Not my usual television fare, but I was watching "Red Planet" on Sci Fi and saw so many commercials, plus a short 'making of" clip, that I'm intrigued.
December 8, 2003
TV REVIEW | 'BATTLESTAR GALACTICA'
The Cylons Are Back and Humanity Is in Deep Trouble
By NED MARTEL
After many decades of science-fiction epics in movies and on television, a space-travel saga can feel like another trip back to the future. A galaxy far, far away comes to life only through conventions of the genre, and each new narrative hardly seems a journey into the unknown. There will of course be exploding planets, a gargantuan space station and a showdown between cocky pilots and enemy vessels.
"Battlestar Galactica" remains true to many old ways of presenting the new. Its retro-futurism will please anyone praying for the success of the Sci-Fi Channel and a new dawn of television adventures into outer space. The producers are even bringing back the title and concept of the short-lived 1978 series, which didn't quite take off as the next "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" but has a legion of fans even today.
As before, humans in a space outpost must fend off robotic Cylons. A space station commander barks orders from the bridge, with Edward James Olmos as an éminence grise not unlike Lorne Greene's old character. Once again, redemption is just a dogfight away for Starbuck, the blond-maned, cigar-wielding swashbuckler, who always backs up a best buddy, Apollo.
The name Starbuck means something much different in our new millennium, and in this updated "Battlestar," the daring pilot is now a woman (and a slightly overcaffeinated one at that). Unlike her precursor, Dirk Benedict, Katee Sackhoff does not steal scenes so much as she merely borrows and returns them. With the gyno-machismo of the pop singer Pink, Starbuck still enjoys a good cigar and sends vibes Apollo's way that are both protective and seductive.
Resexing Starbuck is one of many ways the show's savvy creators mess with the orthodox minds of sci-fi enthusiasts, who often demand strict adherence to original concepts. The producers have made a war movie in sci-fi trappings, and they slip in some arch political themes while viewers are dazzled by blinking lights. For one thing, gender equality has transformed today's military, and the Battlestar's defensive force is similarly integrated, although its era of lip-locking, on-duty pilots seems light years away.
Other political ideas expand the universe even further. The Cylon attack is sudden, in violation of a shaky truce, and perpetrated by sleeper agents. The eerie onset of cataclysm on the various planets is not too different from television's apocalyptic vision of "The Day After" in 1983, but the scenes deliberately evoke Sept. 11 horrors. Another tableau draws on a classic in television-induced dread: Seconds before doom, a lone tow-headed girl plucks at her toy's yellow feathers, in a replica of L.B.J.'s anti-Goldwater "daisy" ad.
Mr. Olmos, as Adama, gets to use his deep tones to provoke viewers in the aftermath, questioning why the human race is worth defending. His "general to the troops" soliloquy is the most stirring and subversive moment in the script, as he rails against humanity for its arrogant creation of a once-servile Cylon population. "We still visit all of our sins upon our children," he says, and his diatribe is meant to remind viewers of the dangers of cloning, colonialism or any paternalistic form of arming future enemies.
It's almost too cute that the wise Adama has his heroism tied to a mothballed fleet of warships. Had he not refused network links for his dilapidated fighter jets, they too would have been hacked into by treacherous Cylons. Hardly a Joseph Campbell-inspired journeyman, Adama has some retrograde qualities that are unworthy of admiration. He bullies his son, who has reluctantly followed a plan outlined by President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the former education minister, who takes a post-apocalyptic oath as commander in chief. Adama rejects orders from "a schoolteacher," and sets up a clever dramatic arc about the struggles of women in leadership roles and the bargaining between military and civilian decision-makers during battle.
Adama also misleads his minions with mention of a peaceful haven that even he thinks is unattainable. "It's not enough just to live," he explains to his colleague. "You have to have something to live for." And he calls to mind many elusive goals of war efforts in a script that achieves many of its aims to blend realism and fantasy.
"Battlestar Galactica" advances the sci-fi genre and the Sci-Fi Channel by pulling the narrative closer to home. The dialogue is winningly familiar, compared with other jargon-laden scripts, although it helps to learn that "F.T.L.'s" are ships that can travel faster than light. The Battlestar denizens have recognizable quirks, like the workaholic who noshes a bowl of noodles at his desk, the maverick who smokes in bed and the unisex locker-room initiate who can't believe his eyes. (Starship troopers . . . They're just like us!)
The conclusion is not so much an ending as a pause, awaiting a world of viewers to amass and demand further travels into the beyond. The Sci-Fi Channel might hope that the mini-series will lead to a more extended run, and DVD's of the original series and video-game versions would surely ensue. The project might all be an exploitative departure from the "Battlestar Galactica" brand name, but it's hard not to like where the spacemen (and spacewomen) are going.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
SCI-FI, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
WITH: Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Mary McDonnell (Laura Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), Jamie Bamber (Apollo), Tricia Helfer (Number Six), James Callis (Gaius Baltar) and Grace Park (Boomer).
Ned Martel writes about television for The Financial Times.
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December 7, 2003
Back to the Sci-Fi Future
By HAL HINSON
Ronald D. Moore, a writer and producer of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Roswell" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," has declared an end to the "planet of the week" approach to science fiction.
"The traditional space opera with its stock characters, techno double talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics has run its course," Mr. Moore wrote in the introduction of a mission statement for his collaborators on "Battlestar Galactica," a four-hour mini-series that has its premiere tomorrow night at 9.
Mr. Moore's vision of a new kind of science fiction that emphasizes realism and dramatic conflict over escapism and fantasy mirrored that of his fellow executive producer, David Eick, who had taken a different path to the same conclusion: the genre they both loved â?? with its mythic grandeur, heroic emotions and monumental themes â?? had become obsolete.
The original "Battlestar Galactica," which followed the journey of the only battlestar to survive a seventh-millennium alien attack that had wiped out most of mankind, was the perfect embodiment of the moribund science fiction of the past. But within that much-publicized, short-lived series, created by Glen A. Larson 25 years ago, Mr. Moore and Mr. Eick saw all the pieces of what they hoped would be a revitalized genre relevant to a new century.
"The notion of a band of refugees who had survived this holocaust and were trying to forge some sort of society while searching for a new home had always appealed to me," said Mr. Eick, who is now executive vice president for USA Cable Entertainment. However, he had never been interested in a remake of the old series or a sequel to it. Instead, he agreed to develop the project only if allowed to rebuild it from the ground up. "My goal from the start," he said, "was to discard everything from the earlier series except its basic DNA."
In their search for a new approach, Mr. Eick and Mr. Moore began to look for alternative models. "Instead of grandeur, we wanted immediacy," Mr. Eick said. "And so we thought of films like `Blackhawk Down.' We didn't want the viewer to be swept away to a different world. We wanted them to feel like they are there, as if they'd switched over to CNN. We wanted it to be hand-held, like a documentary, as if what they were watching were real."
Mr. Moore said that the breakthrough moment on the project came when, instead of treating the story of the Galactica as a movie or a television show, they decided to take it seriously. "When we said to ourselves, `O.K., what if this really happened?' everything changed," he said. "Our decisions about the style of the film and how it should look. Our choice of director, cinematographer, the look of the special effects."
The Australian director Michael Rymer was chosen for the project not because he'd established himself as master of the genre, but because his earlier films ("Angel Baby," "Queen of the Damned" and especially "Perfume") demonstrated what Mr. Moore called "a dynamic use of the documentary or cinéma vérité style" that would facilitate a marriage of the fantastical and the naturalistic.
"I have always been drawn to that loose, spontaneous, Altmanesque approach," Mr. Rymer said. "And so my way of working dovetailed perfectly with the style Ron laid out in his mission statement."
"Because Ron's script created such a plausible reality," he said, "I could be pretty loose and give the actors a lot of space to contribute things on their own."
Mr. Eick said he had never dreamed of attracting actors with the talent and prestige of Edward James Olmos, who plays the old Lorne Greene role of Commander Adama, and Mary McDonnell, who portrays the president of the 12 human colonies of Kobol. (In fact, Mr. Moore said, the biggest obstacle was getting the actors to put aside preconceptions based on the 1978 series and read the script.)
Only a handful of characters from the original "Battlestar Galactica" (which recently became available on DVD in a deluxe 25th-anniversary edition) have survived, and most of those have been given face-lifts, if not radical makeovers. The swashbuckling Lieutenant Starbuck, who was played in the original by the meticulously coiffed Dirk Benedict, remains a troublemaking maverick who likes a good cigar, even though the character is now a woman, played by Katee Sackhoff. Commander Adama's older son, Apollo (Jamie Bamber), also survived, though the dashing pilot and his father are barely on speaking terms.
But the Cylons â?? the ruthless race of supermachines responsible for the seventh-millennium Armageddon â?? have undergone a much more radical transformation. In the original, they were the incarnation of pure evil, dedicated to the elimination of all human life in the universe. In the mini-series, the Cylons are still responsible for driving the human race to the brink of extinction, but, Mr. Moore said, "they are no longer evil for evil's sake."
At the beginning of the mini-series, viewers learn that Cylons were created by humans to work as servants and that over time they evolved from slaves into soldiers, rebelled against their masters, began a bloody, 1,000-year war for their independence, then mysteriously disappeared after signing an armistice with the humans.
The new "Galactica" begins on the 40th anniversary of that disappearance. Without an enemy to fight, the human race has grown complacent and let down its guard. In the meantime, the Cylons have made yet another evolutionary advance, shedding their metallic cocoons along with the yoke of servitude. Now virtually indistinguishable from human beings, this new species of Cylons has been hiding in plain sight, infiltrating every aspect of human existence. One particularly alluring Cylon known only as No. 6 (Tricia Helfer) has managed to beguile Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis), the arrogant young computer genius in charge of designing the navigation program for the colonial fleet, and to gain access to everything the Cylons will need to wipe out the entire human race. ("Galactica" fans will remember that Baltar was the traitor in the first series as well.)
While admitting that the notion of machines rising up against their masters is a well-established sci-fi device, Mr. Moore sees this new breed of enemy as a more ambiguous adversary, whose existence raises intriguing and complex questions. "They're not your typical space Nazis," he said, adding that by creating them, the humans were in a sense guilty of playing God. "And what if the Cylons see themselves as the next step in God's plan for the universe? Couldn't they also feel justified in killing their parents in order to survive?"
Because the mini-series is intended as a sort of back-door pilot for what its producers hope will be a continuing "Battlestar Galactica" series, Mr. Moore acknowledges that it raises more questions than it answers.
"I saw this story as an opportunity to examine what we are going through now in the post-9/11 world," Mr. Moore said. "What are the issues we struggle with? What do we take responsibility for? What do we blame ourselves for, and what do we blame the outside enemy for? And how much of that outside enemy has to do with us?"
