Battlestar Galactica Review

Phil Skayhan · Post by **Phil Skayhan** » 2003-12-09 12:16am

I'm surprised that no one has jumped on the issue that the only acknowledged atheist is Baltar (including the Cylons). So what's the message there?

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-12-09 12:17am

Science is a godless evil that is a crime against nature.

Darth Servo · Post by **Darth Servo** » 2003-12-09 12:40am

Well, at least he didn't delibrately betray humanity and he definately felt remorse for what he had done. Although how bright is it to give all the defense codes away like that to a virtual stranger? And this was "one of humanity's greatest minds".

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-12-09 12:44am

Yeah, I was actually very surprised that he actually called out that the old woman had the last winning number...

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2003-12-09 12:44am

Darth Servo wrote:Well, at least he didn't delibrately betray humanity and he definately felt remorse for what he had done. Although how bright is it to give all the defense codes away like that to a virtual stranger? And this was "one of humanity's greatest minds".

The same humans that allow a mother to let a TOTAL STRANGER cradle her baby. Trust me, that shit does not happen. No matter what, humanity had to be dumbed down to Downs Syndrome levels to allow such an attack that would eradicate humanity. IN the Original at least we have the passable excuse that a crippling pacificsim in the leadership coupled with Baltar's concious betrayal led to the destruction of the fleet. But in this one we are led to beleive that one man has unlimited access to the defense mainframe??

Oh and how many senseless gratuiotous sex scenes did I have to suffer through??

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2003-12-09 12:51am

BTW nice to see NO BLACK characters in the "New" BG whereas in Original BG we had two impotant black characters (Boomer and Tigh) You gotta love progress.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2003-12-09 12:53am

Stravo wrote:BTW nice to see NO BLACK characters in the "New" BG whereas in Original BG we had two impotant black characters (Boomer and Tigh) You gotta love progress.

That's because Boomer's now an Asian chick for no reason

Overall...it was a drag for me. And I still stand by that Starbuck is a woman only because she has tits.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2003-12-09 12:57am

Stravo wrote:BTW nice to see NO BLACK characters in the "New" BG whereas in Original BG we had two impotant black characters (Boomer and Tigh) You gotta love progress.

I noticed that too, it's strange and more than a little disturbing. Especially given the fact that nearly every last extra is white. I'm not one to jump on the racism band wagon but this seems to go way beyond normal and it's pretty clear it's absolutely deliberate.

Bug-Eyed Earl · Post by **Bug-Eyed Earl** » 2003-12-09 01:09am

Stravo wrote:BTW nice to see NO BLACK characters in the "New" BG whereas in Original BG we had two impotant black characters (Boomer and Tigh) You gotta love progress.

I saw black extras in several scenes.

Bug-Eyed Earl · Post by **Bug-Eyed Earl** » 2003-12-09 01:12am

Stravo wrote: IN the Original at least we have the passable excuse that a crippling pacificsim in the leadership coupled with Baltar's concious betrayal led to the destruction of the fleet. But in this one we are led to beleive that one man has unlimited access to the defense mainframe??

Face it-they were idiots in the original, too. Including Baltar, for believoing the Cylons would spare him and his colony.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2003-12-09 01:17am

Bug-Eyed Earl wrote:
Stravo wrote:BTW nice to see NO BLACK characters in the "New" BG whereas in Original BG we had two impotant black characters (Boomer and Tigh) You gotta love progress.
I saw black extras in several scenes.

There are a couple, but let's face it, the whole product looks is whiter than Frosty's asscheeks.

Nova Andromeda · Post by **Nova Andromeda** » 2003-12-09 01:17am

--The GALACTIC STUPIDITY! It burns my mind!!!

-So much so, in fact, that I have no pity for the humans and feel I owe the Cylons a huge debt for wiping them out.
-There are several major problems I have with these humans and I'll just highlight one: When 1/4 of your fleet goes up in smoke because it conveniently shuts down right before enemy contact WHY DON'T YOU ******* RETREAT AND FIX YOUR SHIT!!!! WHAT THE HELL ARE JUMP DRIVES FOR ANYHOW?!?

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2003-12-09 01:18am

Stormbringer wrote:
Patrick Degan wrote:Hmm... First hour down and the action is flowing like cement.
I think it's another case of shitty writing imparing otherwise good actors. Jamie Bambier who play Apollo is a darn good actor (see A&E's Hornblower for proof) but he's sucking it up just as bad as the rest. And Edward James Olmos is another great actor stuck in bad role.

Jamie Bambler... Was he Acting Lt. Kennedy in the Hornblower films?

Lord Poe · Post by **Lord Poe** » 2003-12-09 01:20am

Stravo wrote:Here's a writing tip: To portray a female chaarcter as "strong" you don't have to make them man like. Fucking hacks.

I'm really sick of this new trend. And I've read an interview or two with the "new" Starbuck. "Oh, why is everybody complaining? Starbuck is still a cigar smoking, ass kicker. And a woman can do anything a man can do."

Yeah? Piss up a rope, bitch. Too bad movies are too scared to show a REAL knock down, drag out fight between a man and a woman to prove how silly this whole concept really is.

"True Romance" showed one.

Post by **Kuja** » 2003-12-09 01:34am

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Anyone else think it was weird that some characters mentioned participating in the first Cylon War forty years ago, even though many of them are only ~35 at the most?

Or did I just hear some stuff wrong?

Humans in BSG live longer than we do - 200 years on average. At least, that was how it worked in the original.

Well, at least he didn't delibrately betray humanity and he definately felt remorse for what he had done.

Bullshit. The original Baltar was a great sociopath; he had no remorse at all. Now Baltar's a slack-spined wimp.

BTW nice to see NO BLACK characters in the "New" BG whereas in Original BG we had two impotant black characters (Boomer and Tigh) You gotta love progress.

That PO'ed me. Changing Boomer was fucking bad enough, then they gave Tigh the boot, too?!

I'm really sick of this new trend. And I've read an interview or two with the "new" Starbuck. "Oh, why is everybody complaining? Starbuck is still a cigar smoking, ass kicker. And a woman can do anything a man can do."

ANOTHER fuckup. If you're going to change the character, CHANGE THE WHOLE FUCKING CHARACTER, YOU LAZY FUCKS. Don't give us Starbuck in female form, for fuck's sake, or you might as well leave him a man.

I had my doubts about this remake and all of them came true. The new BSG is crap. Total. Adulterated. Crap.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-12-09 01:36am

I personally could picture a female Starbuck. But next time they should make sure to actually write the character as a woman in the first place, and not as a man with some of the words changed.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2003-12-09 01:56am

Patrick Degan wrote:
Stormbringer wrote:
Patrick Degan wrote:Hmm... First hour down and the action is flowing like cement.
I think it's another case of shitty writing imparing otherwise good actors. Jamie Bambier who play Apollo is a darn good actor (see A&E's Hornblower for proof) but he's sucking it up just as bad as the rest. And Edward James Olmos is another great actor stuck in bad role.
Jamie Bambler... Was he Acting Lt. Kennedy in the Hornblower films?

Yup. And did a pretty good job of it if you ask me. Though Kennedy did get his commission by the time of the second one.

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-12-09 02:17am

This. Blows. Chunks.

Typhonis 1 · Post by **Typhonis 1** » 2003-12-09 02:34am

Actually in the origional they had been fighting the Cylons for 1000 years so when Baltar shows up with a peace proposal the leadership jumps at it.

TrailerParkJawa · Post by **TrailerParkJawa** » 2003-12-09 03:29am

I did not think it was too bad. Here is my list of the good and bad:

Good:

1) I like the odd style of fighting in space. Sometimes sound, sometimes none. It's different enough to be interesting to me.

2) I like the "look" of background touches. Oxygen tanks for the firefighters, a greaseboard for tracking fighters, stuff like that.

3) That surprise attack with nukes was good. We dont get to see much, which is really what would happen with survivors, if you see or hear too much you are too close and thus going to die.

4) The asian girl flying the shuttle/awacs thing was beautiful.

Bad:

1) Too much teenage sexuality, yes I know what I said in #4 above.

Seriously, all the sex stuff could have been left out. Who are
they targeting, Comic Book guy?

2) How exactly do you have a ship without networked computers?

3) I could have done without the baby scene.

4) I dont mind a female "Starbuck" just get rid of the wild, hair on fire, Maverick, man acting women.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2003-12-09 03:51am

This new Galactica is a truly idiotic piece of moviemaking —even by the standards of the original as well as the ripoff hackwork we've come to expect from SciFi of late. Granted, the original certainly was not great by any stretch of the imagination. Point of fact, most of it was stupid. At least it was a fun stupid, an adventurous (at times) stupid. It had an ambitious idea behind it —even if that idea was stupid at its base. And while the original's characters were two-dimensional, they showed more depth than the pile of termite-ridden wood filling in for the people in this production, who were not only stupid but oh so deadly dull, dull, DULL. They acted like the absent Cylon automotons; going through their actions and motions in a rote, by the numbers manner. From the mechanical sex of Baltar/N.6 and Boomer/Jolly to the belligerent perkiness of sex-change Starbuck to the drunken anger of the new, bleached Col. Tigh, to the truly tedious father/son tension between the animated woodcarving of Cmdr. Adama and his punk jarhead son Apollo; each and every action, mannerism, and line of cliched, portentuous dialogue was telegraphed way in advance. You almost knew what the next scene, next reaction, next line was going to be. And all delivered in a bloodless manner to the point that never once is there any point where one can hook into these alledged people on anything approaching an emotional, visceral level. At no point could I feel anything for the "characters" or their alledged plight —particularly Edward James Olmos who was clearly just phoning in his performance in this goofy film which seemed to be attempting to avoid even a hint of action and excitement as if it were touched by the plague.

One poster on this thread compared this movie's overall feel to The Day After. The one problem with this comparison is that in The Day After, you actually experience the inescapable horror of a nuclear war —Jason Robards trapped on the highway when the bombs go off, cities blasted out of existence, people frozen in their tracks and "skeletonised" at ground-zero, people engulfed by flames and supersonic blast-waves, people trapped in buildings as they're literally blown away, and afterward the sight of the people dying from radiation sickness ravaging their bodies or falling victim to the savagery of a suddenly lawless world. By contrast, we saw fireballs from orbit, one mushroom cloud, fireballs over a distant horizon... and people rushing toward a landed shuttlecraft. We don't even see burning ruins or the death of even one minor character in the holocaust. Before now, I never thought anybody could make Armageddon as exciting and horrifying as waiting in a dentist's office, but this movie's makers managed exactly that. All the critical sequences of the downfall of the Twelve Colonies occur off-screen. Never once is the horror of the event actually shown, breaking one of the most cardinal rules of screenwriting which even a hack like Ron Moore should understand. The few battle scenes which are shown are not only all too brief but filmed in either at such distance that you barely make out what's going on or so closely fixed on one fighter or missile that the rest of the combat scene is lost. If a film is going to incorporate battle scenes, it should actually show the fighting, shouldn't it?

There was rampant stupidity in the original BSG to be certain; such as Baltar not really figuring out the sort of retirement plan the Cylons had in mind for him once his usefullness was ended. This movie makes the people from the original seem like MENSA honorees by comparison. Not only is Gailus Baltar, supposedly the Greatest Mind on Caprica, an utter moron for never once wondering why his new electric lovedoll wants the defence mainframe codes, we see that the Colonials stupidly networked every computer system together in both their planetside and space forces so that the whole defence could be attacked at a single point of failure (which means they learned their computer science from Microsoft or Starfleet) and shut down. That this in and of itself is horribly implausible is small beer compared to the truly loopy notion that a race of robots would not only build human duplicates but a particular one with a sex drive to boot. The backstory of the 01 cybernation from The Animatrix is infinitely more reasonable, and that's saying a lot.

Where the original BSG was a weird mix of Mormonism and the pseudo cosmology/history of the VonDaniken School of Crackpots, the new BSG is an exercise in tedious antitechnological sermonising and moralistic handwringing over man daring to Tamper in God's Domain. At one point, Adama is sermonising over the late war with the Cylons and wrestling with the question of what gives humanity the right to survive. Only an utter imbecile indulges this sort of philosophical horseshit with any degree of seriousness. Existing is better than nonexistence —that is the only why to survival and the only reason that counts in the end. Anybody who can't figure that out is an idiot, plain and simple. It is not a question of paying the price for playing god; which brings us to the flipside of this movie's idiocy. To indulge the question is to promulgate the Neo-Luddite idea that somehow, someway, man's extention of his science and technology represents a threat to the Natural Order and must inevitably lead to his downfall. Technology is the path to extinction, to follow this formulation to its inevitable conclusion. Only this ignores the fact that the only attribute which homo sapiens has to his advantage is his ability to invent better tools to tame his environment and thus survive in a world where otherwise the Natural Order would eliminate his evolutionary niche and thus himself. Nature, and thus the Natural Order, changes; this is neither Evil or Good, it simply is a fact of existence. Science and invention are the chief tools which have bought our survival in an otherwise changing and hostile environment. So the entire question of man playing god is moot and always has been. Man plays God because frankly there's no one else to do the job and no real choice in the matter, and pseudomoralistic handwringing over the issue is an utterly pointless exercise.

All this, however, is merely periphral to the fact that Ronald Moore's new vision for Battlestar Galactica removed everything which gave the original its identity and left us with a tedious, plodding mess of a movie; populated by "characters" who haven't even the personalities of cardboard standees. A movie with all the excitement and entertainment value of watching very moralistic paint drying.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-12-09 04:00am

So who's gonna tune in tonight?

I will, but I'll have to tape it, since I have to go out and do some editing.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-12-09 05:19am

Oh, here's what The Digital Bits' editor Bill Hunt had to say about it:

By the way, did any of you sit through part one of Sci-Fi's new Battlestar Galactica miniseries last night? Gods... I haven't been that bored watching TV in a very long time. What a total snore fest. Two hours and almost nothing happened... then, when it did, it was all off screen. The shaky, gun camera cinematography to the battle footage was cool, but that's about it. Don't think I'll be tuning in for part two. What's the deal with Sci-Fi these days anyway? It's all this pseudo-science reality-style crappola. Bryant Gumbel tracking down UFOs, some half-baked schmoe guessing the names of your dead loved ones, or watching people get the piss scared out of them by Shannon Doherty. Plus the occasional B-grade "original" film... and about a hundred hours of that Stargate TV show every week. Yikes.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2003-12-09 05:38am

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Oh, here's what The Digital Bits' editor Bill Hunt had to say about it:

By the way, did any of you sit through part one of Sci-Fi's new Battlestar Galactica miniseries last night? Gods... I haven't been that bored watching TV in a very long time. What a total snore fest. Two hours and almost nothing happened... then, when it did, it was all off screen. The shaky, gun camera cinematography to the battle footage was cool, but that's about it. Don't think I'll be tuning in for part two. What's the deal with Sci-Fi these days anyway? It's all this pseudo-science reality-style crappola. Bryant Gumbel tracking down UFOs, some half-baked schmoe guessing the names of your dead loved ones, or watching people get the piss scared out of them by Shannon Doherty. Plus the occasional B-grade "original" film... and about a hundred hours of that Stargate TV show every week. Yikes.

It's nearly impossible now to remember what a cool network SciFi once was.

Darksider · Post by **Darksider** » 2003-12-09 06:19am

Dear god that sucked.......

Longest two fucking hours of my life.

The sex scenes were pointless (Most of them are these days) and the plot moved along like it was walking through thick mud.

I'll still tune in tomorrow though (or rather tonight) it's like a train wreck. I can't look away.