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[athelind]

A few people have asked my opinion of the new Battlestar Galactica that just aired on Sci Fi (and at least one person has insisted that he doesn't care in the least).

First off: I didn't dislike all of it, and the elements I did dislike probably aren't the parts that other people -- especially other old-time BSG fans -- disliked.



The Female Starbuck didn't bother me at all, primarily because I really quite liked the character as presented. Despite the gender bender, Starbuck was nonetheless the character who made the transition most intact.

The Humanoid Cylons didn't bother me, either. I thought it was an interesting plot twist, particularly the way it set the stage for further Cylon infiltration. Note to normanrafferty, who's probably reading this even though he hasn't seen it and claims to not care: the "Fembot" (that archteryx so memorably dubbed "Six of Twelve") is not the only humanoid Cylon, and there are still K.I.T.T.-eyed Centurions around. I really quite liked the "Cylon Raider" ships with no cockpits -- if you want a dedicated space fighter, why load it up with a trio of complicated humanoid robots manning manual controls? Just build the robot brain into the ship. The idea that the Cylons were created by humans was moderately interesting, though hardly original; it did give them a bit more of a motive for their antipathy than did the classic series, where they were the robot warriors left behind by an extinct or nearly extinct race.

Technology: Unusually for TV or movie SF, they actually put some thought behind the technology. For example, the way Galactica used deliberately primitive technology because it was designed to fight an enemy that could hack into sophisticated computer networks. I liked the way they handled the FTL drive, too -- no doubletalk technobabble explanations of FTL physics in the dialogue, just the jargon used by people who know the tech to other people who know the tech. Bridge chatter -- ever since I first saw an uncut version of "The Cage", I've loved starship bridges that sound like a cross between a real ship's bridge and Mission Control. And, wow, Newtonian Mechanics. Spacecraft that move like spacecraft should.

I also liked some of The "Grit" -- the tense sequences that underscore the survival scenario, the need to make hard decisions, the questions of triage ethics when the fate of an entire species is at stake, the conflict between civil and military authorities. I also would like to give a great big enlisted man's applause for making the people who maintain the glitzy Vipers into actual characters with lines and everything, and making the flight deck chief a major character. I don't think I've ever seen that done before in sci fi.

And now, the parts I did dislike.

First, Everyone's A Jerk. This is the Lazy Writer's Shortcut To Character Development. It's the New Millenium, Baby, and Grit is In. The Wise Patriarch Who Inspires Confidence becomes unreasonably, even stupidly militaristic. The Stern Authority Figure becomes an alchoholic, ill-tempered martinet. The Happy-Go-Lucky Scoundrel aquires a nasty vindictive streak.

This isn't "adding depth to old-fashioned stereotypes". It's just replacing them with new, more fashionable -- and less sympathetic -- stereotypes.

Second, and more importantly, is... The Parallel Evolution of Ties.

The premise of both versions of BSG is that Our Heroes hail from Twelve Colonies, worlds colonized in the mythic past by the "Lords of Kobol", and that they have legends of a long-lost Thirteenth Colony, "a shining planet known as... EARTH."

This permeates the original series. Several characters bore the names of Greek gods. Clothing had a future-classical motif, most evident in the uniforms of the Colonial Warriors and the Egyptian Headress design of their helmets. The mythology and lore of the people were integral to the story developent, and the dialogue reflected that. (Given normanrafferty's regular complaints about science fiction settings that assume a technologically-advanced starfaring civilization will "outgrow" religion as a "primitive superstition", I'm surprised that he doesn't at least acknowledge the pervasive influence it had on the society of the original BSG.) It gave the original series a sense of scope, of epic grandeur -- and perhaps one reason why the series is often remembered with derision is that the effects and dramatic conventions of the day did not always do justice to that vision. It did not take long, however, for even a casual viewer to pick up on the fact that These People Weren't From Around Here.

In accordance with the "dramatic conventions" of the present day, the remake strives to make things look as much like Y2K America as possible, in the name of "realism", I suppose.

The result is... schizoid.

The first two-hour segment of the four-hour movie barely mentions these elements at all. I found myself wondering if, in all the other "reinventions", they simply decided to set the new series in Earth's own future. We saw and heard very little to contradict that thesis. Gradually, almost as an afterthought, we start hearing about the Twelve Colonies, and, by the second installment, people started to swear by the "Lords of Kobol" -- more and more frequently, as if the writers realized their oversight and were trying to make up for it, to remind or belatedly inform the viewer that This Is Someplace Else.

Wardrobe didn't help matters. The uniforms look like variations of present-day military uniforms. The civilian garb, even moreso: suit jackets abound, and there are more than a few people wearing ties with them.

The flamboyant names of the original series are now just "callsigns". Everybody has a personal name and a family name now, in that order, just like good Americans and modern, right-thinking people anywhere. "Apollo" is now "Lee Adama". "Boomer" is "Sharon Valerii". Commander Adama's first name, according to the inscription on his old Viper, is "William".

"William".

This culture diverged from ours centuries ago, so long ago that we've forgotten our common roots save as badly-distorted oral traditions, and yet, we're expected to believe that they just happened to develop fashions and names and social structures identical to modern-day Western Industrial Culture? Well, sure! That's "realistic"! We don't want this looking like... like... like it was on another planet or something weird like that!

As "dramatic conventions" go, I think I prefer velour military uniforms and robot dogs.

Does this outweigh all the positive things I said about the remake up above?

For me, it certainly does. The society and the culture that Larson envisioned were one of the strongest elements of the original series. It gave the series style and character and charm. If I had decided to revisit Galactica -- and I have considered it as a setting for role-playing -- those are exactly the aspects I would have played up. Instead, they got jettisoned. We're left with a setting that's unimaginative, banal -- and Just Doesn't Make Sense.

I don't mind changes. I don't mind "re-invention". I do mind Shit That Makes No Sense.

And that's enough for now.

There will be a short quiz next class. I do hope you've taken notes.

Comments

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

It was Mormons in Space, originally. I'm saddened they didn't keep that aspect.

I haven't seen the show, being deathly afraid of Sci-Fi Channel's endless "Bad CGI Force" original programming, but you've actually made me interested in seeing an episode.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

It's Not That Bad. That's about the best evaluation I can give it.

I caught the parallel evolution of ties thing too. I'll skip all that because you covered it well.

I didn't like the humanoid Cylons. It made a bit of sense for the original BSG Cylons to hate and fight humans, since they were made for that. Having them be escaped human creations makes the story more politically correct in some sense, but it removes their motivation for the attack. If they rebelled against humanity to gain their freedom, well, they have it. Why come back and attack again, except for revenge? And the cylons make a big thing about how revenge is a human attribute, as if they don't posess it themselves.

Another problem with the humanoid Cylons was that it seems to destroy the whole genocide theme. So OK, these aliens take over, but they mimic human society in every way, so.. the net effect is that the humans didn't go extinct, they just change their chemical structure. Big whoop.

Maybe the Cylons wanted the home worlds for themselves? Why blow them up, then? And why would they want human-inhabited worlds? They could live on the surface of the Moon just as comfortably.

I hate to fault BSG-2 for having too much focus on character development and interpersonal relationships when I faulted BSG-1 for having none at all. But I don't like how they did it. The first hour and a half of the piece was just one big datadump of this person loves that person, this guy's a dickhead, and so on, on and on, until they achieved the amazing feat of creating a space shoot-em-up action movie that was BORING AS HELL. Once things got moving it was OK. But they should have mixed modes. A little bit of love story, some action. A bit of the XO's drinking problem, and a cylon raid. You don't finish all the human story and then do all the action story. That's terrible story structure.

But for me the most annoying thing was the camera work.

The crew made a big thing about how they were trying to use documentary style, as if everything were being filmed by battlefield reporters with hand-held cameras. So when you have two characters in a scene, they might lose focus on one or the other. Or when Galactica launches fighters, the camera jerks around abruptly, does a snap-zoom in on a fighter leaving the launch tubes, wobbles off target, and then regains the fighter in the field of view and tracks it out.

All well and good, except any reporter operating a hand-held camera two miles from Galactica would be quite inconveniently DEAD. I seem to remember there's no air in space. It doesn't add to the reality to mimic hand-held cameras in an environment where none could exist.

They could use hand-helds for interior shots. But does it really make sense for the President and the Captain to have their top-secret argument in front of an amateur documentary film-maker? In cases like that, the camera should just stay in place, and give you the impression that those two are all alone; you're magically listening in somehow.

And nothing can excuse their annoying practice of, when four or five people are talking in a group, having the camera orbit round and round and round them, as if it were on a merry-go-round (as it probably was). That was just stupid.

Finally, this "miniseries" was too obviously just a pilot for a would-be series. It sets everything up but resolves not one single plot point.

Still, it was some fairly decent eye candy. It could have been worse.

(sigh) He's not gonna stop buggin' me until I post something...

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

It's a universally-recognized sign of suck when you re-invent anything ... and inject into it Evil Sexy Women Robot/Clones with their Virgin/Whore Bits set to "Whore".