Battlestar Galactica remake: Time to weep openly (1 Viewer)

[John CW]

I've just read this entire thread. Wow. What a wonderful piece of history this is. Just incredible.


The next time there's a remake in the works, I think it's best if we all hold our tongues until it's been given a chance... even if it's a remake of Battlestar Galactica!


(Apologies for bumping such an old thread, but I couldn't help but comment.)

 

[Vaughan Odendaal]

It was funny to read all the negativity early on in this thread. Little did they know that this new 're-imagined' series would become one of the greatest sci-fi shows ever made. I doubt another series will come along to top what BSG did to be honest. I still think about the show to this day, it had a profound impact on me.

 

[Simon Massey]

[COLOR= rgb(24, 24, 24)]THEY CHANGED THE FREAKING HELMETS![/COLOR]


Now my favourite post of all time!!! Perhaps those complaining that "the lightsabers are the wrong colour" should take note!!


And love the comments about the religious aspects being dropped - how little they knew!

 

[Josh Dial]

One of my favourite things about that quote is how Jeff Kleist slinked away from this forum shortly after the show became a massive hit, and now writes for The Digital Bits. I have yet to see him even acknowledge BSG's existence

 

[joshEH]

Oh, dear God, the early pages of this thread are fucking HYSTERICAL. Can't believe folks actually got this melodramatic, especially over a space-opera show from the 1970s that -- let's face it -- was never the greatest in the world to begin with.


The new BSG is bleak? No. Why should it be?

Hey, billions upon billions of our race have just died in the blink of an eye. Now the few thousands of us left are stuck living in tin cans, overcrowded, low on supply, with a broken government system perpetually on the brink of collapse. What are we going to do?

Let's turn that frown upside-down, and go on space adventures. With space casinos, space hookers, and robot puppies.

 

[John CW]

I hope this incredible gem of a thread is never altered, and the lead protagonist takes it all in good humour. I do think it's a lesson to us all.

 

[Tony J Case]

Eh, I gave the show three seasons and hated it. The old show was WAY better than this steaming pile of poo.

 

[Vaughan Odendaal]

The old show was a fucking joke. The new BSG gave us a chilling, realistic reminder of what can happen if technology evolves and the world in BSG reflected that. Dark, gritty and violent. The show oozed emotion from it's complex characters in a way that no other show has been able to do (IMO).


The old BSG was a steaming pile of shit. Seriously, the acting was terrible, the visual effects were ridiculous, the costume design was laughable. Even today, BSG has feature film quality visuals (for the most part). Basically you invested enough time to watch season 3 but not season 4 ? Why don't you actually finish the goddamn show before making a judgment call ?

 

[John CW]

To be fair, if he didn't like it by the end of Season 3, the final season isn't going to sway him. Still, to say the original was better... Yeah.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Originally Posted by joshEH /forum/thread/125076/battlestar-galactica-remake-time-to-weep-openly/480#post_3770071

 

[joshEH]

I mean, I enjoyed the original BSG as a kid, but now it's only watchable in the context of being known as the springboard from which the superior Ronald D. Moore version came.


Glen Larson's Battlestar Galactica was NOT a well-conceived series, and since the producers and the Universal "management" didn't know enough to be able to differentiate between SF and religious mysticism, they ended up doing a lot of "bible stories," rather than proper science fiction.

The entire show was a victim of Glen Larson and Leslie Stevens, and of a disinclination to purchase scripts from proper scriptwriters, literate SF folks, or other competent persons in general. The pilot script made it abundantly clear that Stevens and Larson didn't know the difference between "solar system" and "galaxy," or cared.

The show never had a proper scientific technical advisor, unless you count the time they paid a guy from the L.A. Fire Department to "consult" on safe procedures for opening doors in a burning building. (This was for a script where the Galactica was...ON FIRE. Right. That's what I said. On fire. In space. BURNING.)


About a year-and-a-half ago, as part of our semi-annual "Cinematic Golden Shower" tradition, my wife and I tried watching the original series episode "The Young Lords" on Hulu.


During the whole sequence where Starbuck tries training the unicorn-riding kids to build and place homemade IEDs in the Cylon castle (doing their little rhyming song-chant), I can't help but notice that she's quite visibly rolling her eyes.


She then looks right at me: "The New Caprica insurgency-storyline this is not."

 

[Tony J Case]

Originally Posted by Vaughan Odendaal Why don't you actually finish the goddamn show before making a judgment call ?

Why not finish it out? Because it's a steaming pile of yak diarrhea poured directly into my eyeballs. And no, this isnt just a fanboy of the old series going "They changed it, now it sucks". I have a whole slew of problems with the remake all by itself, no baggage required. For starters. . . .


1) The original had a distinct feeling that while they could be us, they were distinctly not us.It wasnt too far of a stretch to see that we are their cousins. In the remake, they ARE us! The costume designers have people running around in suits and ties. We get names like Lee and William, they use blatently earth swear words and modern day terminology. There will always have to be some earth-centric overlap - the Daleks will always speak English, Imperial officers always sound British - but Galactica was TOO close to home to be convincing.


And of course in doing that they completely jettisoned the underling Chariots of the Gods theme of the show - always one of my favorite aspects


2) I hate what they did to the characters. Now, I dont just mean turning Starbuck into a chick, but I mean turning Starbuck into a bitch. Mean, spiteful, no redeeming qualities about her. But that's just one character I could have lived with it if it was just the one that they fucked up, but every single character I wanted to punch in the face. When you're rooting for the Bad Guys to wipe out the last vestiges of humanity, that's not a good sign.


3) There's no hope in the series. Earth is a lie, it's all dark and depressing and angsty.But duh, you say. 9/10th of the human race has just been wiped out in nuclear fire, of course it's gonna be grim. No, no it doesn't have to be. The Doctor committed a double genocide by his own hand (including his very own race who had gone completely Axe Crazy) and while the Post Time War Doctor Who occasionally had moments where it was really dark or the Doctor was about to lose his shit, there's still a strong undercurrent of hope.


I like my shows to have sense of things getting better, not wallowing in self pity and hopelessness.


4) This one is more a criticism of Hollywood in general, but I loath that herky-jerky camera movement during action sequences. Just hold the bloody shoot still and let the starfighters do all the moving. Thank you.


I'm not denying that the original didn't have problems - it's very much an artifact of the seventies, the production was done on the cheap, we get Disco around every corner, Starbuck and Apollo were sporting goofy Man-Perms, and the stories consisted of Guns of Navarone (in space), High Noon (in space), the Towering Inferno (in space) or Lord of the Flies (in space) - but at least it was a hell of a lot more entertaining than the remake.

 

[Josh Dial]

Originally Posted by Tony J Case



The original had a distinct feeling that while they could be us, they were distinctly not us.It wasnt too far of a stretch to see that we are their cousins. In the remake, they ARE us!


...


And of course in doing that they completely jettisoned the underling Chariots of the Gods theme of the show - always one of my favorite aspects

From these two comments, I actually think you didn't watch the remake at all: they are about as opposite of the truth as can be!

 

[Simon Massey]

Tony Your first two comments would make all those who have watched the whole show smile since your comments are so way off the Mark once the show is taken as a whole. Chariots of the Gods indeed !! In the remake they are us .....hmm or are we really them?? And as for Starbuck well perhaps u should see the whole character arc first. No characters to care for ....I was incredibly moved by The fates of some of these characters And yes there is hope... isn't that one of the points. That no matter how bad it gets it is important to continue to hope?? And if I'm going to watch a show about the near destruction of the human race I'm think being a little grim is preferable to cheese ad camp IMO

 

[RickER]

I enjoyed the first 2 1/2 years of the new Galactica. I liked the last 10 episodes of the last season too.


From the middle of the 3rd season, to the start of the 4th, the show did NOTHING for me. If the show had kept going, i would of stopped watching. The boxing episode in the 3rd season was the shark jumping moment for me... i stated that before in another thread. It pissed me off, that much!

The show is good, but it was losing its focus, it isn't a concept that can keep going for 10 years.


Like Tony, i had issue with the 20th century suits and medical equipment. Hey, the only thing they have, that we do not have, is a faster than light ships. Other than that, they are our technological, and emotional equals.


I enjoy the old show, for what it was, a early evening kids show. A show that had to abide with the rules of the time, for early evening kids shows!

 

[John CW]

I've heard other people complaining about the boxing... but there's a ton other things that came before it. The real "WTF" moment is when they all started singing Bob Dylan/Jimi Hendrix... I can only imagine that some folk aren't as aware of that famous song. If people aren't bothered about that (and the fact that they have cigarettes, speak English, have pianos, eye glasses, guns with bullets, beer, not to mention all the Earth named mythology) then I don't see why boxing is such a big sin: It's a pretty basic "sport", and then have inter-gender versions of it, which we don't.

 

[Will_B]

As for the song, only explanation I think we're meant to have (if any) is that Dylan just like, man, tuned in to the music of the universe, man. LSD let Dylan hear the song and then he wrote down what he heard in his mind, you dig?


Later on, Hendrix did the same thing -- without ever hearing Dylan's original!


I think as for the cultural similarities, they simply hadn't decided on how to end the show, and their ultimate decision didn't make any sense as far as "the rise of the desktop stapler" and other items was concerned.


I enjoyed the show, early seasons more than last season, and for me the ultimate sin was that the "Final Five" story element was garbage.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Originally Posted by Will_B

As for the song, only explanation I think we're meant to have (if any) is that Dylan just like, man, tuned in to the music of the universe, man. LSD let Dylan hear the song and then he wrote down what he heard in his mind, you dig?

"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." The cyclical nature of the history between the humans and the Cylons was at the center of the BSG remake. It's the only reason for the convoluted explanation of the Final Five, other than that Tigh couldn't possibly be a Cylon if they were like the other seven skin jobs. Two things made this particular iteration of the pattern different: 1) For the first time, the humans and Cylons bred to create a viable hybrid. This changed everything. 2) The surviving humans become aware of the pattern and took drastic steps to end it. By literally resetting back to hunter-gatherers, they made the cycle as long as it could possibly go. As the ending made clear, however, they only prolonged the inevitable.

 

[Charlie Campisi]

I understand why we must compare the two series because of the common name and basic theme, but it's really unfair. 25 years between the two and completely opposite objectives. The first was the largested budgeted show ever and on a premier network. The second had a minimal budget on one of the minority channels in a niche. The first survived on 'wow factor' and mass popularity to see things we didn't see everyday. The second survived on plot because they had a limited budget for SFX and they weren't going to wow a sci fi audience that has had 25 years of big budget movies and tv.

Secondly, why bother redoing the original if you aren't going to change it? It had been done. No need to redo it. Make it different so at least the audience would have an interest to keep watching. The latest show also took to heart the "darker, grittier" version that has pervaded Hollywood the last 10 years or so. All of the comic book movies are the prime examples. Back when Entourage was funny (lol) they even tried to sell Vince on doing Aquaman as a darker, edgier version. I agree BSG took the concept over the top with its plodding doom and gloom, but I loved it. Some shows make me feel better because they are upbeat. BSG made me feel better because holy crap, thank God(s) I'm not them!

There were certainly a few missteps in certain episodes or character arcs. I most disliked Starbuck's eventual resolution. But to see the show come together in the finale, where one reveal after another fit with the hybrid's speech to Roslin(?) and the visions of the opera house and temple ... wow. The thought that went into it was, to use an overused term, ... epic. What was it, 60 hours of television? Amazing it held together as well as it did.


For full disclosure, I was a fanatic for the first version. I was 12 at the time it aired and could not wait for Sunday nights. Saw the original pilot in the movie theater when they released it. My opinion is that the reimagined version was "better" but that's mostly because I'm an adult and that show was made for adults. Completely different than the idea of the original.


PS - I love this thread for its nostalgia.

 

[joshEH]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt

"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." The cyclical nature of the history between the humans and the Cylons was at the center of the BSG remake. It's the only reason for the convoluted explanation of the Final Five, other than that Tigh couldn't possibly be a Cylon if they were like the other seven skin jobs. Two things made this particular iteration of the pattern different: 1) For the first time, the humans and Cylons bred to create a viable hybrid. This changed everything. 2) The surviving humans become aware of the pattern and took drastic steps to end it. By literally resetting back to hunter-gatherers, they made the cycle as long as it could possibly go. As the ending made clear, however, they only prolonged the inevitable.

Although, if you accept deleted scenes as canonical, there was that snipped/trimmed bit during the final Head Six/Head Baltar conversation in NYC where Six seems to think that -- this time -- humanity is finally showing the signs of breaking the cycle of man/machine violence forever (with our current generation of robotic development).


She says to Head Baltar (paraphrased), "If you let a system progress long and far enough, something wonderful will eventually happen." For me, at least, I choose to think that, this time, things are finally gonna be different.