Battlestar Galactica Review

[Patrick Degan]

I undestand completely. However, unlike you, I don't happen to believe there is one way, and only one way to tell a good story.

Let's see... there's the right way, and the wrong way. Reducing Armageddon to a series of status reports...

Battlestar Galactica is not telling a story about armageddon. It's not telling the story of the destruction of all twelve colnies (except in a kind of secondary way - as the setting for the exodus), it's telling the story of the Battlestar Galactica and it's escape from this cataclysm. Duh! So it focuses on the Battlestar Galactica.

Repetition of the same lame excuse, I'm afraid, does not erase this production's defects. Apparently you still can't understand the concept of mood-setting in a dramatic film.

And never once was BG 2003 intended to take you beyond the scope of the onscreen characters' point of view. And this nonsense about how a war film "must paint the panorama of wars' horror" is a bunch of pretentious crap.

No it isn't. It's what marks the difference between a film you remember and two or four hours of wallpaper paste.

Bullshit. Das Boot is only one example. Saving Private Ryan never gave you a big picture of the war - "panorama of war's horror" - it never even gave you a big picture of the D-Day invasion. It focused on one single squad.

Are you nuts?! What the fuck did you call the entire opening sequence at Dog Green Sector, Omaha Beach?!?!

Band of Brothers never gave you a "panorama of war's horror", but confined you strictly to the events the 507th regiment of the 101st airborne was in. To Hell and Back never gave you a "panorama of war's horror", it told the story of one man: Audie Murphy. Sink the Bismark didn't give you the "panorama of war's horror", it told about one aspect of the battle of the Atlantic: the hunt for a single German battleship. And while there were a couple of battle scenes, most of the "action" consisted of men humnching over maps in the Admiralty war room in a London bunker getting status reports and making plans.

Again, you reach for invalid comparisons. Sink The Bismarck was a docudrama encompassing every aspect of the hunt for the German warship, both at sea and at Admiralty HQ. As for To Hell And Back, you notice Audie Murphy is avtually on the front linre, in battle, with his life at risk and not merely sitting in the PX reading about the war in Stars and Stripes. Same for the men in Band Of Brothers. The characters are directly involved in the situation they're caught in the middle of. Just what part of this concept eludes your grasp?

Your contention that in order to be good a war film must "paint the panorama of war's horror" is pretentious crap.

I guess Stephen Spielberg, Franklin Schaffner, Darryl Zannuck, Wolfgang
Petersen, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Ron Maxwell, and Nick Meyer, among others, are "full of pretentous crap" for not making war movies consisting almost solely of people in rooms talking over status updates and spouting pseudophilosophical blather about man's worthiness to survive. THAT is pretentious crap.

Many war films eschew that approach, and choose instead to tell a detailed story about a relatively small corner of the war. Not every war movie has to be The Longest Day. You can tell a story by telling a big story on a sweeping scale, like the Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, or Tora! Tora! Tora! (great films all). Or you can focus narrowly on a small group of men or a single ship and tell their story in detail. Both approaches are equally valid, and both can produce landmark war films. Your contention that only the epic, panoramic approach is the right one is simply ridiculous. All of the great films I named above prove how wrong you are.

You totally misunderstand the concept —especially in regard to the great films you imagine prove me wrong. The panorama is of the war the men are fighting, be it one skirmish or an invasion. It is not watching a bunch of people who are uninvolved in actions taking place somewhere else which are only mentioned in passing. That's partly where crap like D Day: The Sixth Of June derives from —war treated as mere backdrop for a soap opera.

I've got that movie in my collection as well, and again you make an utterly ludicrous comparison. Petersen did indeed paint a panorama of the war's horror through the very grueling ordeal of the crew of U91. He didn't have them sitting at dock reading about how the U-boat war was going and merely talking about it for four hours.

Which is nothing like what happened in BG 2003 either. Yes, the Galactica participated in no action for the entire show. They committed not a single ship to teh fight, and fired not a shot in anger. They sat around at Ragnar anchorage for the entire show receiving reports and did nothing.

Certainly true through part one and most of part two. The movie's one real action sequence in the last ten minutes of part two certainly does not make up for a very largely missing armageddon on Caprica, or the total absence of the fleet's destruction. The movie more or less followed the same lame-ass pattern characteristic of Ron Moore's TNG and DS9 work —merely using the idea that some action is taking place somewhere as backdrop for a dreary character soap opera.

Another fine strawman.

Yours, actually.

We did see action. We saw the destruction of Caprica.

Gee —some fireballs visible from orbit and a mushroom cloud in the background of another scene. Yep, that sure makes me feel the full horror of a civilisation's destruction.

We saw the Galactica's first squadron go up against the Cylons and get shut down and destroyed.

Ah yes, the edge-on-your-seat thrills as two robot fighters transmit a "divide-by-zero" command to crash the Windows NT-run computers on the Vipers.

We saw the Cylons finish off the ships that were not able to escape via FTL jump.

A long-distance shot of missile launches which cuts to the closeup of the doomed little girl the president made nice with as the scene whites out —nice bit of emotional button-pushing which of course we never saw coming.

We saw the final battle where Galactica screened the escape of the civilian vessels. We saw everything we needed to see. We saw everything that was necessary to tell the story - and the story is about Galactica and her escape, not about the colonial fleet and its destruction.

So... if Star Wars had been made by Ron Moore instead of George Lucas, you would have found satisfaction in a movie which starts with Princess Leia already in custody complaining to Gov. Tarkin about how many of her crew were killed in the boarding of her starship which goes unseen, followed by Leia merely being given a computer printout by Darth Vader describing the unseen destruction of Alderaan, followed by Vader and Tarkin debating politics and the validity of belief in the Force while getting reports about the attempt to break the princess out of the detention block, followed by the Rebel HQ staff and Leia debating the morality of blowing up the Death Star (come to blow them up) and killing its crew, followed by Luke wrestlinhg with his conscience about blowing up the Death Star and killing its crew while the comm traffic of the attacking Red and Gold squadrons is heard in the background, before Luke is told to Use the Force, fires his torpedoes, and blows up the Death Star? That to you would have been a good movie ?

You are unfairly criticizing them for not telling a story that the show was never supposed to be about in the first place. Gimme a break.

Without the destruction of Caprica and the colonies, there IS no story for BSG! That is the context which justifies the whole production. How does leaving the audience uninvolved in the main driver for the whole fucking plot amount to a good storytelling decision?!

The only reason you saw the Atlantia destroyed in the first movie is that it had been flying right beside Galactica at the start of the pilot. They didn't show extraneous battles depicting the rest of the fleet getting waxed either. Where's your criticism for them?

IT WAS THE FUCKING PRESIDENTIAL FLAGSHIP AND THEIR GOVERNMENT WAS RIDING ON BOARD! That ship's destruction searingly underscores the disaster that is befalling Adama's entire civilisation. Seeing it has far more of an impact than merely hearing about it.

In case you haven't noticed, I have criticized the miniseries where I though it was weak. I am not unqualified in my praise for it. What I object to is unfair criticism by people who wouldn't give it an even break if it had been writted by the resurrected William Shakespeare, just because you had your heart set on an exact recreation of the original, and you can't get over your resentment at having your balloon popped.

Appeal to Motive fallacy. Evidently you missed out on this comment I made prefacing my own review:

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


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.

And

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

Those are hardly the sentiments of somebody who "had his heart set on a remake of the original" as if it was the most spectacular TV show ever, or was disappointed by "having his balloon popped", now is it? Still sounds like you're the one doing any whining here.

Hardly. I'm not the one whose tone is unreservedly critical. I'm not the one whining about how awful this was, and about not getting to see the battle scenes he wanted to see.

No, your tone is that of someone seemingly determined to compose endless apologia for a fundamentally flawed movie no matter how its defects are outlined in detail and determined to ignore those defects at all costs. In other words, you're doing an incredible imitation of an uncritical fanboy.

For some reason, I prefer battle scenes where I can actually see the scope of the fight unfolding on the screen. Jerky gun-camera footage doesn't fit the bill by a longshot.

Perfect example of unfair criticism. Maybe you don't prefer the somewhat chaotic appearance of footage that appears to have been filmed by an on site gun camera. But to assert that the original was actually superior is simply laughable.

I said no such thing.

Then if you don't think the scenes we saw are inferior, why the fuck are you bitching about them?

The thing I never said was that the original was superior. That has nothing to do with commentary on the inferiority of the remake.

There are several panoramic shots in BG 2003, such as the final battle scene when Galactica takes up her position screening the civilian fleet. You see the Galactica, the base stars, and many of the civilian ships, all in one shot. Then there is the shot of the base stars launching dozens of fighters at once - something we never saw the like of in the original. And the vipers speeding away from the Galactica, again with dozens of them in each frame. Then the battle opens and fighters and flying tracers fill the sky. Contrast this with the original where, at most, we would see a whopping three fighters per frame, and a couple of laser torpedo blasts animated in; and where each ship, when hit, was overlayed with an optical mat of an explosion, with nary a hint of debris; and where reuse of stuck footage was abundant. Oh yes, the original was so much better and more realistic.

Except everything in that spew of yours about comparisons with the original is not the source of my complaints with this movie or its alledged action scenes. Try actually dealing with the substance of an argument instead of making a blatant and pathetic Appeal to Motive attack.

Then what is the source of your complaints? The major point of discussion on this thread has been a comparison of the new version to the original. If you don't have a problem with the new versus the old, why the fuck are you complaining? If you don't like the new version, and you didn't like the old version, they why the hell would you spend so much time posting about it? I tend to ignore shows don't like, not argue about them.

And you presume to accuse me of erecting strawmen? That's comedy.

Nice strawman. Never was the action so misdirected from the story by showing anything so irrelevant.

What strawman? It is you who attempted likening the two cited TOS episodes to the new BSG. Are you even sure you saw the episodes in question?

Many times. I am pointing out - rightly I might add - that in order to be a good, dramatic TV depiction of a space battle, there need not be lots of action and effects on camera (which seems to be your major criticism of BG 2003: that we didn't get enough of these things). If the story is good, it can be character driven, and the action of the characters can convey the sense of drama and tension even in the absence of effects. That is my point. And that is as far as I am taking the comparison. Since you seem unable to grasp this point, let me say it again in very plain language: My point, my entire point here, is that a good story can be well told on tv without needing to depict a lot of effects laden battles. It can be done through character actions and dialog. That is all. I am not making any point beyond that. Your gripe that because those ST eps were a different story the comparison doesn't apply at all. Bullshit. You are taking the comparison too far, and moving it into the realm of nitpickery. Not to mention distorting things with snide comments about "Wrigley's pleasure planet" which are deliberate gross exaggerations, and we never see anything like that in BG 2003.

Actually, it is your laughable attempt to lecture me about what constitutes good drama which is bullshit. The whole point is not the level of the SFX; it is the placement of the characters in the very heart of the situation the audience is expected to care about. That is what gets the viewer involved. Your alledged point is pointless.

Another entirely missed point. The action was not seen. In "Balance of Terror" there are numerous scenes where people are just sitting on the bridge of the two ships waiting for the enemy's next move.

Gee... I guess if you disregard the Destruction of Outpost 4 scene, the scenes where the Romulan ship is getting hammered, the whole scene where the Enterprise is fleeing the Romulan plasma bolt, the nuke detonation scene, the phaser room scene, and the scene where the Romulan ship takes two direct hits, you just might have an argument there.

And I guess if you disregard the destruction of the diplomatic station, the destruction of Caprica, the annihilation of Galactica's Mk VII Vipers, the destruction of the sublight civilian ships, and the final battle scene where Galactica and the fleet fought their way clear of the Cylons, I guess you might have an argument as well.

I do have an argument: the destruction of Caprica goes largely unseen. The shutdown of the first wave of Vipers is a cheap plot device to avoid any actual action sequence to involve the viewer. The destruction of the marooned civilian ships goes largely unseen and is merely set-up for a cheap attempt to push the audience's emotional buttons over the Poor Little Lost Girl™. And the movie's one and only true action sequence is all too brief and reached only at the cost of sitting through a dull movie. That you cannot comprehend this is your problem, Mr. Apologist.

The Romulan commander's speech to the centurion about his disillusionment with his mission was all talk and no action.

Which takes less than one minute of screen time and doesn't stretch into empty moralising about the species' worthiness to survive.

Adama's speech at the ceremony and his conversation with the Cylon infiltrator aboard the Ragnar station constitute the entirety of said "empty moralizing", and took no more than about two minutes of screen time. You are making my point for me.

I'm not responsible for your fantasies. The whole pseudomoralistic tone of Adama's Neo-Luddite speech questioning humanity's right to survive because of his technology is a palpable drumbeat throughout the movie and is mouthed repeatedly by Adama, N.6, the Cylon duplicate who tries to kill Adama, Laura Rosen and her aide, and Col. Tigh. About as subtle as a jackhammer and as relevant as debates about the Dancing Angel population on pinheads.

You never see the Enterprise and the warbird occupy the screen together.

Which was clearly beyond the technical or budgetary capacity of the makers of TOS in 1966.

So? Your point is what? That because they can do it today they must? Says who?

Nice little strawman you've put up there. That was not the point and you fucking well know it. You tried putting up that pathetic little dodge to support the false argument likening Neo-BSG 's lack of action to the FX and budgetary limitations of TOS as similar dramatic approaches, when they are no such thing.

And there aren't really many exterior shots at all. The battle was almost entirely conveyed by the action of teh characters on screen.

Except for the ships getting hammered and the fact that both crews were actually in the middle of the battle and not off someplace merely reading status updates on events they have no direct involvement in.

Key point "that they have no direct involvement in". This is the story of the Galactica, not the story of the colonial fleet or the Atlantia. Why should they break away from the story they are telling to put in extraneous scenes?

Robotically repeating "This-is-the-story-of-the-Galactica" over and over and over a over does not a rebuttal make. Without the destruction of their entire civilisation, there IS no story for the Galactica. The issue in that context is not what directly involves the characters at the moment but what convinces the audience to have any involvement in their plight. Placing the Galactica in the ambush of the fleet would have both directly involved the characters in their plight and involved the audience in the movie's main plot-driver at a visceral level.

You are free not to like the show. I can't understand why you'd be bothered to spend so much time posting about a show you don't like though.

Sorry, but until Freedom of Speech is rescinded, you're just going to have to put up with opinions you don't like, aren't you? And I could just as well ask why you seem so hellbent to spend so much time trying to blunt criticism you consider invalid.

[Perinquus]

Battlestar Galactica is not telling a story about armageddon. It's not telling the story of the destruction of all twelve colnies (except in a kind of secondary way - as the setting for the exodus), it's telling the story of the Battlestar Galactica and it's escape from this cataclysm. Duh! So it focuses on the Battlestar Galactica.

Repetition of the same lame excuse, I'm afraid, does not erase this production's defects. Apparently you still can't understand the concept of mood-setting in a dramatic film.

Actually, I wonder if you are the one who can understand it, since I've already explained the dramatic reason for not showing the viewer anything not directly witnessed by the characters.

It works too. Most people who saw the miniseries are simply not as down on it as you are.

Bullshit. Das Boot is only one example. Saving Private Ryan never gave you a big picture of the war - "panorama of war's horror" - it never even gave you a big picture of the D-Day invasion. It focused on one single squad.

Are you nuts?! What the fuck did you call the entire opening sequence at Dog Green Sector, Omaha Beach?!?!

You still didn't see anything that didn't happen around Miller's squad of rangers. Go back and find me the scenes of action on Utah, Juno, Gold, and Sword beaches. Find me scenes showing Canadian and British troops wading ashore. Find me scenes showing naval vessels directing their gunfire onto shore targets. Find me scenes showing the British and American air forces bombing German targets.

Band of Brothers never gave you a "panorama of war's horror", but confined you strictly to the events the 507th regiment of the 101st airborne was in. To Hell and Back never gave you a "panorama of war's horror", it told the story of one man: Audie Murphy. Sink the Bismark didn't give you the "panorama of war's horror", it told about one aspect of the battle of the Atlantic: the hunt for a single German battleship. And while there were a couple of battle scenes, most of the "action" consisted of men humnching over maps in the Admiralty war room in a London bunker getting status reports and making plans.

Again, you reach for invalid comparisons. Sink The Bismarck was a docudrama encompassing every aspect of the hunt for the German warship, both at sea and at Admiralty HQ. As for To Hell And Back, you notice Audie Murphy is avtually on the front linre, in battle, with his life at risk and not merely sitting in the PX reading about the war in Stars and Stripes. Same for the men in Band Of Brothers. The characters are directly involved in the situation they're caught in the middle of. Just what part of this concept eludes your grasp?

The point is they show nothing that is not directly relevant to the story they are telling.

Your contention that in order to be good a war film must "paint the panorama of war's horror" is pretentious crap.

I guess Stephen Spielberg, Franklin Schaffner, Darryl Zannuck, Wolfgang
Petersen, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Ron Maxwell, and Nick Meyer, among others, are "full of pretentous crap" for not making war movies consisting almost solely of people in rooms talking over status updates and spouting pseudophilosophical blather about man's worthiness to survive. THAT is pretentious crap.

Enough with the strawmen already! I never said, hinted, or inferred any such thing and you fucking know it. Stop selectively reading my posts. If there's one thing I can't stand it's people who deliberately employ dishonest tactics.

Here's what I said, and I'll highlight the relevant portions.

You can tell a story by telling a big story on a sweeping scale, like the Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, or Tora! Tora! Tora! (great films all). Or you can focus narrowly on a small group of men or a single ship and tell their story in detail. Both approaches are equally valid, and both can produce landmark war films.

Yes, clear proof that I think large scale, epic war stories are crap.

You totally misunderstand the concept —especially in regard to the great films you imagine prove me wrong. The panorama is of the war the men are fighting, be it one skirmish or an invasion. It is not watching a bunch of people who are uninvolved in actions taking place somewhere else which are only mentioned in passing. That's partly where crap like D Day: The Sixth Of June derives from —war treated as mere backdrop for a soap opera.

Now who's making invalid comparisons?

We did see action. We saw the destruction of Caprica.

Gee —some fireballs visible from orbit and a mushroom cloud in the background of another scene. Yep, that sure makes me feel the full horror of a civilisation's destruction.

It served well enough. It told the audinece everything they needed to know about what was happening. It was not dramatically necessary to lengthen it.

We saw the Galactica's first squadron go up against the Cylons and get shut down and destroyed.

Ah yes, the edge-on-your-seat thrills as two robot fighters transmit a "divide-by-zero" command to crash the Windows NT-run computers on the Vipers.

Again, which told the viewer all that was necessary. It showed the viewer that the Cylons had a weapon that could simply deactivate their enemy's vessels.

We saw the Cylons finish off the ships that were not able to escape via FTL jump.

A long-distance shot of missile launches which cuts to the closeup of the doomed little girl the president made nice with as the scene whites out —nice bit of emotional button-pushing which of course we never saw coming.

And the radio chatter of the people pleading and then cursing as they saw their deaths approaching was a nicely effective means of showing the kind of tragedy the human race was suffering, as well as the hard and sometimes ruthless decisions that had to be made by the survivors if they were to remain survivors. I think you are the only person I've encountered who has a problem with this scene.

We saw the final battle where Galactica screened the escape of the civilian vessels. We saw everything we needed to see. We saw everything that was necessary to tell the story - and the story is about Galactica and her escape, not about the colonial fleet and its destruction.

So... if Star Wars had been made by Ron Moore instead of George Lucas, you would have found satisfaction in a movie which starts with Princess Leia already in custody complaining to Gov. Tarkin about how many of her crew were killed in the boarding of her starship which goes unseen, followed by Leia merely being given a computer printout by Darth Vader describing the unseen destruction of Alderaan, followed by Vader and Tarkin debating politics and the validity of belief in the Force while getting reports about the attempt to break the princess out of the detention block, followed by the Rebel HQ staff and Leia debating the morality of blowing up the Death Star (come to blow them up) and killing its crew, followed by Luke wrestlinhg with his conscience about blowing up the Death Star and killing its crew while the comm traffic of the attacking Red and Gold squadrons is heard in the background, before Luke is told to Use the Force, fires his torpedoes, and blows up the Death Star? That to you would have been a good movie ?

You are unfairly criticizing them for not telling a story that the show was never supposed to be about in the first place. Gimme a break.

Without the destruction of Caprica and the colonies, there IS no story for BSG! That is the context which justifies the whole production. How does leaving the audience uninvolved in the main driver for the whole fucking plot amount to a good storytelling decision?!

And they conveyed to the audience that this destruction took place. They did not focus on it, however, as it was not the main point of the story. Sure a bit more on it might have been nice. But it was not so necessary that the amount they did show makes the miniseries "crap".

The only reason you saw the Atlantia destroyed in the first movie is that it had been flying right beside Galactica at the start of the pilot. They didn't show extraneous battles depicting the rest of the fleet getting waxed either. Where's your criticism for them?

IT WAS THE FUCKING PRESIDENTIAL FLAGSHIP AND THEIR GOVERNMENT WAS RIDING ON BOARD! That ship's destruction searingly underscores the disaster that is befalling Adama's entire civilisation. Seeing it has far more of an impact than merely hearing about it.

Some of us don't need to see it. We have imaginations. We can fill in the details on our own.

snip... Those are hardly the sentiments of somebody who "had his heart set on a remake of the original" as if it was the most spectacular TV show ever, or was disappointed by "having his balloon popped", now is it? Still sounds like you're the one doing any whining here.

Hardly. I'm not the one whose tone is unreservedly critical. I'm not the one whining about how awful this was, and about not getting to see the battle scenes he wanted to see.

No, your tone is that of someone seemingly determined to compose endless apologia for a fundamentally flawed movie no matter how its defects are outlined in detail and determined to ignore those defects at all costs. In other words, you're doing an incredible imitation of an uncritical fanboy.

I'm focusing on the positive because I am responding to your comments. Why would I try to counter a negative with negative? Go back and read my first post. My negative comments you will find there.

Gee... I guess if you disregard the Destruction of Outpost 4 scene, the scenes where the Romulan ship is getting hammered, the whole scene where the Enterprise is fleeing the Romulan plasma bolt, the nuke detonation scene, the phaser room scene, and the scene where the Romulan ship takes two direct hits, you just might have an argument there.

And I guess if you disregard the destruction of the diplomatic station, the destruction of Caprica, the annihilation of Galactica's Mk VII Vipers, the destruction of the sublight civilian ships, and the final battle scene where Galactica and the fleet fought their way clear of the Cylons, I guess you might have an argument as well.

I do have an argument: the destruction of Caprica goes largely unseen. The shutdown of the first wave of Vipers is a cheap plot device to avoid any actual action sequence to involve the viewer. The destruction of the marooned civilian ships goes largely unseen and is merely set-up for a cheap attempt to push the audience's emotional buttons over the Poor Little Lost Girl™. And the movie's one and only true action sequence is all too brief and reached only at the cost of sitting through a dull movie. That you cannot comprehend this is your problem, Mr. Apologist.

Some of us have attention spans longer than five minutes, and we do not need an effects laden wankfest full of huge explosions and giant battles every couple of minutes in order to keep us interested.

Which takes less than one minute of screen time and doesn't stretch into empty moralising about the species' worthiness to survive.

Adama's speech at the ceremony and his conversation with the Cylon infiltrator aboard the Ragnar station constitute the entirety of said "empty moralizing", and took no more than about two minutes of screen time. You are making my point for me.

I'm not responsible for your fantasies. The whole pseudomoralistic tone of Adama's Neo-Luddite speech questioning humanity's right to survive because of his technology is a palpable drumbeat throughout the movie and is mouthed repeatedly by Adama, N.6, the Cylon duplicate who tries to kill Adama, Laura Rosen and her aide, and Col. Tigh. About as subtle as a jackhammer and as relevant as debates about the Dancing Angel population on pinheads.

Excuse me, I must have missed something. Where do Tigh and the president ever say any such thing? And I remember Adama saying that in his speech, but not "repeatedly". Where else does he say it?

Which was clearly beyond the technical or budgetary capacity of the makers of TOS in 1966.

So? Your point is what? That because they can do it today they must? Says who?

Nice little strawman you've put up there. That was not the point and you fucking well know it. You tried putting up that pathetic little dodge to support the false argument likening Neo-BSG 's lack of action to the FX and budgetary limitations of TOS as similar dramatic approaches, when they are no such thing.

So one had that approach necessitated by technological and budgetary constraints, and the other chose to use it voluntarily. They reasons behind their approach are not the point. The point you just cannot seem to grasp is that it is not necessary to have a lot of effects and battle scenes to tell a good story.

Except for the ships getting hammered and the fact that both crews were actually in the middle of the battle and not off someplace merely reading status updates on events they have no direct involvement in.

Key point "that they have no direct involvement in". This is the story of the Galactica, not the story of the colonial fleet or the Atlantia. Why should they break away from the story they are telling to put in extraneous scenes?

Robotically repeating "This-is-the-story-of-the-Galactica" over and over and over a over does not a rebuttal make. Without the destruction of their entire civilisation, there IS no story for the Galactica.

And they showed it, setting the stage for the Galactica's story. That's all they needed to do, and that's all they did. They didn't show it in obsessive detail because that wasn't necessary to tell the story. My God. You are sounding more and more like a little kid crying because he didn't get to see as many explosions as he wanted.

The issue in that context is not what directly involves the characters at the moment but what convinces the audience to have any involvement in their plight. Placing the Galactica in the ambush of the fleet would have both directly involved the characters in their plight and involved the audience in the movie's main plot-driver at a visceral level.

It also would have made it harder to explain why Galactica survived. To a certain extent, I expect they were just trying to be different from the original series just to be different. Having the Galactica be an old ship about to be mothballed was probably a decision made on that basis. Having it in the fleet might have made it possible to show an exciting battle scene, but leaving that out hardly ruins the movie. I don't judge the worth of a story by how many cool explosions it has. I judge it by whether or not the story is good.

You are free not to like the show. I can't understand why you'd be bothered to spend so much time posting about a show you don't like though.

Sorry, but until Freedom of Speech is rescinded, you're just going to have to put up with opinions you don't like, aren't you? And I could just as well ask why you seem so hellbent to spend so much time trying to blunt criticism you consider invalid.

Because I am argumentative by nature. And because it just kind of irritates me when people spout their opinions as if they were universal truth.

[Kuja]

By any objective criteria, the battle scenes in the new series are far more effective than in the old. They are more elaborate, they feature more vessels and show a much larger scope of action, the effects are more realistic, there is no re-use of stock footage, and they look more realistic.

I defy you to find anyone who has never before seen either incarnation of BG, who would tell you the scenes from the original BG were in any way superior.

Oh yes, I'm prefectly content to conceed that they were technologically superior.

But were they dramatically superior? Fuck no. I didn't care a whit if the new BSG was nuked a dozen times, because I didn't connect with any of the characters. Wow, there goes one Viper. Wow, Starbuck got hit. Wow, a nuke went off. Wow, 85 people died.

See, in original BSG, we had what was almost solidly positive character interaction. Apollo and Adama were close to each other. Apollo, Starbuck, and Boomer were all good friends. Now, Adama and Apollo can't stand each other. Starbuck and Tigh can't stand each other. Starbuck and Apollo were rocky. There was virtually universal NEGATIVE interaction, and what was left felt stale. Old BSG made you feel for the characters; that made all the difference.

Again, by any objective criteria, the battle scenes here were more realistic and exciting. The battle scenes in the new don't have any more holes in them than in the old. If the battle stars in the old series had one third the fighter complement and NONE of the megapulsar cannon that Cylon base stars had, how could the Galactica or the Pegasus charge two of them and survive for even a few moments?

Better pilots and none of the Basestars were able to bring their cannons to bear in time. But I do see your point.

Bullshit. As the opening of the final battle took place we saw a panoramic shot of a Cylon base star launching dozens of fighters in a single scene, which is far, far more than we ever saw in the old show. There were several shots featuring multiple ships, shots firing, and debris flying all in a single scene - which, again, is far more than we ever saw in the old show. The old show featured, at most, two or three ships in a single frame, a couple of laser torpedo bolts at most, or a single laser turret firing, and no debris. The old BG did a great job for its day, given the limits of TV budgets and then-current FX technology. The new BG has done at least as good a job, for its day, given the limits of TV budgets and now-current FX technology.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. You two raiders shutting down a squadron the best it could do? You call a two-minute dogfight and a five-minute final battle the best it could do? You call distant mushroom clouds and not even showing Caprica City getting nuked THE BEST IT COULD DO?!

You are simply one of those people who is not willing to give the series an objective viewing, because you can't get over your resentment that it's not exactly the same show as the old one.

Horseshit. I dislike new BSG because it gave us lots of bitchy characters and lots of gratuitous sex in place of REAL character development and REAL sci-fi battles.

Which would have given the viewer a picture of the battle the characters in the show did not have.

So frelling what? It's an apocolypse, right? GIVE US A GODDAMNED APOCALYPSE.

And I've already pointed out the fact that the makers of this version were clearly trying to limit the viewers' perspective to that of the characters, and the dramatic reasons for this.

Characters? I'm sorry, did you see characters? All I saw was a bunch of people starting arguments at the drop of a hat before ripping each others' clothes off.

And there was also the practical reason. This is a TV show, with a limited budget. Such a scene would have necessitated more actors (and their salaries), plus more expesive FX shots.

I highly doubt that a four-minute-long scene like the one described above would have been THAT stressful on BSG's budget.

Why spend the money for that when the dramatic effect the writers are shooting for can actually be better achieved by leaving it out.

Better achieved? Bull. You call hearing a blurb about the Atlantia being destroyed better than actually seeing a mighty Battlestar being shredded without even being able to lift a finger to save itself?

Yes, lets emphasize flashy visuals over everything else. Everyone knows that's the best way to tell an effective story.

What effective story? I hate to beat a dead horse but new BSGs plotline, especially early on, was weak. Did you notice that after the jump to the armory, things started to flow more smoothly because folks decided to forget the petty bullshit between them and start working together? Why couldn't the whole thing have been like that? Why did we need virtually two hours of whiny soap opera with a tiny bit of action instead of a first episode?

[Kuja]

Perinquus expressed my feelings yet again, Kuja. You're whining about a scene that was also "missing" from the first according to your standards.

What the fuck kind of smoking have you been crack? We SAW the Atlantia go up in the original.

[Typhonis 1]

Lets face it Moore droped the ball when it came to protraying the end of the Colonial military.

In the origional we had at least 5 battlestars on screen in the first ep and we saw the Atlantia explode even saw the damage on the bridge.

[Perinquus]

By any objective criteria, the battle scenes in the new series are far more effective than in the old. They are more elaborate, they feature more vessels and show a much larger scope of action, the effects are more realistic, there is no re-use of stock footage, and they look more realistic.

I defy you to find anyone who has never before seen either incarnation of BG, who would tell you the scenes from the original BG were in any way superior.

Oh yes, I'm prefectly content to conceed that they were technologically superior.

But were they dramatically superior? Fuck no. I didn't care a whit if the new BSG was nuked a dozen times, because I didn't connect with any of the characters. Wow, there goes one Viper. Wow, Starbuck got hit. Wow, a nuke went off. Wow, 85 people died.

I was referring to the battle scenes here, not character development.

See, in original BSG, we had what was almost solidly positive character interaction. Apollo and Adama were close to each other. Apollo, Starbuck, and Boomer were all good friends. Now, Adama and Apollo can't stand each other. Starbuck and Tigh can't stand each other. Starbuck and Apollo were rocky. There was virtually universal NEGATIVE interaction, and what was left felt stale. Old BSG made you feel for the characters; that made all the difference.

I'll grant you, the old show had mostly more interesting characters. But the new Baltar is interesting. I think Olmos is solid as Adama, even if he's less warm and avuncular. I find I don't really mind the female Starbuck like I thought I would, though I miss the camaraderie between Starbuck and Apollo, so overall I wish they hadn't changed that. Still, I am willing to give the new series a chance, not write it off because it isn't the old. I think it has a lot of potential.

Bullshit. As the opening of the final battle took place we saw a panoramic shot of a Cylon base star launching dozens of fighters in a single scene, which is far, far more than we ever saw in the old show. There were several shots featuring multiple ships, shots firing, and debris flying all in a single scene - which, again, is far more than we ever saw in the old show. The old show featured, at most, two or three ships in a single frame, a couple of laser torpedo bolts at most, or a single laser turret firing, and no debris. The old BG did a great job for its day, given the limits of TV budgets and then-current FX technology. The new BG has done at least as good a job, for its day, given the limits of TV budgets and now-current FX technology.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. You two raiders shutting down a squadron the best it could do? You call a two-minute dogfight and a five-minute final battle the best it could do? You call distant mushroom clouds and not even showing Caprica City getting nuked THE BEST IT COULD DO?!

I'm talking about quality; you're talking about quantity. Well, a little more quantity might have been nice, but it hardly kills the show that there wasn't more.

You are simply one of those people who is not willing to give the series an objective viewing, because you can't get over your resentment that it's not exactly the same show as the old one.

Horseshit. I dislike new BSG because it gave us lots of bitchy characters and lots of gratuitous sex in place of REAL character development and REAL sci-fi battles.

And the old one had some better characters. But the battles frankly weren't all that great, and it had some pretty good sized plot holes that hurt suspension of disbelief.

Which would have given the viewer a picture of the battle the characters in the show did not have.

So frelling what? It's an apocolypse, right? GIVE US A GODDAMNED APOCALYPSE.

Waaaaahhhh!!! I wan't more battles! Waaaaaahhhh!!! My attention span isn't long enough to stay interested! Waaaaaaahhhh!!!

It really puzzles me - I mean it truly puzzles - me that one of the reasons you prefer the old show to the new is the new version's depiction of Caprica's destruction, when the same scene in the old show was ridiculous! Caprica destroyed by Cylon fighters making strafing runs!?! Give me a break! It would have taken the Cylons years to destroy all life on the planet that way, assuming it's even possible to do so by that means. Bombard from orbit? Why do that? Let's send the fighters down to strafe people on the ground.

You really think that's better?

And I've already pointed out the fact that the makers of this version were clearly trying to limit the viewers' perspective to that of the characters, and the dramatic reasons for this.

Characters? I'm sorry, did you see characters? All I saw was a bunch of people starting arguments at the drop of a hat before ripping each others' clothes off.

You're dodging. Moore was trying to limit your viewpoint to that of the characters. Whether you find those characters interesting, likeable, or sympathetic or not is a completely separate issue that has nothing to do with that perspective.

And there was also the practical reason. This is a TV show, with a limited budget. Such a scene would have necessitated more actors (and their salaries), plus more expesive FX shots.

I highly doubt that a four-minute-long scene like the one described above would have been THAT stressful on BSG's budget.

But it would have necessitated taking the viewer away from this tight focus only on the actions taking place around the characters.

Why spend the money for that when the dramatic effect the writers are shooting for can actually be better achieved by leaving it out.

Better achieved? Bull. You call hearing a blurb about the Atlantia being destroyed better than actually seeing a mighty Battlestar being shredded without even being able to lift a finger to save itself?

Yes, since the effect the writers were shooting for was not to let you know anything that the people onscreen don't know. If they allow you to see things the characters themselves can't see they are not achieving this effect. So yes, the effect can be better achieved by leaving it out, and letting you discover it the same way the crew of the Galactica discovers it.

Yes, lets emphasize flashy visuals over everything else. Everyone knows that's the best way to tell an effective story.

What effective story? I hate to beat a dead horse but new BSGs plotline, especially early on, was weak. Did you notice that after the jump to the armory, things started to flow more smoothly because folks decided to forget the petty bullshit between them and start working together? Why couldn't the whole thing have been like that? Why did we need virtually two hours of whiny soap opera with a tiny bit of action instead of a first episode?

I'll grant that they could have picked up the pace a bit in the first part, and I've already givein my unfavorable opinion of the father/son conflict between Adama and Apollo, but overall the story is better for not having the unbelievable character actions, and implausible situations the first one had (I've already posted on what those were, specifically - see p.11 this thread). And not all the characters on the old show were superior. I think the new Baltar is a vast improvement on the old, for example.

[Kuja]

I was referring to the battle scenes here, not character development.

Which is exactly what I'M talking about. What are battles meant to do but heighten tension and bring out the best in the show's characters?

I'll grant you, the old show had mostly more interesting characters. But the new Baltar is interesting. I think Olmos is solid as Adama, even if he's less warm and avuncular. I find I don't really mind the female Starbuck like I thought I would, though I miss the camaraderie between Starbuck and Apollo, so overall I wish they hadn't changed that.

New Baltar: started off whiney and annoying but got better.
New Adama: mediocre.
New Starbuck: grated on me.

The characters are only fair at best, and new BSG has to change if it wants to succeed.

Still, I am willing to give the new series a chance, not write it off because it isn't the old. I think it has a lot of potential.

I haven't written it off. But I will if they don't change.

I'm talking about quality; you're talking about quantity. Well, a little more quantity might have been nice, but it hardly kills the show that there wasn't more.

You're right. What kills the show is wooden characters and constant whining. The lack of action is just the finishing touch.

And the old one had some better characters. But the battles frankly weren't all that great, and it had some pretty good sized plot holes that hurt suspension of disbelief.

They were still better than what new BSG gave us.

Waaaaahhhh!!! I wan't more battles! Waaaaaahhhh!!! My attention span isn't long enough to stay interested! Waaaaaaahhhh!!!

Stop your fucking grandstanding and pay attention to what I'm saying. My POINT, if you can get it through your head, is that the battles provide great ways to advance the plot. How did the original Adama figure out that the Colonies were under attack? He saw no Basestars during the battle. How were the Cylons able to attack the Colonies? They sent a force of raiders to keep the fleet busy.

Flash forward to new BSG, where the Galactica sits on its ass because it's being decomissioned and watches it all happen with a completely detached air. Meanwhile we get lots of crappy soap opera.

I've been saying over and over: the best parts of new BSG was at the end. Why? Because the plot was moving, things were happening, characters were doing things, not just listening to far-off reports of people dying. Why was the final battle good? Because they made us CARE. Galactica was protecting the human race with a barrage of firepower and dogfighting Vipers. It was crucial to the story, yet managed to deliver in the action department as well. That's why it was a good battle.

It really puzzles me - I mean it truly puzzles - me that one of the reasons you prefer the old show to the new is the new version's depiction of Caprica's destruction, when the same scene in the old show was ridiculous! Caprica destroyed by Cylon fighters making strafing runs!?! Give me a break! It would have taken the Cylons years to destroy all life on the planet that way, assuming it's even possible to do so by that means. Bombard from orbit? Why do that? Let's send the fighters down to strafe people on the ground.

You really think that's better?

I think it's better that they SHOWED IT UP CLOSE. I think it's better that was saw the Capricans' flower display of 'Peace' IN FLAMES to symbolize the destruction of the human race. Now we get some far-off mushroom clouds and a cliched (mostly, but not completely) lottery scene. Wow, watch me CARE about anyone.

You're dodging. Moore was trying to limit your viewpoint to that of the characters. Whether you find those characters interesting, likeable, or sympathetic or not is a completely separate issue that has nothing to do with that perspective.

Oh so it's OK if we get shitty characters as long as we only see what they see. Yeah, that's a winning formula.

But it would have necessitated taking the viewer away from this tight focus only on the actions taking place around the characters.

THEN CHANGE IT, FOR GOD'S SAKE. What if, instead of hearing Vader say "She must have hidden the plans in the escape pod. Send a detachment down to retrieve them. See to it presonally commander. Theree will be no one to stop us this time!" we just heard Artoo bleep and then Threepio say "what do you mean they're going to follow us?"

What if, instead of having the Sandtrooper "look sir, droids!" scene, we just heard Threepio say, "oh, look at that, I'm missing a [part name]. I hope somebody finds it."

Do you honestly think that would have been better storytelling?

Yes, since the effect the writers were shooting for was not to let you know anything that the people onscreen don't know. If they allow you to see things the characters themselves can't see they are not achieving this effect. So yes, the effect can be better achieved by leaving it out, and letting you discover it the same way the crew of the Galactica discovers it.

BUT WE DON'T CARE. Showing the Atlantia's crew just before their deaths makes you CARE about them. If we had been grown attached to Adama by giving him some real emotion, we would have CARED about him when his heart sank at the report of the Atlantia's death. If making viewers CARE must come at the cost of leaving your tight focus for a few moments, then DO IT.

I'll grant that they could have picked up the pace a bit in the first part, and I've already givein my unfavorable opinion of the father/son conflict between Adama and Apollo, but overall the story is better for not having the unbelievable character actions, and implausible situations the first one had (I've already posted on what those were, specifically - see p.11 this thread). And not all the characters on the old show were superior. I think the new Baltar is a vast improvement on the old, for example.

My point is that taking away the battles of the original didn't serve to better new BSG, it just ended up hamstringing it. If Moore wanted a tight focus on the characters, he should have made their relationships positive in nature. It's simple: people can connect with someone they like. People don't connect with folks who yell at each other constantly. And no, ripping each other's clothes off doesn't count. Thus, virtually all of the first episode was crappy soap opera nad no action to interest the viewer.

[Perinquus]

I was referring to the battle scenes here, not character development.

Which is exactly what I'M talking about. What are battles meant to do but heighten tension and bring out the best in the show's characters?

Battle scenes are meant to do a lot of things, depending on what the story is. That which you mention is only one of them. At the moment I am looking at the battle scenes on their own, however.

New Baltar: started off whiney and annoying but got better.
New Adama: mediocre.
New Starbuck: grated on me.

The characters are only fair at best, and new BSG has to change if it wants to succeed.

I expect they will if it goes to a series.

I'm talking about quality; you're talking about quantity. Well, a little more quantity might have been nice, but it hardly kills the show that there wasn't more.

You're right. What kills the show is wooden characters and constant whining. The lack of action is just the finishing touch.

The characters need some improvement, but I don't find them as bad as you do. And while I think the show could be paced a little more quickly it does not seem so slow as you seem to think either. And the battle scenes were not disappointing as far as I was concerned - at least not with the quality of the effects.

And the old one had some better characters. But the battles frankly weren't all that great, and it had some pretty good sized plot holes that hurt suspension of disbelief.

They were still better than what new BSG gave us.

Bullshit. Many of the character actions in the old show were simply unbelievable. It hurt suspension of disbelief. It's easier to see how the Colonials in the new series could be surprised than than in the old. And I simply find it impossible to believe that someone like Sire Yuri wouldn't be thrown out an airlock in the aftermath of the disaster for acting the way he did. The idea that people would, even for an instant, seriously entertain the idea of laying down their arms before the Cylons, after they just had the most bitter kind of taste possible of the Cylons' treachery and untrustworthiness, is just too unbelievable to swallow. To be asked to believe that the Colonials would actually be willing to trust the good intentions of such an enemy is STUPID!

There is nothing so egregious as this in the new show.

Waaaaahhhh!!! I wan't more battles! Waaaaaahhhh!!! My attention span isn't long enough to stay interested! Waaaaaaahhhh!!!

Stop your fucking grandstanding and pay attention to what I'm saying. My POINT, if you can get it through your head, is that the battles provide great ways to advance the plot. How did the original Adama figure out that the Colonies were under attack? He saw no Basestars during the battle. How were the Cylons able to attack the Colonies? They sent a force of raiders to keep the fleet busy.

Flash forward to new BSG, where the Galactica sits on its ass because it's being decomissioned and watches it all happen with a completely detached air. Meanwhile we get lots of crappy soap opera.

That's a blatant and unworthy mischaracterization. It watches with disbelief and shock, then mounting horror. It also gets attacked and has to defend itself, and suffers a large number of casualties. The fact that you so mischaracterize all this as "sitting on its ass". and watching with "A completely detached air" indicates that you are not watching objectively. You are determined not to like the show.

It really puzzles me - I mean it truly puzzles - me that one of the reasons you prefer the old show to the new is the new version's depiction of Caprica's destruction, when the same scene in the old show was ridiculous! Caprica destroyed by Cylon fighters making strafing runs!?! Give me a break! It would have taken the Cylons years to destroy all life on the planet that way, assuming it's even possible to do so by that means. Bombard from orbit? Why do that? Let's send the fighters down to strafe people on the ground.

You really think that's better?

I think it's better that they SHOWED IT UP CLOSE. I think it's better that was saw the Capricans' flower display of 'Peace' IN FLAMES to symbolize the destruction of the human race. Now we get some far-off mushroom clouds and a cliched (mostly, but not completely) lottery scene. Wow, watch me CARE about anyone.

So it doesn't matter if it's so ludicrously unbelievable as long as they show it up close? That's a mighty strange definition of quality you have there. I don't think I've ever encountered anything quite like it.

You're dodging. Moore was trying to limit your viewpoint to that of the characters. Whether you find those characters interesting, likeable, or sympathetic or not is a completely separate issue that has nothing to do with that perspective.

Oh so it's OK if we get shitty characters as long as we only see what they see. Yeah, that's a winning formula.

It's meant to help create the sense of chaos and confusion you would feel even if you were actually in the situation with the character - this effect would still happen whether you liked the people you were stuck there with or not. And again, while some of the characters were less sympathetic than in the old show, most of the reaction I have read is not as negative as your is, especially from people who never saw the old show or who were not particular fans of it. Most people don't seem to find them as poor as you do.

But it would have necessitated taking the viewer away from this tight focus only on the actions taking place around the characters.

THEN CHANGE IT, FOR GOD'S SAKE. What if, instead of hearing Vader say "She must have hidden the plans in the escape pod. Send a detachment down to retrieve them. See to it presonally commander. Theree will be no one to stop us this time!" we just heard Artoo bleep and then Threepio say "what do you mean they're going to follow us?"

What if, instead of having the Sandtrooper "look sir, droids!" scene, we just heard Threepio say, "oh, look at that, I'm missing a [part name]. I hope somebody finds it."

Do you honestly think that would have been better storytelling?

Star Wars was telling a very different kind of story. There was not the same sense of desperation and chaos. BG is telling a different story of people pushed to the very brink of extinction, who have to escape from a hopeless situation. Star Wars was a story with a very different mood - hope. It required a different approach.

Yes, since the effect the writers were shooting for was not to let you know anything that the people onscreen don't know. If they allow you to see things the characters themselves can't see they are not achieving this effect. So yes, the effect can be better achieved by leaving it out, and letting you discover it the same way the crew of the Galactica discovers it.

BUT WE DON'T CARE. Showing the Atlantia's crew just before their deaths makes you CARE about them. If we had been grown attached to Adama by giving him some real emotion, we would have CARED about him when his heart sank at the report of the Atlantia's death. If making viewers CARE must come at the cost of leaving your tight focus for a few moments, then DO IT.

Sorry, but that's just silly. Showing a handful of extra people onscreen moments before wiping them out would not make me CARE about them. They'd be extras who got waxed for the sake of the story just like the redshirts in Star Trek. Disposable characters. Boo fucking hoo.

You still care about it, even from just the announcement, because you can feel the sense of shock going around the CIC after Adama made the announcement. You can practically hear everyone saying "Holy shit! We're really fucked now. If they've wiped out the whole fleet, and even the flagship, then we're is deep shit!"

I'll grant that they could have picked up the pace a bit in the first part, and I've already givein my unfavorable opinion of the father/son conflict between Adama and Apollo, but overall the story is better for not having the unbelievable character actions, and implausible situations the first one had (I've already posted on what those were, specifically - see p.11 this thread). And not all the characters on the old show were superior. I think the new Baltar is a vast improvement on the old, for example.

My point is that taking away the battles of the original didn't serve to better new BSG, it just ended up hamstringing it. If Moore wanted a tight focus on the characters, he should have made their relationships positive in nature. It's simple: people can connect with someone they like. People don't connect with folks who yell at each other constantly. And no, ripping each other's clothes off doesn't count. Thus, virtually all of the first episode was crappy soap opera nad no action to interest the viewer.

Amking great characters isn't all that easy. Certain ones are just right. The Kirk/Spock/ McCoy triangle from the original Star Trek, and the friendship between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker come to mind from the sci-fi genre. The relationship with Starbuck, Apollp, Boomer, and Adama from the old show was almost that good. It's not as simple as making your mind up that you'll write it, and then writing it. Sometimes its a bit hard to capture.

Now, as I said, I think the idea to have an enmity between Adama and his son was not a great one. In that sense, they deliberately sabotaged their own efforts to make sympathetic characters. But we see a step toward a reconciliation at the end. They may fix that. And the rest of the characters, as I said, were not so unsympathetic as you seem to find them.

[Patrick Degan]

Battlestar Galactica is not telling a story about armageddon. It's not telling the story of the destruction of all twelve colnies (except in a kind of secondary way - as the setting for the exodus), it's telling the story of the Battlestar Galactica and it's escape from this cataclysm. Duh! So it focuses on the Battlestar Galactica.

Repetition of the same lame excuse, I'm afraid, does not erase this production's defects. Apparently you still can't understand the concept of mood-setting in a dramatic film.

Actually, I wonder if you are the one who can understand it, since I've already explained the dramatic reason for not showing the viewer anything not directly witnessed by the characters.

No, you excuse a lame and lazy approach to storytelling which ignores the cardinal rule of visual drama —show, don't tell. You also utterly refuse to recognise the concepts of context and dramatic set-up.

It works too. Most people who saw the miniseries are simply not as down on it as you are.

If this thread is anything to go by, that demonstrably is not true. In any case, trying to appeal to an alledged majority opinion means precisely dick.

Bullshit. Das Boot is only one example. Saving Private Ryan never gave you a big picture of the war - "panorama of war's horror" - it never even gave you a big picture of the D-Day invasion. It focused on one single squad.

Are you nuts?! What the fuck did you call the entire opening sequence at Dog Green Sector, Omaha Beach?!?!

You still didn't see anything that didn't happen around Miller's squad of rangers. Go back and find me the scenes of action on Utah, Juno, Gold, and Sword beaches. Find me scenes showing Canadian and British troops wading ashore. Find me scenes showing naval vessels directing their gunfire onto shore targets. Find me scenes showing the British and American air forces bombing German targets.

The point is WE SEE THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH WHERE THE WORST OF THE FIGHTING WAS which sets the entire mood for the rest of the goddamn movie. The Ron Moore approach would have opened SPR with Miller reporting to his C.O. after the landing and the bloody meatgrinder the troops going in —of which there were far more than just Miller's squad in the film's opening— had to fight their way through.

Band of Brothers never gave you a "panorama of war's horror", but confined you strictly to the events the 507th regiment of the 101st airborne was in. To Hell and Back never gave you a "panorama of war's horror", it told the story of one man: Audie Murphy. Sink the Bismark didn't give you the "panorama of war's horror", it told about one aspect of the battle of the Atlantic: the hunt for a single German battleship. And while there were a couple of battle scenes, most of the "action" consisted of men humnching over maps in the Admiralty war room in a London bunker getting status reports and making plans.

Again, you reach for invalid comparisons. Sink The Bismarck was a docudrama encompassing every aspect of the hunt for the German warship, both at sea and at Admiralty HQ. As for To Hell And Back, you notice Audie Murphy is actually on the front line, in battle, with his life at risk and not merely sitting in the PX reading about the war in Stars and Stripes. Same for the men in Band Of Brothers. The characters are directly involved in the situation they're caught in the middle of. Just what part of this concept eludes your grasp?

The point is they show nothing that is not directly relevant to the story they are telling.

:banghead::banghead: And the point is that to emphasise war's horror, THEY ACTUALLY SHOW THE FUCKING WAR. They don't just have the characters sitting around talking about it for two boring hours.

Your contention that in order to be good a war film must "paint the panorama of war's horror" is pretentious crap.

I guess Stephen Spielberg, Franklin Schaffner, Darryl Zannuck, Wolfgang
Petersen, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Ron Maxwell, and Nick Meyer, among others, are "full of pretentous crap" for not making war movies consisting almost solely of people in rooms talking over status updates and spouting pseudophilosophical blather about man's worthiness to survive. THAT is pretentious crap.

Enough with the strawmen already!

Agreed —you should stop erecting them.

I never said, hinted, or inferred any such thing and you fucking know it. Stop selectively reading my posts. If there's one thing I can't stand it's people who deliberately employ dishonest tactics.

A clear example of the psychological phenomenon known as Projection: the habit of ascribing one's own character defects upon others.

Here's what I said, and I'll highlight the relevant portions.

"You can tell a story by telling a big story on a sweeping scale, like the Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, or Tora! Tora! Tora! (great films all). Or you can focus narrowly on a small group of men or a single ship and tell their story in detail. Both approaches are equally valid, and both can produce landmark war films."

Yes, clear proof that I think large scale, epic war stories are crap.

Another of your idiotic strawmen. It is you who is attempting to liken Neo-BSG's incompetent storytelling approach to war movies by filmmakers who actually understand the dramatic concept of scope and how to involve an audience in the characters plight. This is not an issue of scale, so kindly cease pretending that it is.

You totally misunderstand the concept —especially in regard to the great films you imagine prove me wrong. The panorama is of the war the men are fighting, be it one skirmish or an invasion. It is not watching a bunch of people who are uninvolved in actions taking place somewhere else which are only mentioned in passing. That's partly where crap like D Day: The Sixth Of June derives from —war treated as mere backdrop for a soap opera.

Now who's making invalid comparisons?

Certainly not myself. D Day: The Sixth Of June was mostly soap-operaish drivel.

We did see action. We saw the destruction of Caprica.

Gee —some fireballs visible from orbit and a mushroom cloud in the background of another scene. Yep, that sure makes me feel the full horror of a civilisation's destruction.

It served well enough. It told the audinece everything they needed to know about what was happening. It was not dramatically necessary to lengthen it.

No, of course not. Why actually illustrate the scope of Armageddon when you can simply let the audience glimpse bits of it in passing?

We saw the Galactica's first squadron go up against the Cylons and get shut down and destroyed.

Ah yes, the edge-on-your-seat thrills as two robot fighters transmit a "divide-by-zero" command to crash the Windows NT-run computers on the Vipers.

Again, which told the viewer all that was necessary. It showed the viewer that the Cylons had a weapon that could simply deactivate their enemy's vessels.

In other words, the Cliff Notes approach to storytelling. Brilliant.

We saw the Cylons finish off the ships that were not able to escape via FTL jump.

A long-distance shot of missile launches which cuts to the closeup of the doomed little girl the president made nice with as the scene whites out —nice bit of emotional button-pushing which of course we never saw coming.

And the radio chatter of the people pleading and then cursing as they saw their deaths approaching was a nicely effective means of showing the kind of tragedy the human race was suffering, as well as the hard and sometimes ruthless decisions that had to be made by the survivors if they were to remain survivors. I think you are the only person I've encountered who has a problem with this scene.

The radio-chatter bit isn't the problem. The unseen massacre of the stranded ships —like the unseen destruction of the battlestar fleet, the unseen death of the president, and the unseen armageddon of Caprica— is the problem. Your Baghdad Bob-like denial of these defects does not negate them, no matter how much you hope it does.

You are unfairly criticizing them for not telling a story that the show was never supposed to be about in the first place. Gimme a break.

Without the destruction of Caprica and the colonies, there IS no story for BSG! That is the context which justifies the whole production. How does leaving the audience uninvolved in the main driver for the whole fucking plot amount to a good storytelling decision?!

And they conveyed to the audience that this destruction took place. They did not focus on it, however, as it was not the main point of the story. Sure a bit more on it might have been nice. But it was not so necessary that the amount they did show makes the miniseries "crap".

THE MOVIE DOES NO SUCH FUCKING THING —it merely tells us about Caprica's destruction and lets us glimpse a few fireballs from high orbit and a mushroom cloud. That doesn't involve a viewer on a visceral level, which is the whole point of visual drama. Hypothetical: would Babylon 5 have succeeded making an impact on the viewer over the death of President Santiago by merely having Sinclair read a bulletin instead of actually showing the explosion of EarthForce 1 and the horrified reactions of Sinclair, Ivanova, and the C-in-C crew as they saw it live on ISN?! Just why is this such a difficult concept for you?

The only reason you saw the Atlantia destroyed in the first movie is that it had been flying right beside Galactica at the start of the pilot. They didn't show extraneous battles depicting the rest of the fleet getting waxed either. Where's your criticism for them?

IT WAS THE FUCKING PRESIDENTIAL FLAGSHIP AND THEIR GOVERNMENT WAS RIDING ON BOARD! That ship's destruction searingly underscores the disaster that is befalling Adama's entire civilisation. Seeing it has far more of an impact than merely hearing about it.

Some of us don't need to see it. We have imaginations. We can fill in the details on our own.

That's a lame defence of your position, and one which totally evades the issue.

Hardly. I'm not the one whose tone is unreservedly critical. I'm not the one whining about how awful this was, and about not getting to see the battle scenes he wanted to see.

No, your tone is that of someone seemingly determined to compose endless apologia for a fundamentally flawed movie no matter how its defects are outlined in detail and determined to ignore those defects at all costs. In other words, you're doing an incredible imitation of an uncritical fanboy.

I'm focusing on the positive because I am responding to your comments. Why would I try to counter a negative with negative? Go back and read my first post. My negative comments you will find there.

Yes, yes, yes, your little nitpicks on small detail while engaging in pell-mell denial regarding the great gaping flaws in the fundamental storytelling approach to the movie. That's like Matrix fanboys arguing little nitpicks about the mecha or computer systems while defending the alledged intellectual depth of movies that in reality have all the depth of a sidewalk puddle.

the destruction of Caprica goes largely unseen. The shutdown of the first wave of Vipers is a cheap plot device to avoid any actual action sequence to involve the viewer. The destruction of the marooned civilian ships goes largely unseen and is merely set-up for a cheap attempt to push the audience's emotional buttons over the Poor Little Lost Girl™. And the movie's one and only true action sequence is all too brief and reached only at the cost of sitting through a dull movie. That you cannot comprehend this is your problem, Mr. Apologist.

Some of us have attention spans longer than five minutes, and we do not need an effects laden wankfest full of huge explosions and giant battles every couple of minutes in order to keep us interested.

Yet another of your lame strawmen and another evasion of the issue at hand.

Adama's speech at the ceremony and his conversation with the Cylon infiltrator aboard the Ragnar station constitute the entirety of said "empty moralizing", and took no more than about two minutes of screen time. You are making my point for me.

I'm not responsible for your fantasies. The whole pseudomoralistic tone of Adama's Neo-Luddite speech questioning humanity's right to survive because of his technology is a palpable drumbeat throughout the movie and is mouthed repeatedly by Adama, N.6, the Cylon duplicate who tries to kill Adama, Laura Rosen and her aide, and Col. Tigh. About as subtle as a jackhammer and as relevant as debates about the Dancing Angel population on pinheads.

Excuse me, I must have missed something. Where do Tigh and the president ever say any such thing? And I remember Adama saying that in his speech, but not "repeatedly". Where else does he say it?

Oh, puhLEEZE! The whole issue posed by this film —Man being punished for Tampering in God's Domain, his technology being his undoing, and the doubts on the species' worthiness to survive, forms the core of every significant conversation of the movie. "Do we really deserve to survive?' "When we created the Cylons, we dared to create life" and its variations are spouted at various points throughout the movie.

So? Your point is what? That because they can do it today they must? Says who?

Nice little strawman you've put up there. That was not the point and you fucking well know it. You tried putting up that pathetic little dodge to support the false argument likening Neo-BSG 's lack of action to the FX and budgetary limitations of TOS as similar dramatic approaches, when they are no such thing.

So one had that approach necessitated by technological and budgetary constraints, and the other chose to use it voluntarily. They reasons behind their approach are not the point. The point you just cannot seem to grasp is that it is not necessary to have a lot of effects and battle scenes to tell a good story.

THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE! We're not talking about FX for its own sake, we're talking about establishing a mood that actually involves the audience on a visceral as well as an intellectual level. This whole "we don't need lots and lots of FX to tell a good story" argument is yet another in the expanding line of your strawmen, because that is not what I or anyone else on this thread is basing a criticism on. Enough of your bullshit, already.

Key point "that they have no direct involvement in". This is the story of the Galactica, not the story of the colonial fleet or the Atlantia. Why should they break away from the story they are telling to put in extraneous scenes?

Robotically repeating "This-is-the-story-of-the-Galactica" over and over and over a over does not a rebuttal make. Without the destruction of their entire civilisation, there IS no story for the Galactica.

And they showed it, setting the stage for the Galactica's story. That's all they needed to do, and that's all they did. They didn't show it in obsessive detail because that wasn't necessary to tell the story.

Translation: "What they showed was all that they had to show because it was because it was because it was because it was because it was because it was because it was..."

My God. You are sounding more and more like a little kid crying because he didn't get to see as many explosions as he wanted.

Sigh... I notice that the "deprived whiny little kid" caricature seems to be becoming your general response to the critics on this thread —who also are not complaining about any lack of SFX for its own sake.

The issue in that context is not what directly involves the characters at the moment but what convinces the audience to have any involvement in their plight. Placing the Galactica in the ambush of the fleet would have both directly involved the characters in their plight and involved the audience in the movie's main plot-driver at a visceral level.

It also would have made it harder to explain why Galactica survived.

Exactly how? Explaining the Galactica's survival in the original wasn't all that difficult. What would have made it such a challenge had the Galactica been at the ambush in this production?

To a certain extent, I expect they were just trying to be different from the original series just to be different.

Which is no excuse.

Having the Galactica be an old ship about to be mothballed was probably a decision made on that basis. Having it in the fleet might have made it possible to show an exciting battle scene, but leaving that out hardly ruins the movie. I don't judge the worth of a story by how many cool explosions it has. I judge it by whether or not the story is good.

Yeah, yeah, blah blah... Your latest repetition of the lame "cool explosions" dodge to dismiss criticism is really starting to get old.

You are free not to like the show. I can't understand why you'd be bothered to spend so much time posting about a show you don't like though.

Sorry, but until Freedom of Speech is rescinded, you're just going to have to put up with opinions you don't like, aren't you? And I could just as well ask why you seem so hellbent to spend so much time trying to blunt criticism you consider invalid.

Because I am argumentative by nature. And because it just kind of irritates me when people spout their opinions as if they were universal truth.

So... in truth, you're just arguing the point for the sheer hell of it? Sort of makes your case look as if it's devoid of substance, doesn't it?

[StarshipTitanic]

Perinquus expressed my feelings yet again, Kuja. You're whining about a scene that was also "missing" from the first according to your standards.

What the fuck kind of smoking have you been crack? We SAW the Atlantia go up in the original.

No, you want scenes of battles that the Galactica wasn't present for with characters we weren't exposed to.

Demise of the last 3 battlestars = Demise of the Colonial fleet

[Perinquus]

Actually, I wonder if you are the one who can understand it, since I've already explained the dramatic reason for not showing the viewer anything not directly witnessed by the characters.

No, you excuse a lame and lazy approach to storytelling which ignores the cardinal rule of visual drama —show, don't tell. You also utterly refuse to recognise the concepts of context and dramatic set-up.

You can repeat "show, don't tell" like a mantra all you like; it still won't make it universally true. No doubt you will start screaming "invalid comparison" about this as well, but here's another example of a film very sucessfully telling and not showing. If you asked most people what the single best scene in Jaws was, they would tell you it's the scene where Robert Shaw tells Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Maxim, or FHM, or one of those magazines recently put it on their list of 100 scariest film scenes of all time.

Now according to you and your first commandment of filmmaking, Spielberg fucked up. He should have had a flashback scene that showed the ship get torpedoed, the sailors abandon ship, and the sharks start swarming in for the feast. Instead, he put three guys in a room and had one of the just talking.

It is possible to tell and not show in a film, under the right circumstances, and still produce something good. It is simply not necessarily the wrong way to do it, just a different way.

It works too. Most people who saw the miniseries are simply not as down on it as you are.

If this thread is anything to go by, that demonstrably is not true. In any case, trying to appeal to an alledged majority opinion means precisely dick.

This thread is not the only thing to go by. I also read the reviews in the forum at BattlestarGalactica.com, and they seem mostly positive.

And an appeal to a majority opinion most certainly does not mean "precisely dick" when you are talking about entertainment stupid. If most of the people who watch a given show do not enjoy it, it will not be a success, therefore the majority opinion is relevant. What part of that concept can you not understand?

he point is WE SEE THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH WHERE THE WORST OF THE FIGHTING WAS which sets the entire mood for the rest of the goddamn movie. The Ron Moore approach would have opened SPR with Miller reporting to his C.O. after the landing and the bloody meatgrinder the troops going in —of which there were far more than just Miller's squad in the film's opening— had to fight their way through.

And according to the approach you have outlined, Spielberg's decision to tell us of Private Ryan's paradrop and the scattering of his unit was wrong. We shouldn't have had to wait until the last quarter of the movie to see Private Ryan. Spielberg should have shown us the 101st's parachute drop, and the subsequent fight, rather than having us told about this by a bunch of generals reading about it in reports and talking about it back in an office in Washington.

The point is they show nothing that is not directly relevant to the story they are telling.

:banghead::banghead: And the point is that to emphasise war's horror, THEY ACTUALLY SHOW THE FUCKING WAR. They don't just have the characters sitting around talking about it for two boring hours.

They actually show the war in BG 2003 as well. The Cylon attack, the end of the Galactica's vipers, the attack on the convoy. It obviously wasn't enough to suit you, but it's just a little more than "Characters sitting around talking about it for two boring hours".

I never said, hinted, or inferred any such thing and you fucking know it. Stop selectively reading my posts. If there's one thing I can't stand it's people who deliberately employ dishonest tactics.

A clear example of the psychological phenomenon known as Projection: the habit of ascribing one's own character defects upon others.

No, I'm calling you on a dishonest tactic and a deliberate misrepresentation. I just got through saying that both the epic, panoramic approach, and the small scale approach were equally valid, and could produce great films, and then you immediately turn around and tell me that I must think a bunch of directors who made epic war dramas did a crappy job. You blatantly and deliberately misrepresented a position I had just clearly stated in the post immediately before. Don't even try to deny it, it's right there in print.

Yes, clear proof that I think large scale, epic war stories are crap.

Another of your idiotic strawmen. It is you who is attempting to liken Neo-BSG's incompetent storytelling approach to war movies by filmmakers who actually understand the dramatic concept of scope and how to involve an audience in the characters plight. This is not an issue of scale, so kindly cease pretending that it is.

It's an issue of perspective. You can have a broad or a narrow one. BG chooses a narrow one. Again, this is neither a right way or a wrong way, so kindly cease pretending that it is. It's merely a particular way.

Now who's making invalid comparisons?

Certainly not myself. D Day: The Sixth Of June was mostly soap-operaish drivel.

I see. Every single film I have cited to make a comparison with BG you have objected to on some pretext or other. "Invalid comparison" has become your battle cry. Then, without batting an eye, you turn around and compare a soap opera love story, without the slightest resemblance to BG storywise. Well, "invalid comparison", right back at you.

It served well enough. It told the audinece everything they needed to know about what was happening. It was not dramatically necessary to lengthen it.

No, of course not. Why actually illustrate the scope of Armageddon when you can simply let the audience glimpse bits of it in passing?

Because any viewer with a brain in his head gets the idea. Only people who demand lots and lots of really cool visual effects would use this as an excuse to condemn the story as a whole. Not everybody has to have every last thing spelled out for them in excruciating detail. As I said before, some of us have imaginations.

Ah yes, the edge-on-your-seat thrills as two robot fighters transmit a "divide-by-zero" command to crash the Windows NT-run computers on the Vipers.

Again, which told the viewer all that was necessary. It showed the viewer that the Cylons had a weapon that could simply deactivate their enemy's vessels.

In other words, the Cliff Notes approach to storytelling. Brilliant.

So in other words, even though the whole point of that scene, and not incidentally, a crucial plot point of the story was to show that the Cylons had a means of easily disabling their enemies, thus enabling them to wipe out the Colonials' defenses in jig time, they should have contrived somehow to lengthen the scene and spice it up with some cool battles and neato explosions. Nevermind that that would tend to undermine the whole point that the Cylons had developed a way to rip through the Colonial forces at will - the really important thing is to have lots of cool fights and flashy effects. Story and major plot points should always take a back seat to snazzy visuals.

We saw the Cylons finish off the ships that were not able to escape via FTL jump.

The radio-chatter bit isn't the problem. The unseen massacre of the stranded ships —like the unseen destruction of the battlestar fleet, the unseen death of the president, and the unseen armageddon of Caprica— is the problem. Your Baghdad Bob-like denial of these defects does not negate them, no matter how much you hope it does.

Once again, any intelligent viewer understands that the sublight ships just got wiped out. Why is it necesary to show everything in gory detail? Once again, your complaint boils down, not to a story point, but to the gripe that you didn't see enough cool effects. I don't judge those as the end all and be all of a show.

THE MOVIE DOES NO SUCH FUCKING THING —it merely tells us about Caprica's destruction and lets us glimpse a few fireballs from high orbit and a mushroom cloud. That doesn't involve a viewer on a visceral level, which is the whole point of visual drama. Hypothetical: would Babylon 5 have succeeded making an impact on the viewer over the death of President Santiago by merely having Sinclair read a bulletin instead of actually showing the explosion of EarthForce 1 and the horrified reactions of Sinclair, Ivanova, and the C-in-C crew as they saw it live on ISN?! Just why is this such a difficult concept for you?

They showed the destruction of Earthforce One in about the same level of detail that BG showed the destruction of Caprica. You didn't get any closeups of Santiago's body blasting out into space either. You didn't see the horrified reaction of Earthforce One's bridge crew as they realized their deaths were upon them. You saw a single exterior shot of a ship blowing up. How you conclude this provides so much more detail than the Caprica bombardment in BG escapes me.

IT WAS THE FUCKING PRESIDENTIAL FLAGSHIP AND THEIR GOVERNMENT WAS RIDING ON BOARD! That ship's destruction searingly underscores the disaster that is befalling Adama's entire civilisation. Seeing it has far more of an impact than merely hearing about it.

Some of us don't need to see it. We have imaginations. We can fill in the details on our own.

That's a lame defence of your position, and one which totally evades the issue.

No it isn't. I hate to break it to you, but my first reaction, upon hearing Adama announce the destruction of the Atlantia was not: "Damn! I wanted to see that." He announced earlier that Admiral Nogala (sp?) had taken command of the fleet aboard the Atlantia, presumably the flagship would be at the head of a large force, so when the destruction of the Atlantia was announced, this told me all I needed to know - namely, that the flagship had been destroyed, and presumably a significant number of other ships as well, and that the Colonials were on the ropes. The reactions of the crew on the Galactica told me how serious a blow this was for them. Sure it would have been nice to see some of this. But when you get right down to it, I didn't need to. My mind was capable of filling in all the necessary details.

Yes, yes, yes, your little nitpicks on small detail while engaging in pell-mell denial regarding the great gaping flaws in the fundamental storytelling approach to the movie. That's like Matrix fanboys arguing little nitpicks about the mecha or computer systems while defending the alledged intellectual depth of movies that in reality have all the depth of a sidewalk puddle.

These "great gaping flaws in the fundamental storytelling approach to the movie" are nothing more than your opinion. Lots of other people liked it, myself included. No it's not Star Wars Episode IV. But it's not a bad story either. It may make a decent series. If you're so down on it, don't watch.

Some of us have attention spans longer than five minutes, and we do not need an effects laden wankfest full of huge explosions and giant battles every couple of minutes in order to keep us interested.

Yet another of your lame strawmen and another evasion of the issue at hand.

Since your primary gripe seems to be that you didn't see enough battles and explosions, no.

Excuse me, I must have missed something. Where do Tigh and the president ever say any such thing? And I remember Adama saying that in his speech, but not "repeatedly". Where else does he say it?

Oh, puhLEEZE! The whole issue posed by this film —Man being punished for Tampering in God's Domain, his technology being his undoing, and the doubts on the species' worthiness to survive, forms the core of every significant conversation of the movie. "Do we really deserve to survive?' "When we created the Cylons, we dared to create life" and its variations are spouted at various points throughout the movie.

Another exagerration. I remember Adama's speech, which was aimed at least as much at himself and his partial responsibility for the death of his younger son as it was an introspective about the Cylons. And there was the Cylon infiltrator's taunting of Adama aboard the station. But I don't remember every other significant conversation revolving around this issue. Maybe it would help if you cited some examples.

THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE! We're not talking about FX for its own sake, we're talking about establishing a mood that actually involves the audience on a visceral as well as an intellectual level. This whole "we don't need lots and lots of FX to tell a good story" argument is yet another in the expanding line of your strawmen, because that is not what I or anyone else on this thread is basing a criticism on. Enough of your bullshit, already.

The hell it's not. Every bitch and gripe you've made has been to point out that there wasn't enough action; we should have seen more battles; they should have shown more of the war; we should have seen more of the destruction of Caprica, especially up close; we should have seen the Atlantia get blown up. Almost every complaint of yours has been of some action or battle scene that was left out. You want more fireballs and crashes. You seem to feel this is necessary to get the audience involved. It's not. Maybe it's necessary to get you involved, but you ought to realize those are your personal tastes and nothing more.

My God. You are sounding more and more like a little kid crying because he didn't get to see as many explosions as he wanted.

Sigh... I notice that the "deprived whiny little kid" caricature seems to be becoming your general response to the critics on this thread —who also are not complaining about any lack of SFX for its own sake.

What do you expect? When the substance of someone's complaints is "I want more battles!" do you expect me to regard that as a mature critique?

It also would have made it harder to explain why Galactica survived.

Exactly how? Explaining the Galactica's survival in the original wasn't all that difficult. What would have made it such a challenge had the Galactica been at the ambush in this production?

Because the Cylons in this case seem to have a more overwhelming technological edge than the did in the original. If Galactica had been part of a whole fleet, it would have been facing a much larger Cylon force, as the Cylons would have brought more ships to that fight. After all the other battlestars and their fighters had been shut down and destroyed, and after all the Galactica's Mk. VII vipers had been shut down and destroyed, that would have left one operational battlestar, and a handful of older, Mk. II vipers (whose presence aboard would have been rather hard to explain, since a Galactica with the fleet would presumably not be about to become a museum) to face an entire Cylon fleet and and its fighters all by themselves.

To a certain extent, I expect they were just trying to be different from the original series just to be different.

Which is no excuse.

And if they had followed the old series story more closely, you would now, no doubt, be lambasting them for not being original enough.

So... in truth, you're just arguing the point for the sheer hell of it? Sort of makes your case look as if it's devoid of substance, doesn't it?

No, I am arguing not only because I am somewhat argumentative by nature, but also because you have come in here spouting your opinions about filmmaking as if they were commandments out of the filmmaker's bible, and ecause I do not think all your criticisms of the show are really all that reasonable.

[Uraniun235]

Once again, any intelligent viewer understands that the sublight ships just got wiped out. Why is it necesary to show everything in gory detail?

It's more shocking that way. Drives the horror of the destruction home for the audience. Instead, we as an audience get to hide behind the cliche' fade to white on the little girl. How wonderful.

Dude, there's more to movies than the intellectual side. Yeah, the audience might be able to figure out what's going on, but that's not the point. "Show not tell" isn't supposed to be taken literally, it's supposed to mean "Involve the audience and make them feel what your characters are feeling." This tends to be most effectively done with visuals, hence the 'show don't tell' phrase; if you hear from a character about somebody being shot on TV, and you see for yourself somebody being shot on TV, which one is going to affect you more? It's going to be seeing the guy get shot.

Likewise, if you hear somebody talking about a city having just been nuked, and you see the city getting nuked, seeing the city get nuked is going to have a greater impact on the audience.

Jaws is a flawed example, because the tale of U.S.S. Indianapolis isn't really part of the story, it's the guy telling the tale that's part of the story. Whether it was the Indianapolis or whether it was man-eating guppies is irrelevant; that scene was not about the Indianapolis, but about some guys listening to someone tell a spooky story that could potentially become their own fate. Hence, we are with the characters in question at that point in the movie.

He announced earlier that Admiral Nogala (sp?) had taken command of the fleet aboard the Atlantia, presumably the flagship would be at the head of a large force, so when the destruction of the Atlantia was announced, this told me all I needed to know - namely, that the flagship had been destroyed, and presumably a significant number of other ships as well, and that the Colonials were on the ropes. The reactions of the crew on the Galactica told me how serious a blow this was for them. Sure it would have been nice to see some of this. But when you get right down to it, I didn't need to. My mind was capable of filling in all the necessary details.

Again, as an audience member, you shouldn't have to. Not everyone would remember to piece together that the Admiral is on the Atlantia, that the Atlantia got vaped, and that therefore the Colonials are in serious shit. The vast majority of filmmaking plays off of emotional reactions to what we see on the screen, not off of our reactions to our intellectual conclusions.

And if they had followed the old series story more closely, you would now, no doubt, be lambasting them for not being original enough.

Bullshit. When you assume the name of an already-established franchise, people will assume certain things about your production based on what they knew about the franchise.

[Perinquus]

Once again, any intelligent viewer understands that the sublight ships just got wiped out. Why is it necesary to show everything in gory detail?

It's more shocking that way. Drives the horror of the destruction home for the audience. Instead, we as an audience get to hide behind the cliche' fade to white on the little girl. How wonderful.

I disagree. I don't think it would have made the film much better at all to see the sublight ships coming apart. You don't always need to go into excrutiating detail. Another example of this kind is The Crow. In the theater, or on the DVD, you actually see Top Dollar take a rapier and shove it into the pawn shop owner's throat. The pawn shop owner sits there in the chair flopping around and gurgling, while Top Dollar says: "Oh just fucking die already!", then takes a gun and shoots him. On network TV, they obviously couldn't show that. So instead, you just see Top Dollar smile at him, then turn suddenly and stab with the rapier. Then cut to the next scene. You never see the sword stike the pawn shop owner's throat. I personally thought that was a better way to play scene. You don't need to see the gross, gory details. It has as much impact without adding the gross out factor. All that extra detail is there these days because too many film makers go for splatter, or gross out factor, or flashy visuals, and have forgotten how to make a scene work without these things.

Dude, there's more to movies than the intellectual side. Yeah, the audience might be able to figure out what's going on, but that's not the point. "Show not tell" isn't supposed to be taken literally, it's supposed to mean "Involve the audience and make them feel what your characters are feeling." This tends to be most effectively done with visuals, hence the 'show don't tell' phrase; if you hear from a character about somebody being shot on TV, and you see for yourself somebody being shot on TV, which one is going to affect you more? It's going to be seeing the guy get shot.

Well, in this case they chose to "Involve the audience and make them feel what your characters are feeling" by making them see, hear and know only what the characters do. That may not be the technique you would have most preferred that they use, and that's your priveledge; just recognize that that's a matter of your personal taste, and not Ron Moore breaking an inviolable rule of filmmaking.

Likewise, if you hear somebody talking about a city having just been nuked, and you see the city getting nuked, seeing the city get nuked is going to have a greater impact on the audience.

Jaws is a flawed example, because the tale of U.S.S. Indianapolis isn't really part of the story, it's the guy telling the tale that's part of the story. Whether it was the Indianapolis or whether it was man-eating guppies is irrelevant; that scene was not about the Indianapolis, but about some guys listening to someone tell a spooky story that could potentially become their own fate. Hence, we are with the characters in question at that point in the movie.

And Atlantia's fate isn't really a part of this story either, except in a peripheral way. So the characters hear Adama report a scary development that could potentially become their own fate. Hence, we are with the characters in question at that point in the movie.

He announced earlier that Admiral Nogala (sp?) had taken command of the fleet aboard the Atlantia, presumably the flagship would be at the head of a large force, so when the destruction of the Atlantia was announced, this told me all I needed to know - namely, that the flagship had been destroyed, and presumably a significant number of other ships as well, and that the Colonials were on the ropes. The reactions of the crew on the Galactica told me how serious a blow this was for them. Sure it would have been nice to see some of this. But when you get right down to it, I didn't need to. My mind was capable of filling in all the necessary details.

Again, as an audience member, you shouldn't have to. Not everyone would remember to piece together that the Admiral is on the Atlantia, that the Atlantia got vaped, and that therefore the Colonials are in serious shit. The vast majority of filmmaking plays off of emotional reactions to what we see on the screen, not off of our reactions to our intellectual conclusions.

I'm sorry, I just don't have much sympathy with this point. If you don't remember that the Atlantia was the flagship, you either weren't paying attention, or you're an idiot.

And if they had followed the old series story more closely, you would now, no doubt, be lambasting them for not being original enough.

Bullshit. When you assume the name of an already-established franchise, people will assume certain things about your production based on what they knew about the franchise.

But if you follow it too closely, people would ask "why'd they even bother?" just like they did with Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho.

[Kuja]

Battle scenes are meant to do a lot of things, depending on what the story is. That which you mention is only one of them. At the moment I am looking at the battle scenes on their own, however.

TRANSLATION: I'm going to ignore your point.

Good for you.

I expect they will if it goes to a series.

Well, if they don't, it'll tank pretty quickly.

The characters need some improvement, but I don't find them as bad as you do. And while I think the show could be paced a little more quickly it does not seem so slow as you seem to think either. And the battle scenes were not disappointing as far as I was concerned - at least not with the quality of the effects.

You actually thought the first episode had an acceptable pace?

Bullshit. Many of the character actions in the old show were simply unbelievable. It hurt suspension of disbelief. It's easier to see how the Colonials in the new series could be surprised than than in the old. And I simply find it impossible to believe that someone like Sire Yuri wouldn't be thrown out an airlock in the aftermath of the disaster for acting the way he did. The idea that people would, even for an instant, seriously entertain the idea of laying down their arms before the Cylons, after they just had the most bitter kind of taste possible of the Cylons' treachery and untrustworthiness, is just too unbelievable to swallow. To be asked to believe that the Colonials would actually be willing to trust the good intentions of such an enemy is STUPID!

There is nothing so egregious as this in the new show.

I suppose gratuitous baby-killings don't count in your book.

That's a blatant and unworthy mischaracterization.

It's an astute and accurate observation.

It watches with disbelief and shock, then mounting horror. It also gets attacked and has to defend itself, and suffers a large number of casualties.

"Mounting horror" being one report after another saying vitually the same thing: "Hey, the Cylons shut down our computers and wiped us out!" Gee, you'd think there was a pattern here.

The fact that you so mischaracterize all this as "sitting on its ass". and watching with "A completely detached air" indicates that you are not watching objectively. You are determined not to like the show.

I was willing to give new BSG a chance. They blew it with two hours of soap opera and annoying sex scenes that killed what sluggish plot there was, then it failed to redeem itself with a mediocre battle at the last minute. BSG killed itself; don't blame me for not liking it.

It really puzzles me - I mean it truly puzzles - me that one of the reasons you prefer the old show to the new is the new version's depiction of Caprica's destruction, when the same scene in the old show was ridiculous! Caprica destroyed by Cylon fighters making strafing runs!?! Give me a break! It would have taken the Cylons years to destroy all life on the planet that way, assuming it's even possible to do so by that means. Bombard from orbit? Why do that? Let's send the fighters down to strafe people on the ground.

You really think that's better?

I think that if the new show had actually shown Caprica City being nuked, then yes, it would have been better than the old one. But they blew it.

So it doesn't matter if it's so ludicrously unbelievable as long as they show it up close? That's a mighty strange definition of quality you have there. I don't think I've ever encountered anything quite like it.

Hey, they showed baby-killing up close. Doesn't mean I liked it.

It's meant to help create the sense of chaos and confusion you would feel even if you were actually in the situation with the character - this effect would still happen whether you liked the people you were stuck there with or not.

WHAT sense of chaos and confusion? Paper reports saying that this was wiped out, then this was wiped out, then this was wiped out, and so on. You call THAT chaos?

And again, while some of the characters were less sympathetic than in the old show, most of the reaction I have read is not as negative as your is, especially from people who never saw the old show or who were not particular fans of it. Most people don't seem to find them as poor as you do.

After the drivel of Voyager and Enterprise and the early cancellations of Farscape and Firefly, most people have probably forgotten what good scifi show characters should be like.

Star Wars was telling a very different kind of story. There was not the same sense of desperation and chaos. BG is telling a different story of people pushed to the very brink of extinction, who have to escape from a hopeless situation. Star Wars was a story with a very different mood - hope. It required a different approach.

So two hours of soap opera and Armageddon via fax machine were REQUIRED?

Sorry, but that's just silly. Showing a handful of extra people onscreen moments before wiping them out would not make me CARE about them. They'd be extras who got waxed for the sake of the story just like the redshirts in Star Trek. Disposable characters. Boo fucking hoo.

It's better to at least SHOW IT ONCE then hearing about it over and over again via the bridge fax machine.

You still care about it, even from just the announcement, because you can feel the sense of shock going around the CIC after Adama made the announcement. You can practically hear everyone saying "Holy shit! We're really fucked now. If they've wiped out the whole fleet, and even the flagship, then we're is deep shit!"

Which would have had an even greater impact if we were SHOWN the Atlantia being blown away just before cutting away to Adama recieving the message. We would have had a good few seconds of "oh man, now Adam's gonna hear about this? Shit, this isn't good!" But no.

Amking great characters isn't all that easy. Certain ones are just right. The Kirk/Spock/ McCoy triangle from the original Star Trek, and the friendship between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker come to mind from the sci-fi genre. The relationship with Starbuck, Apollp, Boomer, and Adama from the old show was almost that good. It's not as simple as making your mind up that you'll write it, and then writing it. Sometimes its a bit hard to capture.

The characters don't have to be GREAT. They just have to be able to connect with the audience, and apparently BSGs producers are under the impression that screaming banshees, emotion-dulled wrecks, and lusty demons can connect with an audience

Now, as I said, I think the idea to have an enmity between Adama and his son was not a great one. In that sense, they deliberately sabotaged their own efforts to make sympathetic characters. But we see a step toward a reconciliation at the end. They may fix that. And the rest of the characters, as I said, were not so unsympathetic as you seem to find them.

Of course they weren't. But how many of them had as much screen time? Boomer, by far my fave, didn't get NEARLY as much time as Starbuck or Apollo or Adama. They made Tigh a drunkard...WHY? For tension? Baltar got better once he pulled himself together and told Six to buzz off, but I wish that had happened a lot earlier.

[Kuja]

No, you want scenes of battles that the Galactica wasn't present for with characters we weren't exposed to.

We would've been exposed to them if they had been shown. That thought ever crossed your mind? Guess not.

Demise of the last 3 battlestars = Demise of the Colonial fleet

Yeah, so?

[Patrick Degan]

You can repeat "show, don't tell" like a mantra all you like; it still won't make it universally true.

Denial of an argument does not refute it —especially as you refuse to answer the challenge as to why the rule isn't valid.

No doubt you will start screaming "invalid comparison" about this as well, but here's another example of a film very sucessfully telling and not showing. If you asked most people what the single best scene in Jaws was, they would tell you it's the scene where Robert Shaw tells Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Maxim, or FHM, or one of those magazines recently put it on their list of 100 scariest film scenes of all time.

It is an invalid comparison because, as Uranian 235 has already pointed out, Jaws is not about Robert Shaw surviving the Indianopolis tragedy and the movie only touches on that event as a throwaway line as Shaw is relating his own history. You just never tire of this sort of bullshit, do you?

Now according to you and your first commandment of filmmaking, Spielberg fucked up. He should have had a flashback scene that showed the ship get torpedoed, the sailors abandon ship, and the sharks start swarming in for the feast. Instead, he put three guys in a room and had one of the just talking.

No, because Jaws was about the hunt for the big shark in 1978, not Robert Shaw facing sharks in the Pacific 30 years earlier. Ron Moore's approach would simply have had Roy Schieder, Bob Balaban, and Robert Shaw sitting in Scheider's office talking about how vicious sharks are while receiving shark attack bulletins for two hours instead of breaking away from the main characters to show people being eaten by the shark —before Scheider, Balaban, and Shaw get out on the boat to hunt the thing down.

It is possible to tell and not show in a film, under the right circumstances, and still produce something good. It is simply not necessarily the wrong way to do it, just a different way.

Trying to extend that argument into an overall defence of Neo-BSG's failings is either pathetic or comical. I haven't yet decided which label fits.

It works too. Most people who saw the miniseries are simply not as down on it as you are.

If this thread is anything to go by, that demonstrably is not true. In any case, trying to appeal to an alledged majority opinion means precisely dick.

This thread is not the only thing to go by. I also read the reviews in the forum at BattlestarGalactica.com, and they seem mostly positive.

And an appeal to a majority opinion most certainly does not mean "precisely dick" when you are talking about entertainment stupid. If most of the people who watch a given show do not enjoy it, it will not be a success, therefore the majority opinion is relevant. What part of that concept can you not understand?

Appeal to Authority fallacy, for a start. If a majority held the opinion the world is flat, that still would not make it true. The challenge is to defend a position on its merits, not because it has the momentary backing of popular acclaim. "These people liked it too" —is that really your best shot?

he point is WE SEE THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH WHERE THE WORST OF THE FIGHTING WAS which sets the entire mood for the rest of the goddamn movie. The Ron Moore approach would have opened SPR with Miller reporting to his C.O. after the landing and the bloody meatgrinder the troops going in —of which there were far more than just Miller's squad in the film's opening— had to fight their way through.

And according to the approach you have outlined, Spielberg's decision to tell us of Private Ryan's paradrop and the scattering of his unit was wrong. We shouldn't have had to wait until the last quarter of the movie to see Private Ryan. Spielberg should have shown us the 101st's parachute drop, and the subsequent fight, rather than having us told about this by a bunch of generals reading about it in reports and talking about it back in an office in Washington.

I see again you mischaracterise my position, which is becoming a habit. The point was that the mood for everything which followed in the movie was set BY SHOWING THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH. That was the context of what James Ryan was lost in and was a partial driver of the search because one of Ryan's brothers died at Omaha Beach. Handwave away all you like, and it still does not erase the fact that Spielberg in making Saving Private Ryan did indeed follow the dramatic screenwriting/production rule I've outlined and which you seem hellbent on rejecting.

They actually show the war in BG 2003 as well. The Cylon attack, the end of the Galactica's vipers, the attack on the convoy. It obviously wasn't enough to suit you, but it's just a little more than "Characters sitting around talking about it for two boring hours".

Mere glimpses of three action scenes and people reading bulletins... That doesn't qualify as "showing the war" by a longshot.

I never said, hinted, or inferred any such thing and you fucking know it. Stop selectively reading my posts. If there's one thing I can't stand it's people who deliberately employ dishonest tactics.

A clear example of the psychological phenomenon known as Projection: the habit of ascribing one's own character defects upon others.

No, I'm calling you on a dishonest tactic and a deliberate misrepresentation. I just got through saying that both the epic, panoramic approach, and the small scale approach were equally valid, and could produce great films, and then you immediately turn around and tell me that I must think a bunch of directors who made epic war dramas did a crappy job. You blatantly and deliberately misrepresented a position I had just clearly stated in the post immediately before. Don't even try to deny it, it's right there in print.

Yes it is right there in print —and the evidence calls you a liar, sir. That was not misrepresentation, it was mockery. Which is what your argument merited. And it is YOU who is blatantly misrepresenting others' positions by dismissively waving the "You Whine Because There Weren't Enough Cool Explosions" dodge.

It is you who is attempting to liken Neo-BSG's incompetent storytelling approach to war movies by filmmakers who actually understand the dramatic concept of scope and how to involve an audience in the characters plight. This is not an issue of scale, so kindly cease pretending that it is.

It's an issue of perspective. You can have a broad or a narrow one. BG chooses a narrow one. Again, this is neither a right way or a wrong way, so kindly cease pretending that it is. It's merely a particular way.

No, Neo-BSG chose a myopic perspective. When a production fails to adequately convey the scope of events in which the characters are caught in, and indeed involves neither the characters or the audience directly in the story, the approach has failed and therefore it was the wrong approach.

I see. Every single film I have cited to make a comparison with BG you have objected to on some pretext or other. "Invalid comparison" has become your battle cry. Then, without batting an eye, you turn around and compare a soap opera love story, without the slightest resemblance to BG storywise. Well, "invalid comparison", right back at you.

That's pretty desperate for a comeback. You got called on your bullshit and simple denial is the best you can do? Par for the course, I suppose.

It served well enough. It told the audinece everything they needed to know about what was happening. It was not dramatically necessary to lengthen it.

No, of course not. Why actually illustrate the scope of Armageddon when you can simply let the audience glimpse bits of it in passing?

Because any viewer with a brain in his head gets the idea. Only people who demand lots and lots of really cool visual effects would use this as an excuse to condemn the story as a whole. Not everybody has to have every last thing spelled out for them in excruciating detail. As I said before, some of us have imaginations.

Repetitive grandstanding. How unimaginative of you. This is, what, the seventh or eighth post in which you've dismissed criticism with the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge? You've wheeled this one out now in your responses to myself, Kuja, and Uranian while ignoring in toto the substance of the argument in each case. It really is beginning to get boring.

Again, which told the viewer all that was necessary. It showed the viewer that the Cylons had a weapon that could simply deactivate their enemy's vessels.

In other words, the Cliff Notes approach to storytelling. Brilliant.

So in other words, even though the whole point of that scene, and not incidentally, a crucial plot point of the story was to show that the Cylons had a means of easily disabling their enemies, thus enabling them to wipe out the Colonials' defenses in jig time, they should have contrived somehow to lengthen the scene and spice it up with some cool battles and neato explosions blah blah blah blahblahblahblahblah...

That's right —rebut the complaint over a such a lame and obvious plot device with the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again.

Meantime, I will point out that the Cylons' Magic McGuffin was sheer laziness on the part of this movie. Why work out the problem of how the Cylons can ambush the battlestar fleet when you just gimmick up the "Divide-by-Zero" button for them to push?

The radio-chatter bit isn't the problem. The unseen massacre of the stranded ships —like the unseen destruction of the battlestar fleet, the unseen death of the president, and the unseen armageddon of Caprica— is the problem. Your Baghdad Bob-like denial of these defects does not negate them, no matter how much you hope it does.

Once again, any intelligent viewer understands that the sublight ships just got wiped out. Why is it necesary to show everything in gory detail? Once again, your complaint boils down, not to a story point, but to the gripe that you didn't see enough cool effects. I don't judge those as the end all and be all of a show.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Hypothetical: would Babylon 5 have succeeded making an impact on the viewer over the death of President Santiago by merely having Sinclair read a bulletin instead of actually showing the explosion of EarthForce 1 and the horrified reactions of Sinclair, Ivanova, and the C-in-C crew as they saw it live on ISN?! Just why is this such a difficult concept for you?

They showed the destruction of Earthforce One in about the same level of detail that BG showed the destruction of Caprica.

You, I think, are joking?

You didn't get any closeups of Santiago's body blasting out into space blah blah blah blahblahblahblahblahblahblah... How you conclude this provides so much more detail than the Caprica bombardment in BG escapes me.

BECAUSE IT WAS FAR MORE THAN SOMEBODY JUST READING A GODDAMN BULLETIN as was the case of the mere report of the Atlantia's destruction. To try to make this simple for you: EarthForce 1 is the very symbol of the Alliance Sinclair took his oath to defend. Watching that ship explode symbolises in stark terms the destruction of the dream which was the foundation of the Earth Alliance and the Babylon project.

Some of us don't need to see it. We have imaginations. We can fill in the details on our own.

That's a lame defence of your position, and one which totally evades the issue.

No it isn't. I hate to break it to you, but my first reaction, upon hearing Adama announce the destruction of the Atlantia was not: "Damn! I wanted to see that." He announced earlier that Admiral Nogala (sp?) had taken command of the fleet aboard the Atlantia, presumably the flagship would be at the head of a large force, so when the destruction of the Atlantia was announced, this told me all I needed to know - namely, that the flagship had been destroyed, and presumably a significant number of other ships as well, and that the Colonials were on the ropes. The reactions of the crew on the Galactica told me how serious a blow this was for them. Sure it would have been nice to see some of this. But when you get right down to it, I didn't need to. My mind was capable of filling in all the necessary details.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Yes, yes, yes, your little nitpicks on small detail while engaging in pell-mell denial regarding the great gaping flaws in the fundamental storytelling approach to the movie. That's like Matrix fanboys arguing little nitpicks about the mecha or computer systems while defending the alledged intellectual depth of movies that in reality have all the depth of a sidewalk puddle.

These "great gaping flaws in the fundamental storytelling approach to the movie" are nothing more than your opinion. Lots of other people liked it, myself included.

And here's that Appeal to Authority (Majority Acclaim) again, as if it actually has any validity as an argument.

Some of us have attention spans longer than five minutes, and we do not need an effects laden wankfest full of huge explosions and giant battles every couple of minutes in order to keep us interested.

Yet another of your lame strawmen and another evasion of the issue at hand.

Since your primary gripe seems to be that you didn't see enough battles and explosions, no.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Excuse me, I must have missed something. Where do Tigh and the president ever say any such thing? And I remember Adama saying that in his speech, but not "repeatedly". Where else does he say it?

Oh, puhLEEZE! The whole issue posed by this film —Man being punished for Tampering in God's Domain, his technology being his undoing, and the doubts on the species' worthiness to survive, forms the core of every significant conversation of the movie. "Do we really deserve to survive?' "When we created the Cylons, we dared to create life" and its variations are spouted at various points throughout the movie.

Another exagerration. I remember Adama's speech, which was aimed at least as much at himself and his partial responsibility for the death of his younger son as it was an introspective about the Cylons. And there was the Cylon infiltrator's taunting of Adama aboard the station. But I don't remember every other significant conversation revolving around this issue. Maybe it would help if you cited some examples.

Adama's speech, his exchange with the Cylon infiltrator on Ragnar, an exchange between Laura Rosen and her aide aboard their liner, the scene when Tigh and Adama are discussing the problem of the Cylon infiltrators. in one of the scenes between Adama and Rosen, and N.6's expression of her "faith" which is echoed by the duplicate who tries to kill Adama. Don't try denying that the theme of "Man paying the price for playing God" wasn't an essential part of the movie's fabric because it clearly was.

We're not talking about FX for its own sake, we're talking about establishing a mood that actually involves the audience on a visceral as well as an intellectual level. This whole "we don't need lots and lots of FX to tell a good story" argument is yet another in the expanding line of your strawmen, because that is not what I or anyone else on this thread is basing a criticism on. Enough of your bullshit, already.

The hell it's not. Every bitch and gripe you've made has been to point out that there wasn't enough action; we should have seen more battles; they should have shown more of the war; we should have seen more of the destruction of Caprica, especially up close; we should have seen the Atlantia get blown up. Almost every complaint of yours has been of some action or battle scene that was left out. You want more fireballs and crashes. You seem to feel this is necessary to get the audience involved. It's not. Maybe it's necessary to get you involved, but you ought to realize those are your personal tastes and nothing more.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Sigh... I notice that the "deprived whiny little kid" caricature seems to be becoming your general response to the critics on this thread —who also are not complaining about any lack of SFX for its own sake.

What do you expect? When the substance of someone's complaints is "I want more battles!" do you expect me to regard that as a mature critique?

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Explaining the Galactica's survival in the original wasn't all that difficult. What would have made it such a challenge had the Galactica been at the ambush in this production?

Because the Cylons in this case seem to have a more overwhelming technological edge than the did in the original. If Galactica had been part of a whole fleet, it would have been facing a much larger Cylon force, as the Cylons would have brought more ships to that fight. After all the other battlestars and their fighters had been shut down and destroyed, and after all the Galactica's Mk. VII vipers had been shut down and destroyed, that would have left one operational battlestar, and a handful of older, Mk. II vipers (whose presence aboard would have been rather hard to explain, since a Galactica with the fleet would presumably not be about to become a museum) to face an entire Cylon fleet and and its fighters all by themselves.

This is precisely why the Cylons' "Divide-by-Zero" button-push was such a lame and obvious plot device. And having the Galactica as an active warship with the fleet would have put Adama and crew in what would have been a hopeless battle and facing the hard decision to either stick it out, or abandon the fleet to try to save Caprica. Placing your main characters in the middle of the situation is what makes an audience involved in their plight on a direct emotional level.

To a certain extent, I expect they were just trying to be different from the original series just to be different.

Which is no excuse.

And if they had followed the old series story more closely, you would now, no doubt, be lambasting them for not being original enough.

And your evidence for that direction to my thought processes is...? Oh, that's right —pulled out of your own ass.

So... in truth, you're just arguing the point for the sheer hell of it? Sort of makes your case look as if it's devoid of substance, doesn't it?

No, I am arguing not only because I am somewhat argumentative by nature, but also because you have come in here spouting your opinions about filmmaking as if they were commandments out of the filmmaker's bible, and because I do not think all your criticisms of the show are really all that reasonable.

Translation: "There are no defects in Neo-BSG. Defects are annihilating themselves by the thousands on the gates of Neo-BSG". As I've said before, denial is not a rebuttal. And it's fairly evident that you consider no criticism of the movie reasonable.

[Patrick Degan]

This I had to address:

But if you follow it too closely, people would ask "why'd they even bother?" just like they did with Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho.

And just where has anybody on this thread even HINTED that the new BSG movie should have been a copy of the 1978 original? BTW, the reason why people hate Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho wasn't that it "followed the original too closely" but because it was virtually a FRAME-BY-FRAME XEROX of the original.

[Uraniun235]

And Atlantia's fate isn't really a part of this story either, except in a peripheral way. So the characters hear Adama report a scary development that could potentially become their own fate. Hence, we are with the characters in question at that point in the movie.

Doesn't quite work that way; the Indianapolis took place three decades prior to the events of Jaws, while the Atlantia was happening right then. Indianapolis indirectly affected the characters in a rather minor way (some boozed up guys get to hear a scary story) whereas Atlantia more directly affected the fate of the BSG and her crew.

Like I was saying earlier, the scene was not about the story of Indianapolis itself, it was focusing on the delivery of the story. I didn't find the delivery of the news of Atlantia's destruction memorable, and I don't think the scene even lasted nearly as long as the Indianapolis storytelling.

Now, this method could still be workable... if the Atlantia was an entity of the story that we really cared about. For example, if in say Star Trek someone was to recieve a report that U.S.S. Enterprise had been destroyed, that would be a big blow because Enterprise is a character unto herself in the Trek franchise. Or if we had gotten to know the Admiral even just a little (like we did the President in 1978-BSG) then we might feel some of the tragedy of losing them. As it is, it's hard to care about them, and hard to relate to the feelings of the characters listening to the report of Atlantia's destruction.

[Perinquus]

You can repeat "show, don't tell" like a mantra all you like; it still won't make it universally true.

Denial of an argument does not refute it —especially as you refuse to answer the challenge as to why the rule isn't valid.

I have answered the challenge you idiot. I've given you fucking examples of filmmakers using narration or dialogue rather than showing everything in detail. It's not a rule because for thousands of years, there was no visual medium of film, and storytellers since Homer have managed to tell gripping dramatic stories by forcing the audience to use their imaginations. Sure, film is a visual medium and it's generally better to show rather than tell. That does not mean it is an inviolable rule. It's like beginning sentences with conjunctions - not a good idea when done too often, but it is simply not a crime to do it from time to time.

It is an invalid comparison because, as Uranian 235 has already pointed out, Jaws is not about Robert Shaw surviving the Indianopolis tragedy and the movie only touches on that event as a throwaway line as Shaw is relating his own history. You just never tire of this sort of bullshit, do you?

And you just never tire of declaring any example invalid on any pretext do you? Any comparison breaks down if carried too far because no two things are exactly alike unless they are, in fact, the same thing. Cry invalid all you like, the fact remains that is is possible to use narration or dialogue in film to achieve a dramatic effect.

Now you may not like it that this approach was chosen in BG. Fine, you certainly don't have to. If that ruins the movie for you, well then it does. But too bad, so sad, that's a personal preference on your part, not a hard and fast rule of filmmaking that Must Not Be Broken. Stop pretending it's anything else.

No, because Jaws was about the hunt for the big shark in 1978, not Robert Shaw facing sharks in the Pacific 30 years earlier.

And Battlestar Galactica is about the Galactica's escape following the destruction of the twelve colonies, not the destruction of the colonial fleet. The destruction of the colonial fleet merely sets the stage for the exodus.

It is possible to tell and not show in a film, under the right circumstances, and still produce something good. It is simply not necessarily the wrong way to do it, just a different way.

Trying to extend that argument into an overall defence of Neo-BSG's failings is either pathetic or comical. I haven't yet decided which label fits.

And I am lying awake at night awaiting your decision.

And an appeal to a majority opinion most certainly does not mean "precisely dick" when you are talking about entertainment stupid. If most of the people who watch a given show do not enjoy it, it will not be a success, therefore the majority opinion is relevant. What part of that concept can you not understand?

Appeal to Authority fallacy, for a start. If a majority held the opinion the world is flat, that still would not make it true. The challenge is to defend a position on its merits, not because it has the momentary backing of popular acclaim. "These people liked it too" —is that really your best shot?

Oh come off it. This is not a matter of objective fact like the world being a sphere. Art and entertainment never is. It is an entirely subjective field, since what entertains one person bores another - this argument certainly reveals that to be true. Entertainment is all about popular acclaim. Art, literature, cinema, etc, succeed because they appeal to an audience. If you even try to pretend otherwise you are too stupid to bother with. If they become classics, and stand the test of time, it's because they retain appeal to changing audiences over time, and remain relevant and entertaining. Entertainment has no meaning without an audience.

he point is WE SEE THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH WHERE THE WORST OF THE FIGHTING WAS which sets the entire mood for the rest of the goddamn movie. The Ron Moore approach would have opened SPR with Miller reporting to his C.O. after the landing and the bloody meatgrinder the troops going in —of which there were far more than just Miller's squad in the film's opening— had to fight their way through.

And we see the horror of Caprica being destroyed (though obviously not in enough detail to suit you), and this sets the tine for the rest of the goddamn movie. Since this was not shown with someone on the Galactica bridge simply reporting that Caprica was destroyed, and we did, in fact, actually see it, you are talking shit.

I see again you mischaracterise my position, which is becoming a habit. The point was that the mood for everything which followed in the movie was set BY SHOWING THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH. That was the context of what James Ryan was lost in and was a partial driver of the search because one of Ryan's brothers died at Omaha Beach. Handwave away all you like, and it still does not erase the fact that Spielberg in making Saving Private Ryan did indeed follow the dramatic screenwriting/production rule I've outlined and which you seem hellbent on rejecting.

Handwave away all you like, the fact is that Spielberg shose to show certain parts of the story, and chose to have characters simply tell of others. And Ron Moore chose to show certain parts of his story, and have characters simply tell of others. The only really significant difference is how much each director chose to put in which category. You clearly did not approve of Moore's choice in this, but that is your personal preference, not some kind of rule.

They actually show the war in BG 2003 as well. The Cylon attack, the end of the Galactica's vipers, the attack on the convoy. It obviously wasn't enough to suit you, but it's just a little more than "Characters sitting around talking about it for two boring hours".

Mere glimpses of three action scenes and people reading bulletins... That doesn't qualify as "showing the war" by a longshot.

That's your opinion. Nothing more.

No, I'm calling you on a dishonest tactic and a deliberate misrepresentation. I just got through saying that both the epic, panoramic approach, and the small scale approach were equally valid, and could produce great films, and then you immediately turn around and tell me that I must think a bunch of directors who made epic war dramas did a crappy job. You blatantly and deliberately misrepresented a position I had just clearly stated in the post immediately before. Don't even try to deny it, it's right there in print.

Yes it is right there in print —and the evidence calls you a liar, sir. That was not misrepresentation, it was mockery. Which is what your argument merited. And it is YOU who is blatantly misrepresenting others' positions by dismissively waving the "You Whine Because There Weren't Enough Cool Explosions" dodge.

Hardly a dodge when, argue all you like, that's what the substance of your argument is. As I said before, virtually every complaint you raise boils down to the fact that you think Ron Moore didn't show enough action.

No, Neo-BSG chose a myopic perspective. When a production fails to adequately convey the scope of events in which the characters are caught in, and indeed involves neither the characters or the audience directly in the story, the approach has failed and therefore it was the wrong approach.

Your opinion. Nothing more. Neither I, nor a great many other viewers felt this way. This is entertainment, and is subjective. Your opinion is not fact. Deal with it.

I see. Every single film I have cited to make a comparison with BG you have objected to on some pretext or other. "Invalid comparison" has become your battle cry. Then, without batting an eye, you turn around and compare a soap opera love story, without the slightest resemblance to BG storywise. Well, "invalid comparison", right back at you.

That's pretty desperate for a comeback. You got called on your bullshit and simple denial is the best you can do? Par for the course, I suppose.

I merely point out your hyposcrisy. You have taken every comparison with another film I have made, and pouted "invalid comparison", then you turn right around and yourself make a comparison with a film that is far more unlike BG than any of the movies I cited as examples. Why do you get to employ a tactic that is denied to others?

Because any viewer with a brain in his head gets the idea. Only people who demand lots and lots of really cool visual effects would use this as an excuse to condemn the story as a whole. Not everybody has to have every last thing spelled out for them in excruciating detail. As I said before, some of us have imaginations.

Repetitive grandstanding. How unimaginative of you. This is, what, the seventh or eighth post in which you've dismissed criticism with the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge? You've wheeled this one out now in your responses to myself, Kuja, and Uranian while ignoring in toto the substance of the argument in each case. It really is beginning to get boring.

Too bad. Truth hurts doesn't it?

So in other words, even though the whole point of that scene, and not incidentally, a crucial plot point of the story was to show that the Cylons had a means of easily disabling their enemies, thus enabling them to wipe out the Colonials' defenses in jig time, they should have contrived somehow to lengthen the scene and spice it up with some cool battles and neato explosions blah blah blah blahblahblahblahblah...

That's right —rebut the complaint over a such a lame and obvious plot device with the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again.

Which does nothing to change the fact that your chief complaint is precisely that - a lack of more battle scenes, more effects, more explosions, etc.

You didn't get any closeups of Santiago's body blasting out into space blah blah blah blahblahblahblahblahblahblah... How you conclude this provides so much more detail than the Caprica bombardment in BG escapes me.

BECAUSE IT WAS FAR MORE THAN SOMEBODY JUST READING A GODDAMN BULLETIN as was the case of the mere report of the Atlantia's destruction. To try to make this simple for you: EarthForce 1 is the very symbol of the Alliance Sinclair took his oath to defend. Watching that ship explode symbolises in stark terms the destruction of the dream which was the foundation of the Earth Alliance and the Babylon project.

And Caprica was the very symbol of the twelve colonies - the captial apparently - and we saw it get destroyed. It was not read off as a bulletin; we saw it get blown up.

No it isn't. I hate to break it to you, but my first reaction, upon hearing Adama announce the destruction of the Atlantia was not: "Damn! I wanted to see that." He announced earlier that Admiral Nogala (sp?) had taken command of the fleet aboard the Atlantia, presumably the flagship would be at the head of a large force, so when the destruction of the Atlantia was announced, this told me all I needed to know - namely, that the flagship had been destroyed, and presumably a significant number of other ships as well, and that the Colonials were on the ropes. The reactions of the crew on the Galactica told me how serious a blow this was for them. Sure it would have been nice to see some of this. But when you get right down to it, I didn't need to. My mind was capable of filling in all the necessary details.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

And here's that Appeal to Authority (Majority Acclaim) again, as if it actually has any validity as an argument.

And here's that treatment of subjective entertainment as if it were a matter of objective fact, with rules as inviolable as the laws of physics, as if that actually has any validity as an argument.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

Adama's speech, his exchange with the Cylon infiltrator on Ragnar,

Yeah, yeah, I already referred to those.

an exchange between Laura Rosen and her aide aboard their liner,

You mean the one where she tells him she has cancer? Where's the anti-technology sermon in that conversation?

the scene when Tigh and Adama are discussing the problem of the Cylon infiltrators.

All Tigh says is that their situation just got worse, and the Cylons could be anywhere and look like anyone. Adama replies that he's had time to think about it; when Tigh asks what should they do, Adama answers that he doesn't know, and then moves the conversation right along to other matters by asking how the warheads are coming. Tigh tells him, and then tells him his son Lee is alive. Then they cut to another scene.

You know, try as I might, I just can't seem to find an anti-technology sermon, or a we-shouldn't-play-God speech in any of this.

in one of the scenes between Adama and Rosen,

The one before the final battle consisted of her expressing disbelief that Adama wanted to continue fighting, and telling him the war was over and they had to escape and start over somewhere else. There was no discussion of mankind's folly in creating the Cylons.

Her second conversation consisted of the two of them discussing the details of what kind of goverenment they would have, with Adama in charge of military matters, and Roslin in charge of the civilian ships. There was no discussion of mankind's folly in creating the Cylons.

You know, try as I might, I just can't seem to find an anti-technology sermon, or a we-shouldn't-play-God speech in any of this either.

and N.6's expression of her "faith" which is echoed by the duplicate who tries to kill Adama.

If you mean where she told Baltar that "God wanted her" to help him, I don't see the sermon in that either. That might just as easily be her playing the part of a religious woman in a religious society as part of her cover.

Don't try denying that the theme of "Man paying the price for playing God" wasn't an essential part of the movie's fabric because it clearly was.

It was there, but don't think it loomed quite as large as you think. I took it to mean that any technology has dangerous applications, and you have to accept responsibility for what you do with it, which is true enough.

The hell it's not. Every bitch and gripe you've made has been to point out that there wasn't enough action; we should have seen more battles; they should have shown more of the war; we should have seen more of the destruction of Caprica, especially up close; we should have seen the Atlantia get blown up. Almost every complaint of yours has been of some action or battle scene that was left out. You want more fireballs and crashes. You seem to feel this is necessary to get the audience involved. It's not. Maybe it's necessary to get you involved, but you ought to realize those are your personal tastes and nothing more.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

What do you expect? When the substance of someone's complaints is "I want more battles!" do you expect me to regard that as a mature critique?

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

Explaining the Galactica's survival in the original wasn't all that difficult. What would have made it such a challenge had the Galactica been at the ambush in this production?

This is precisely why the Cylons' "Divide-by-Zero" button-push was such a lame and obvious plot device. And having the Galactica as an active warship with the fleet would have put Adama and crew in what would have been a hopeless battle and facing the hard decision to either stick it out, or abandon the fleet to try to save Caprica. Placing your main characters in the middle of the situation is what makes an audience involved in their plight on a direct emotional level.

And it would have been far less believable that the Galactica escaped. It strains suspension of disbelief far less that the ship survived because it was never really in the thick of the fighting.

And your evidence for that direction to my thought processes is...? Oh, that's right —pulled out of your own ass.

No, from your own unreasonable arguments. Treating matters of subjective entertainment as though they were matters of objective fact is not a reasonable position. Therefore I would not expect you to be reasonable on this as well.

Translation: "There are no defects in Neo-BSG. Defects are annihilating themselves by the thousands on the gates of Neo-BSG". As I've said before, denial is not a rebuttal. And it's fairly evident that you consider no criticism of the movie reasonable.

Another stupid and dishonest misreprentation of my position. About what I've come to expect from you. If that were so, explain the comments I listed under the BAD category in my first post on this thread. How could I possibly criticize anything from BG 2003 as bad, if I thought: "There are no defects in Neo-BSG."?

[StarshipTitanic]

No, you want scenes of battles that the Galactica wasn't present for with characters we weren't exposed to.

We would've been exposed to them if they had been shown. That thought ever crossed your mind? Guess not.

Yes it did, but I dismissed such an idea due to the stupidity of cramming so many disposable characters into a pilot and then following them through their own adventures.

Demise of the last 3 battlestars = Demise of the Colonial fleet

Yeah, so?

So they were both handled well by dialogue, not visuals. Unless you want to start complaining about the original's handling of the fleet's destruction, hypocrite.

[Kuja]

We would've been exposed to them if they had been shown. That thought ever crossed your mind? Guess not.

Yes it did, but I dismissed such an idea due to the stupidity of cramming so many disposable characters into a pilot and then following them through their own adventures.

Strawman.

A four-minute (if that) scene is HARDLY "following them through their own adventures".

Yeah, so?

So they were both handled well by dialogue, not visuals. Unless you want to start complaining about the original's handling of the fleet's destruction, hypocrite.

Now I don't know what the hell you're babbling about. We SAW the Atlantia go up in the original. We SAW the Radiers closing the net on the original fleet. We SAW Adama make the desicion to leave them and go help the colonies. We didn't SEE any of that in new BSG. I don't know what kind of comparison you're trying to make, but you're failing miserably.

[Patrick Degan]

You can repeat "show, don't tell" like a mantra all you like; it still won't make it universally true.

Denial of an argument does not refute it —especially as you refuse to answer the challenge as to why the rule isn't valid.

I have answered the challenge you idiot.

The fuck you have. You just keep yammering "different approach" as if that answers all questions.

I've given you fucking examples of filmmakers using narration or dialogue rather than showing everything in detail. It's not a rule because for thousands of years, there was no visual medium of film, and storytellers since Homer have managed to tell gripping dramatic stories by forcing the audience to use their imaginations. Sure, film is a visual medium and it's generally better to show rather than tell. That does not mean it is an inviolable rule. It's like beginning sentences with conjunctions - not a good idea when done too often, but it is simply not a crime to do it from time to time.

Yes we all know the history of theatre and literature, thank you. And you keep missing the fucking point —the viewer becomes considerably more involved when the characters he's looking at on screen are directly involved in the events of the story. Yes, at times the pure dialogue/narration approach is best —as linkage between story aspects, not wholesale REPLACEMENT for them or when the scope of the story is very small. And trying to justify the utter absence of critical scenery of the Colonies' downfall in this movie by citing the inability of staging such large scenes in theatrical productions before the invention of film has to be the most inane argument you've put forth yet in this increasingly silly thread. Ron Moore isn't obligated to show armageddon because Homer couldn't have done such a thing in his time?! Is that really what you're trying to argue here?!?!

It is an invalid comparison because, as Uranian 235 has already pointed out, Jaws is not about Robert Shaw surviving the Indianopolis tragedy and the movie only touches on that event as a throwaway line as Shaw is relating his own history. You just never tire of this sort of bullshit, do you?

And you just never tire of declaring any example invalid on any pretext do you?

No —only on the pretext that you haven't a goddamn clue what you presume to talk about.

Any comparison breaks down if carried too far because no two things are exactly alike unless they are, in fact, the same thing. Cry invalid all you like, the fact remains that is is possible to use narration or dialogue in film to achieve a dramatic effect.

As linkage between story aspects, not REPLACEMENT for dramatic illustration.

Now you may not like it that this approach was chosen in BG. Fine, you certainly don't have to. If that ruins the movie for you, well then it does. But too bad, so sad, that's a personal preference on your part, not a hard and fast rule of filmmaking that Must Not Be Broken. Stop pretending it's anything else.

It is not "personal preference", Clueless One, it's how things fucking work in filmmaking when the object is to tell an EPIC story —especially in that case.

No, because Jaws was about the hunt for the big shark in 1978, not Robert Shaw facing sharks in the Pacific 30 years earlier.

And Battlestar Galactica is about the Galactica's escape following the destruction of the twelve colonies, not the destruction of the colonial fleet. The destruction of the colonial fleet merely sets the stage for the exodus.

AND WITHOUT ACTUALLY SEEING ANYTHING OF THAT STAGE-SETTING EVENT, THERE IS NO REAL DRAMATIC TENSION FOR THE VIEWER TO HOOK INTO! You are being deliberately obtuse —the destruction of the battlestar fleet and the Colonial civilisation is contemporaneous to the Galactica's story, not some event in the remote past that can simply be disposed of with some throwaway dialogue. It's the goddam plot-driver to the whole story, for fuck's sake. Just what about that escapes your grasp?

And an appeal to a majority opinion most certainly does not mean "precisely dick" when you are talking about entertainment stupid. If most of the people who watch a given show do not enjoy it, it will not be a success, therefore the majority opinion is relevant. What part of that concept can you not understand?

Appeal to Authority fallacy, for a start. If a majority held the opinion the world is flat, that still would not make it true. The challenge is to defend a position on its merits, not because it has the momentary backing of popular acclaim. "These people liked it too" —is that really your best shot?

Oh come off it. This is not a matter of objective fact like the world being a sphere. Art and entertainment never is. It is an entirely subjective field, since what entertains one person bores another - this argument certainly reveals that to be true. Entertainment is all about popular acclaim. Art, literature, cinema, etc, succeed because they appeal to an audience. If you even try to pretend otherwise you are too stupid to bother with. If they become classics, and stand the test of time, it's because they retain appeal to changing audiences over time, and remain relevant and entertaining. Entertainment has no meaning without an audience.

In other words, you really have no defence for your position other than popular acclaim. Which really means you have no argument.

The point is WE SEE THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH WHERE THE WORST OF THE FIGHTING WAS which sets the entire mood for the rest of the goddamn movie. The Ron Moore approach would have opened SPR with Miller reporting to his C.O. after the landing and the bloody meatgrinder the troops going in —of which there were far more than just Miller's squad in the film's opening— had to fight their way through.

And we see the horror of Caprica being destroyed (though obviously not in enough detail to suit you), and this sets the tone for the rest of the goddamn movie. Since this was not shown with someone on the Galactica bridge simply reporting that Caprica was destroyed, and we did, in fact, actually see it, you are talking shit.

No, that's you talking shit actually. A few fireballs seen from high orbit and a distant mushroom cloud shows nothing which carries any real meaning and simply leaves the viewer detatched. Ron Moore may as well simply have put up a slide show of A-bomb test photos. Again, I present comparison with The Day After.

I see again you mischaracterise my position, which is becoming a habit. The point was that the mood for everything which followed in the movie was set BY SHOWING THE HORROR OF OMAHA BEACH. That was the context of what James Ryan was lost in and was a partial driver of the search because one of Ryan's brothers died at Omaha Beach. Handwave away all you like, and it still does not erase the fact that Spielberg in making Saving Private Ryan did indeed follow the dramatic screenwriting/production rule I've outlined and which you seem hellbent on rejecting.

Handwave away all you like, the fact is that Spielberg shose to show certain parts of the story, and chose to have characters simply tell of others. And Ron Moore chose to show certain parts of his story, and have characters simply tell of others. The only really significant difference is how much each director chose to put in which category. You clearly did not approve of Moore's choice in this, but that is your personal preference, not some kind of rule.

Ah, your new formula response to criticism: "It's just your personal preference™" Still nothing but more evasion of the issues at hand.

They actually show the war in BG 2003 as well. The Cylon attack, the end of the Galactica's vipers, the attack on the convoy. It obviously wasn't enough to suit you, but it's just a little more than "Characters sitting around talking about it for two boring hours".

Mere glimpses of three action scenes and people reading bulletins... That doesn't qualify as "showing the war" by a longshot.

That's your opinion. Nothing more.

Pathetic tapdance. Why don't you try a substantive response for a change?

No, I'm calling you on a dishonest tactic and a deliberate misrepresentation. I just got through saying that both the epic, panoramic approach, and the small scale approach were equally valid, and could produce great films, and then you immediately turn around and tell me that I must think a bunch of directors who made epic war dramas did a crappy job. You blatantly and deliberately misrepresented a position I had just clearly stated in the post immediately before. Don't even try to deny it, it's right there in print.

Yes it is right there in print —and the evidence calls you a liar, sir. That was not misrepresentation, it was mockery. Which is what your argument merited. And it is YOU who is blatantly misrepresenting others' positions by dismissively waving the "You Whine Because There Weren't Enough Cool Explosions" dodge.

Hardly a dodge when, argue all you like, that's what the substance of your argument is. As I said before, virtually every complaint you raise boils down to the fact that you think Ron Moore didn't show enough action.

Lie.

No, Neo-BSG chose a myopic perspective. When a production fails to adequately convey the scope of events in which the characters are caught in, and indeed involves neither the characters or the audience directly in the story, the approach has failed and therefore it was the wrong approach.

Your opinion. Nothing more. Neither I, nor a great many other viewers felt this way. This is entertainment, and is subjective. Your opinion is not fact. Deal with it.

Ah, your new formula response to criticism: "It's just your personal preference™" Still nothing but more evasion of the issues at hand.

I see. Every single film I have cited to make a comparison with BG you have objected to on some pretext or other. "Invalid comparison" has become your battle cry. Then, without batting an eye, you turn around and compare a soap opera love story, without the slightest resemblance to BG storywise. Well, "invalid comparison", right back at you.

That's pretty desperate for a comeback. You got called on your bullshit and simple denial is the best you can do? Par for the course, I suppose.

I merely point out your hyposcrisy.

A laughable assertion coming from a rank hypocrite.

You have taken every comparison with another film I have made, and pouted "invalid comparison", then you turn right around and yourself make a comparison with a film that is far more unlike BG than any of the movies I cited as examples. Why do you get to employ a tactic that is denied to others?

What invalid comparison? D-Day: The Sixth Of June merely uses the pending invasion of Normandy as backdrop for the soap-opera of the characters' romances. Neo-BSG uses the war and the armageddon of the Twelve Colonies as backdrop for the soap-opera of Adama's family problems, the soap-opera of Laura Rosen's cancer, the soap-opera of Tigh and his alcoholism, the soap-opera of Lee and Kara's past relationship. The comparison is very valid.

Because any viewer with a brain in his head gets the idea. Only people who demand lots and lots of really cool visual effects would use this as an excuse to condemn the story as a whole. Not everybody has to have every last thing spelled out for them in excruciating detail. As I said before, some of us have imaginations.

Repetitive grandstanding. How unimaginative of you. This is, what, the seventh or eighth post in which you've dismissed criticism with the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge? You've wheeled this one out now in your responses to myself, Kuja, and Uranian while ignoring in toto the substance of the argument in each case. It really is beginning to get boring.

Too bad. Truth hurts doesn't it?

Yes —probably why you're so hellbent on evading it.

So in other words, even though the whole point of that scene, and not incidentally, a crucial plot point of the story was to show that the Cylons had a means of easily disabling their enemies, thus enabling them to wipe out the Colonials' defenses in jig time, they should have contrived somehow to lengthen the scene and spice it up with some cool battles and neato explosions blah blah blah blahblahblahblahblah...

That's right —rebut the complaint over a such a lame and obvious plot device with the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again.

Which does nothing to change the fact that your chief complaint is precisely that - a lack of more battle scenes, more effects, more explosions, etc.

Lie.

You didn't get any closeups of Santiago's body blasting out into space blah blah blah blahblahblahblahblahblahblah... How you conclude this provides so much more detail than the Caprica bombardment in BG escapes me.

BECAUSE IT WAS FAR MORE THAN SOMEBODY JUST READING A GODDAMN BULLETIN as was the case of the mere report of the Atlantia's destruction. To try to make this simple for you: EarthForce 1 is the very symbol of the Alliance Sinclair took his oath to defend. Watching that ship explode symbolises in stark terms the destruction of the dream which was the foundation of the Earth Alliance and the Babylon project.

And Caprica was the very symbol of the twelve colonies - the captial apparently - and we saw it get destroyed. It was not read off as a bulletin; we saw it get blown up.

As you wish...

No it isn't. I hate to break it to you, but my first reaction, upon hearing Adama announce the destruction of the Atlantia was not: "Damn! I wanted to see that." He announced earlier that Admiral Nogala (sp?) had taken command of the fleet aboard the Atlantia, presumably the flagship would be at the head of a large force, so when the destruction of the Atlantia was announced, this told me all I needed to know - namely, that the flagship had been destroyed, and presumably a significant number of other ships as well, and that the Colonials were on the ropes. The reactions of the crew on the Galactica told me how serious a blow this was for them. Sure it would have been nice to see some of this. But when you get right down to it, I didn't need to. My mind was capable of filling in all the necessary details.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

Arrogance and ignorance in one package. How efficent of you.

And here's that Appeal to Authority (Majority Acclaim) again, as if it actually has any validity as an argument.

And here's that treatment of subjective entertainment as if it were a matter of objective fact, with rules as inviolable as the laws of physics, as if that actually has any validity as an argument.

Ah, your new formula response to criticism: "It's just your personal preference™" Still nothing but more evasion of the issues at hand.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

I have. So has Kuja. So has Uranian. And your response continues to be "LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA LA LA...."

On the matter of the specific scenes in question regarding the expressions of the "Man being punished" theme, I will have to concede for the time being, having no copy of the script or video to refer back to in order to support argument in that direction. But the entire exchange between Adama and the Cylon infiltrator at Ragnar did indeed sermonise on the theme of Man deserving his fate for Tampering in God's Domain and for far more than a minute of throwaway dialogue.

Don't try denying that the theme of "Man paying the price for playing God" wasn't an essential part of the movie's fabric because it clearly was.

It was there, but don't think it loomed quite as large as you think. I took it to mean that any technology has dangerous applications, and you have to accept responsibility for what you do with it, which is true enough.

Oh, puhLEEZE — the script goes way beyond making such a mundane point and does so in a most unsubtle manner.

The hell it's not. Every bitch and gripe you've made has been to point out that there wasn't enough action; we should have seen more battles; they should have shown more of the war; we should have seen more of the destruction of Caprica, especially up close; we should have seen the Atlantia get blown up. Almost every complaint of yours has been of some action or battle scene that was left out. You want more fireballs and crashes. You seem to feel this is necessary to get the audience involved. It's not. Maybe it's necessary to get you involved, but you ought to realize those are your personal tastes and nothing more.

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

Translation: "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" Which has been your general response to every substantive criticism from three people now, who have outlined details and specifics.

What do you expect? When the substance of someone's complaints is "I want more battles!" do you expect me to regard that as a mature critique?

And here's you wheeling out the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge yet again, I see. Is there any point when you'll actually get around to addressing an argument with something other than a formula response?

Perhaps when you show me that your chief objection to BG is not that you think it didn't have enough scenes of action.

Considering that the substance of your argument consists of nothing more than the "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge, each repetition thereof deserved no more time or consideration than a cut-and-paste response.

Explaining the Galactica's survival in the original wasn't all that difficult. What would have made it such a challenge had the Galactica been at the ambush in this production?

This is precisely why the Cylons' "Divide-by-Zero" button-push was such a lame and obvious plot device. And having the Galactica as an active warship with the fleet would have put Adama and crew in what would have been a hopeless battle and facing the hard decision to either stick it out, or abandon the fleet to try to save Caprica. Placing your main characters in the middle of the situation is what makes an audience involved in their plight on a direct emotional level.

And it would have been far less believable that the Galactica escaped. It strains suspension of disbelief far less that the ship survived because it was never really in the thick of the fighting.

Riiight —it's FAR more believable that a ship which hasn't been in active service for twenty years, which has been disarmed and partially dismantled, can be brought to anything resembling operational readiness and prepped for an FTL jump in mere hours without dock reconditioning beforehand.

How would the Galactica's escape from the ambush of the battlestar fleet have been implausible? Supposedly, the ship would have been operational and in combat condition. The fact that her systems were not networked or running the latest buggy OS would have rendered her immune to the Cylons' "Divide-by-Zero" button-push. If that plot device had not been employed, the Galactica's escape from the Cylon ambush would have been no more implausible than her escape from the Cylons at Ragnar or the escape of the FTL-capable transports from the Cylons in the scene where the STL ships are abandoned. The Cylons had no means to STOP an FTL jump. So exactly how would it have been implausible?

And your evidence for that direction to my thought processes is...? Oh, that's right —pulled out of your own ass.

No, from your own unreasonable arguments. Treating matters of subjective entertainment as though they were matters of objective fact is not a reasonable position. Therefore I would not expect you to be reasonable on this as well.

Either produce a quote from me anywhere on this thread where I state or imply that I would have run down a BSG film for being "close to the original" or admit you simply don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Translation: "There are no defects in Neo-BSG. Defects are annihilating themselves by the thousands on the gates of Neo-BSG". As I've said before, denial is not a rebuttal. And it's fairly evident that you consider no criticism of the movie reasonable.

Another stupid and dishonest misreprentation of my position.

Evidently, the paraphrasing of Baghdad Bob's most famous wartime statement just flew right over your head. Here's a hint: it's called mockery.

About what I've come to expect from you. If that were so, explain the comments I listed under the BAD category in my first post on this thread. How could I possibly criticize anything from BG 2003 as bad, if I thought: "There are no defects in Neo-BSG."?

Nitpicks on small details. So far, the entire "substance" of your posts these last two pages have been apologia and the dismissal of every detailed criticism with the formulaic "I've Got Imagination, You Need Cool Explosions™" dodge and the "It's just your personal preference™" dodge. And until you start responding with something more than repetition of the same formula dismissals, the observation that you consider no criticism of the movie reasonable stands.

[Perinquus]

Oh come off it. This is not a matter of objective fact like the world being a sphere. Art and entertainment never is. It is an entirely subjective field, since what entertains one person bores another - this argument certainly reveals that to be true. Entertainment is all about popular acclaim. Art, literature, cinema, etc, succeed because they appeal to an audience. If you even try to pretend otherwise you are too stupid to bother with. If they become classics, and stand the test of time, it's because they retain appeal to changing audiences over time, and remain relevant and entertaining. Entertainment has no meaning without an audience.

In other words, you really have no defence for your position other than popular acclaim. Which really means you have no argument.

In other words, you really are stupid and arrogant enough to try and argue that entertainment is objective, and subject to completely objective standards. You really are stupid and arrogant enough to dispute the manifestly true statement that what entertains one person bores another. You really are stupid and arrogant enough to deny the obvious and indisputable fact that entertainment is aimed at an audience, and that said audience's appreciation is relevant, indeed critical to its success.

I see I overestimated you. I actually credited you with some sense.

Continuing to argue with you at this point would only serve to waste my time. As Shakespeare said: "For I mine own gained knowledge should profane/ If I would time expend with such a snipe..."

[StarshipTitanic]

Strawman.

A four-minute (if that) scene is HARDLY "following them through their own adventures".

Oh goodie, a scene not only with disposable characters, but ones we can't connect to! Even Adar had enough screentime to develop pity for and fustration with him. I thought you would at least have such characters introduced.

Now I don't know what the hell you're babbling about.

I misunderstood your whining about the Atlantia missing with whining about no scene with the destruction of the entire fleet. Guess what? The scene's still unnecessary! There is no reason for Adama to be in contact with Adar (at least TRY to fit in with the Galactica-central theme). There is no reason to see the Atlantia turned off because that's what the Vipers were for. Even if the unpowered Viper scene were cut to accomodate the Atlantia, there would be virtually no difference. We know Adar as well as we know that Mk. 7 squadron leader, the drama would be the same.

[Kuja]

Oh goodie, a scene not only with disposable characters, but ones we can't connect to! Even Adar had enough screentime to develop pity for and fustration with him. I thought you would at least have such characters introduced.

What the fuck do you expect me to do, fucking rewrite and replan the whole fucking first episode to show you what the fuck I mean? Of course, I really WOULD like to do that, but I don't have the goddamn time to point out and fix all the flaws in new BSG. I'd be here til I was eighty.

I misunderstood your whining about the Atlantia missing with whining about no scene with the destruction of the entire fleet. Guess what? The scene's still unnecessary! There is no reason for Adama to be in contact with Adar (at least TRY to fit in with the Galactica-central theme). There is no reason to see the Atlantia turned off because that's what the Vipers were for. Even if the unpowered Viper scene were cut to accomodate the Atlantia, there would be virtually no difference. We know Adar as well as we know that Mk. 7 squadron leader, the drama would be the same.

Of course the drama's the same, you dope. The SCALE is different. If you can plan two different battles that deliver exactly the same amount of drama but one offers more eye candy for the viewers at the same time, you'd have to be a drunk warthog to use the smaller one. Unfortunately, new BSG's producers ARE a bunch of drunk warthogs and narrowed the extent of the story so far that they neatly and efficiently cut themselves off from being able to effectively show the demise of the Colonial military and even the Colonies themselves.