
humans, complete with feelings, including one with rabid sexual
desires, and the quest is not for a mythical Earth, as it no
longer exists. More information at the BattlestarGalactica.com
website, and the Sci-Fi
channel."
While you're in the mood.. (Score:2, Interesting)
What, no Lorne Green? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been way too many yarons since I've been able to see Our Hero.
Maybe some digital recreation of LG could allow him to reprise his role.
It was never cheap (Score:2, Interesting)
I am waiting to see the new series before I pass judgement.
Re:So in other words.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree completely. Same thing with Enterprise. The show is so lackluster and not "Star Trek" that Paramount was finally forced to prepend "Star Trek:" to the title to boost ratings. Had DS9 and Voyager not had Star Trek in the title, it's likely they would have died unlamented deaths for the same reasons.
It'll fail (Score:4, Interesting)
1) It is based on an old, out-dated Sci-Fi show that will not appeal to the mainstream public, no matter how much senseless T&A, sexually charged adult themes, pointless gun battles, and especially computer animation they add.
2) It does not appeal to the old fans whatsoever, because of many of the same reasons in #1, plus the fact that it is "untr00" and often fails to explore many of the themes of the older series, and rather focuses on the "development" of silly, stereotypical characters.
It'll fail after a few seasons of low ratings.
Anybody watch SciFi Previews? (Score:5, Interesting)
They flat out stated that they were taking a different approach to this BSG. In the earlier one, the Cylons were just mad at humans. That's all we knew. Why? Nobody knew. What was their history? Nobody knew. At least they're attempting some sort of story / history on the Cylons, and not just an Independence Day scenario of aliens attacking because they feel in a pissy mood that day.
I am glad the SciFi channel at least does *something*, but I'm still not happy they discontinued Farscape.
I enjoyed their Dune remakes (bought the DVD's even). I'm a sick pup, but those 3- and 4- star (out of IMDB's 10 star rating) are some of my faves. :D
Re:the only thing the same is the viper (Score:1, Interesting)
Two things that tick me off, though:
1. They made two of my favorite characters women. Not to be sexist, here or anything, but the only way I see Starbuck and Boomer's characters working as women is if at least one of them is a lesbian.
2. The Cylons. Period. Everything about them is lameified. The Cylons were supposed to be these cold, unfeeling, unremorseful drones. They core conflict is that the humans and cylons are so fundamentally different (they're opposites in every aspect except their mutual violent tendancies) that they can never reach any mutual settlement terms. Making them look human, and more importantly, giving them feelings and desires makes them, for all intents and purposes, human. This sort of storyline isn't neccessarily a BAD one, but it is NOT, by any measure, Battlestar Galactica.
Starbuck and Apollo (Score:3, Interesting)
Bah! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The theme tune (Score:2, Interesting)
Lord I hope this doesn't suck... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Starbuck was a womanizing, cigar-smoking guy," explains SciFi.com general manager Craig Engler. "Now, she's a man-izing, cigar-smoking bundle of trouble."
Yeah, all he did was have sex and smoke cigars, that's why his character was so great... Not to mention "bundle of trouble" popping up highly on my oh-crap-o-meter for plucky obnoxious characters.
Only time will tell how well adding hot chicks who can't act to dead TV series' will work out. I thought (and please don't flame me for this) SciFi did a pretty good job with Dune though, but they didn't try to make Paul a woman.
Re:BSG a network tv production (Score:2, Interesting)
So Glenn Larson grabbed a hodge-podge of stuff, through in some special effects and cobbled together sets (the Viper interiors were reused in Buck Rogers) and tried to pass it off on TV.
Unfortunately, it never hit big with the adults of that time. Kids loved it. But the primetime Neilson ratings didn't measure the kid's interest.
So, it was doomed. Let's not even talk about Galactica, 1980.
This effort takes the names and places, and respins them. Yes, they want to capitalize on the BSG name, because that automatically makes potential viewers familiar with the basic layout.
But if I want to watch a re-hash of BSG, I'll catch the reruns on SciFi. I want to see something NEW.
So I'm going to watch it, and treat it like it's on it's own. Kind of like David Lynch's Dune, and the mini-series. Both tell th story differently, both have their strengths and weaknesses.
Actually.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole thing with the 12 colonies of man and the 'lost' 13th colony is exactly like the Mormon belief of 12 tribes of man with a lost 13th tribe and how reuniting with that 13th tribe would be their salvation or something along those lines.
There was a great deal of other Mormon influences behind a great deal of the back-story to BSG. The actual TV series stories followed the basic 'hodge-podge' that often plagues the first season of a number of television series, although there was some really interesting storylines built around the Mormon mythology, like the thing with the beings of light that went through a handful of the episodes.
If it had stayed on the air, it would have developed into a very significant series of stories instead of just the barely exposing the surface that was shown back in the 70's.
The whole draw to the series was and still is the way the characters were, how they interacted and the relationships they held with eachother. These days the producers and storywriters claim that having 'damaged' characters and conflict amongst the heroes is the way that things are supposed to be. That's not the BSG that I remember and it's not the BSG that I would like to see.
I will probably watch this show, just to give it a chance, but in the end I will likely still give more weight to the original with it's compelling back-history and lofty ideals. (Even though it is based heavily on a somewhat 'odd' religious group's history.)
BSG was popular... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fans clamored to get it back after it was dumped, and were given BSG 1980, based on Earth where the executives could get away with much cheaper cost/episode. Most of the original cast was gone, and the episodes reeked of being cheaply made and for the most part poorly written.
Personally, I don't mind a rethinking, since, for instance, I can't imagine the original Star Trek working with today's audiences, but I'm a little wary about new cylons, which seem more like dopplegangers than machines. I still think of BSG as a man-vs-machine conflict (even though, if I recall this correctly, the Cylons are some kind of proteus mass that lives in the robot body). Not to say that it won't work - Terminator did the doppleganger robot thing believably. T2 and T3, on the other hand, were very non-realistic with their liquid metal robots (I can see being damaged and self repairing, but being blown to bits and having all the pieces flow back together? Give me a break). I don't really consider those movies sci-fi - they're fantasy in a sci-fi setting.
I still don't picture Starbuck as a woman - it doens't seem like a female name and the character was so well defined. Boomer I can picture more (it's got that fighter-pilot aura) and the character didn't stand out as much as Starbuck or Apollo. Speaking of, if they'd made Apollo a girl, I'd have to whack them upside the head (there are much better and appropriate female goddess names, like Artemis, Athena [though that was used in the orig], and Kalypso). Thankfully, they didn't.
What?! No more "Mormons in Space"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Trying to find those little gems in the plot lines was the most fun part of sitting through the original BSG.
Chalupa
Re:Little? Cylon? Different? (Score:3, Interesting)
First off the "cylons" are still the red eye robots. there happens to be an addition of stealth cylons that look exactly like us.
The story line is pretty damn close to the origional and the effects are awesome.
I have the dvd here from work with the first 2 episodes on it. (we are a cable ad-sales company... I get all the goodies that are sci-fi based and because we are one of the largest markets we get the premium freebies/goodies.)
and It's not anything you make it out to be. there are a few minor changes that really dont screw up anything but really enhance it more.
Re:You mean like the original series did? (Score:2, Interesting)
I nearly walked out of the theater in disgust when I heard the word "micron" used as a unit of time. Scientific illiterates such as those writers should not be permitted to breed.
Let's hope the new series avoids that particular mistake.
Re:Bad omens (Score:2, Interesting)
He basically said it was like something you would watch in the waiting room "while a doctor probes for nodules where nodules sometimes grow."
Now THAT is funny.
I also have to say that is isn't a particularly good sign when they have to make a show about the show, defending their decisions about the show...
I will give them credit for not just doing a remake. This series is targeted at the audience who watched the original. We've all grown up now... If they kept many of the elements of the original (Moffet the daggit, for instance) we would all be shouting about it the way we shouted about Jar Jar...
I like the idea of female pilots, but I do think it was a stretch to convert TWO of the THREE main characters from male to female. That would be like Charlie's Angels with two guys and one girl, none of whom you had ever seen before...
The preview show made Apollo look like a snotty character you just wouldn't want to hang around with. Maybe Richard Hatch wasn't the best actor in the world, but at least you LIKED his Apollo. I want to hear their explanation of why he has a TOTALLY different accent then his dad... Dad is hispanic, son is painfully British. Hmm. Oh, Lucy, you have some 'splaining to do!
Quick comments (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks sex-addled, low-action, and pretty scanty on the mythology. "Cylon Fembots" is all we need to know.
I was a bit surprised when I saw how much sex stuff was going to be in this new show. I know that Star Trek has gone this way (7 of 9, T'Pol) but the guy doing BG is Roland Moore and between him and Braga (the other ST:TNG writer) I always figured that Moore was the one who didn't feel the need to use sex as a way to sell an inferior product. I guess I was wrong. Of course then they try to head off the criticism that the new show is sexist by making Starbuck and Boomer women. Yet the people on the 'making of' show last night clearly indicated that Starbuck and Boomer were going to be in sexual situations as well (sexual tension but no action in Starbuck's case).
The mythology was pretty much all that made it distinctive, such as it was, in the original case.
You're probably already aware of this but just in case not: the story of the original is based very heavily on the story of the Mormons trying to find a place to settle. Obviously, most Hollywood types are Mormons so they were completely unaware of this. For them, and the vast majority of the American public, the story was a brand new idea. In reality, the backbone story was already done. All the writers had to do was take an obscure, yet interesting, story and flesh it out a bit and transfer it to the stars.
GMD
Re:BSG was popular... (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the coolest lines in the show was when they were observing earth from space and zoomed in on the Los Angeles freeways:
"It must take them many years of training to be able to travel like that". (paraphrased)
The other funny moments were (also paraphrased):
A Cylon shorting out when a nearby microwave oven started up.
From the WWII time-travel episode:
(Viper pilot)"They seem to be launching many small metal objects at us."
(Passenger)"They're shooting at us! Get out of here!"
and:
(one nazi to another after firing on a Viper):
"You fool! You are shooting at one of our own experimental aircraft!"
Galactica 80 was horrid, but it did have its moments.
Re:another botched memory? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, they have one of these. It's a TV series run by ABC where Indiana Jones is a kung-fu action woman who runs around the world (but is based in LA) retrieving artifacts to create a big machine, set in the early 21st century. It's called Alias.
Re:another botched memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:another botched memory? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:another botched memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
>warned fans of the original series to not watch.
I read his quote way back when, and it seemed to me he was saying that if you're the sort of obsessive fanboy who regards every word of the original series as Holy Writ, and will get upset at the slightest change... Then, no, you should not watch this version, as it will upset you. Otherwise, you might like it.
I never cared much for the original; I only watched it for a while because there was no other SF on the toob. There's only so many "Morons take kid and daggit to uncharted planet, daggit runs away, kid runs off following daggit, morons must spend rest of episode chasing stupid kid" plots I can stand to watch.
It did occasionally have some good stuff. I was interested in seeing more about what was going on with Count Iblis.
The last straw, though, was on one episode where the Badactica had to go back to somewhere they had left earlier, console jocky asks Captain Ben Cartwright what speed to set, and he intones portentiously "Light Speed!" There follows a great deal of anxiety about how they hadn't gone that fast in centons and centons, and the engines canna take tha strain.
Which showed that no one involved in the show had a clue. Not the slightest clue. I couldn't bear to watch it after that, even though it was the only thing barely resembling SF on the toob.
So "Not the same as the old BG" sounds promising to me.
Unfortunately, nothing else I have heard about this wombat sounds like it's going to be good. At all. It sounds <voice=marvin> perfectly dreadful. </voice> I don't plan to watch; if I hear it's really good after all, I'm sure the skiffy channel will re-run any episodes I missed.