oldwardaggit
January 9th, 2004, 10:43 AM
I don’t know how much value anyone here would give it, but this is my opinion of the recent Battlestar: Galactica mini-series as a non-fan – or, maybe more correctly, a casual fan. As an introduction, let me first say that I watched the series when it first ran in 1978, and then occasionally as reruns for the next couple of years, until it pretty much disappeared from TV. I haven’t really thought much about it since then until I heard about the “re-imagining”.
My feelings about the original show can possibly be described by misquoting Charles Dickens: “It was the best of shows; it was the worst of shows.” The big thing I liked about the show was that it had characters I could relate to, and who obviously cared about each other. There was (at least, in my opinion) a tremendous chemistry between the characters that made them believable and made you care about what happened to them. This was, in my opinion, the biggest thing the show had going for it. A lot of shows never achieve this chemistry – to me, this seemed like something that BSG seemed to be able to do almost from the start. There were also several strong episodes that showed the potential that the show had if it had gone past that first year.
On the other hand, the show seemed to at times be cursed with some of the worst script writing this side of “Spock’s Brain” (I was an ardent Star Trek fan – that has cooled over the years as I’ve gotten older). Some of the plots were – again, in my opinion - just plain bad. And some of the dialogue was painful to hear – a line from Adama in one episode still sticks out to me today, when, in the search of fuel or something, he said they should go back to “that planet we passed not too long ago in that quadrant not too far out of the way.” I could go on about this, but those of you who know the show better than I would surely see what I’m talking about here, and have to agree that some of the writing was – let’s face it – bad.
(As an aside, lest anyone think I am being too harsh, I think BSG showed considerable promise. And I have to add that it was certainly no worse than Voyager or Enterprise their first season – actually, I would even say it was in some ways better. Even Next Generation didn’t really hit stride until season three. I actually think the characters on BSG meshed together better than any of the shows above if you only compare the first 24 episodes of each. I can’t say this enough – there was just a great chemistry among them.)
There are many among you who know more about the history of the show than I do, and can perhaps shed some light on this to me, but to me, it almost had the appearance of something that was a great idea, and rushed into production without enough preparation time. I always thought it would have been a better show if they had made the pilot, then waited a year (or even just a half season) before making the show to give them more time to develop it, and get some better scripts written.
Anyway, the point to all of the above is that I saw both good and bad in the old show, which I think shows that I am reasonably objective in my observations. I have also not been involved in any disputes as to which is better – the original or this re-imagining. I first heard around two years ago about a possible revival, and saw the occasional blurb. I was very disappointed to find out a few months ago that it was going to be a “re-imagining” of the original, instead of a continuation, or even a remake with as much of the original cast as they could. Although certainly not a die-hard BSG fan, I liked the show, and remembered it well enough to have an initial bias against the new one. I recognized this from the start, and so I really tried to be as objective as I could as I watched this mini-series. In fact, I was actually hoping that I would be wrong. I wanted to like the mini-series.
So, what did I think?
In a word – terrible. I mean, this wasn’t just bad – it was really bad. It reminded me of a promo ad that the local talk radio station I listen to runs for an album rock station they own on the FM side. You hear this really sappy ballad (Celine Dion?), and then you hear this guy, in what is obviously total anguish, half-screaming “Please, make it ssstttoooopppppp!!!!” That about sums it up for my viewing experience of the mini-series. I could go into details (a lot of details), and I started to, but so many others have already made all of the same points I was going to bring up, so there doesn’t seem to be much point to that. I will say, though, that I actually began fixing dinner during the middle of the show the first night because it just wasn’t all that interesting.
I’ve read some reviews of the mini, and when I read some of the ones that were very positive, it really made me wonder whether or not these people had seen the same show I did. I mean, this wasn’t just a bad science fiction – folks, this was just plain bad television. This range in opinions, though, got me to thinking.
This is only my opinion, and I would be the first to acknowledge that I am not an expert on how studios make decisions on what they’re going to produce, and how they’re going to do it. I also apologize in advance if I step on anyone’s toes – that is NOT my intent. It seems to me, though, that this show was not geared to BSG fans, or even science fiction fans, but to the under-30 crowd in general, and they sacrificed plot for special effects and cheap gimmicks (for example, all of the sexual things) because they were going for this younger (and again, just my opinion, but also a less-discerning) audience. This opinion may be seen as me stereotyping people younger than me (I’m 44), but I do know from considerable personal experience that many (certainly not all, but many) people growing up today are not taught critical thinking skills the way they once were. Obviously, this isn’t true for everyone (some younger people will be more discerning, some older ones less so), but I do think it’d be interesting if there were a way to see if there is a statistical correlation between what someone thinks of the mini and their age.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, it reminded me of when the movie “Pearl Harbor” came out. I had been looking forward to this movie for over a year, and went to see it with a group from my singles group at church. I was expecting to see a movie set around the events of the attack, where the primary focus would be on a fictional story, but within historically accurate events. Instead, I got an absolute disaster – a story so bad as to be laughable, with a rewritten history with almost no connection to what actually happened.
When we were leaving, everyone in my group (all of us in our late 30’s or early 40’s) hated it. But I could hear other people around us talking who liked it. I then noticed that the people who liked this movie were all young – early 20’s at the oldest. While my friends and I were aghast at the horrible story and the liberties taken with history (for example, it was embarrassingly bad to see the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Perry-class frigates in a World War II battle scene), these younger people were all talking about the cool battle scenes and effects, and the romance between the characters.
The point (yes, I’m coming to one) to this is that I think that for many, if not most people today, visual effects and such are more important than a good plot line. As long as there’s a lot of action, sex, explosions, etc., a good plot just isn’t all that important. I just don’t think audiences today are as critical as they once were in regards to things like plot and character development. They are primarily focused on excitement, and that’s the reason I think you get something like this re-imagined BSG. The producers of a show like this obviously want to make money, and to do so, they’re going to make the show appeal to the least common denominator. To them, it’s better to make something mediocre that they’re pretty sure 10 million people will like rather than go for higher quality that maybe only 5 million will like.
I do think this thing will be made into a series – or at least a series of “Sci Fi Special movies” or something like it. I think they just have too much money invested in sets and such to call it done after just the mini, and it seems that for a cable network it did get respectable ratings. If it does become a series, maybe it will be better if they get the chance to develop the characters, and actually become something worth watching. But based on what I saw in the mini, unless it runs on a Friday night, and I don’t have a date that night, and my friends are all busy, and there’s nothing better on TV, and my DVD and VCR players are broken, I won’t waste my time finding out.
My feelings about the original show can possibly be described by misquoting Charles Dickens: “It was the best of shows; it was the worst of shows.” The big thing I liked about the show was that it had characters I could relate to, and who obviously cared about each other. There was (at least, in my opinion) a tremendous chemistry between the characters that made them believable and made you care about what happened to them. This was, in my opinion, the biggest thing the show had going for it. A lot of shows never achieve this chemistry – to me, this seemed like something that BSG seemed to be able to do almost from the start. There were also several strong episodes that showed the potential that the show had if it had gone past that first year.
On the other hand, the show seemed to at times be cursed with some of the worst script writing this side of “Spock’s Brain” (I was an ardent Star Trek fan – that has cooled over the years as I’ve gotten older). Some of the plots were – again, in my opinion - just plain bad. And some of the dialogue was painful to hear – a line from Adama in one episode still sticks out to me today, when, in the search of fuel or something, he said they should go back to “that planet we passed not too long ago in that quadrant not too far out of the way.” I could go on about this, but those of you who know the show better than I would surely see what I’m talking about here, and have to agree that some of the writing was – let’s face it – bad.
(As an aside, lest anyone think I am being too harsh, I think BSG showed considerable promise. And I have to add that it was certainly no worse than Voyager or Enterprise their first season – actually, I would even say it was in some ways better. Even Next Generation didn’t really hit stride until season three. I actually think the characters on BSG meshed together better than any of the shows above if you only compare the first 24 episodes of each. I can’t say this enough – there was just a great chemistry among them.)
There are many among you who know more about the history of the show than I do, and can perhaps shed some light on this to me, but to me, it almost had the appearance of something that was a great idea, and rushed into production without enough preparation time. I always thought it would have been a better show if they had made the pilot, then waited a year (or even just a half season) before making the show to give them more time to develop it, and get some better scripts written.
Anyway, the point to all of the above is that I saw both good and bad in the old show, which I think shows that I am reasonably objective in my observations. I have also not been involved in any disputes as to which is better – the original or this re-imagining. I first heard around two years ago about a possible revival, and saw the occasional blurb. I was very disappointed to find out a few months ago that it was going to be a “re-imagining” of the original, instead of a continuation, or even a remake with as much of the original cast as they could. Although certainly not a die-hard BSG fan, I liked the show, and remembered it well enough to have an initial bias against the new one. I recognized this from the start, and so I really tried to be as objective as I could as I watched this mini-series. In fact, I was actually hoping that I would be wrong. I wanted to like the mini-series.
So, what did I think?
In a word – terrible. I mean, this wasn’t just bad – it was really bad. It reminded me of a promo ad that the local talk radio station I listen to runs for an album rock station they own on the FM side. You hear this really sappy ballad (Celine Dion?), and then you hear this guy, in what is obviously total anguish, half-screaming “Please, make it ssstttoooopppppp!!!!” That about sums it up for my viewing experience of the mini-series. I could go into details (a lot of details), and I started to, but so many others have already made all of the same points I was going to bring up, so there doesn’t seem to be much point to that. I will say, though, that I actually began fixing dinner during the middle of the show the first night because it just wasn’t all that interesting.
I’ve read some reviews of the mini, and when I read some of the ones that were very positive, it really made me wonder whether or not these people had seen the same show I did. I mean, this wasn’t just a bad science fiction – folks, this was just plain bad television. This range in opinions, though, got me to thinking.
This is only my opinion, and I would be the first to acknowledge that I am not an expert on how studios make decisions on what they’re going to produce, and how they’re going to do it. I also apologize in advance if I step on anyone’s toes – that is NOT my intent. It seems to me, though, that this show was not geared to BSG fans, or even science fiction fans, but to the under-30 crowd in general, and they sacrificed plot for special effects and cheap gimmicks (for example, all of the sexual things) because they were going for this younger (and again, just my opinion, but also a less-discerning) audience. This opinion may be seen as me stereotyping people younger than me (I’m 44), but I do know from considerable personal experience that many (certainly not all, but many) people growing up today are not taught critical thinking skills the way they once were. Obviously, this isn’t true for everyone (some younger people will be more discerning, some older ones less so), but I do think it’d be interesting if there were a way to see if there is a statistical correlation between what someone thinks of the mini and their age.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, it reminded me of when the movie “Pearl Harbor” came out. I had been looking forward to this movie for over a year, and went to see it with a group from my singles group at church. I was expecting to see a movie set around the events of the attack, where the primary focus would be on a fictional story, but within historically accurate events. Instead, I got an absolute disaster – a story so bad as to be laughable, with a rewritten history with almost no connection to what actually happened.
When we were leaving, everyone in my group (all of us in our late 30’s or early 40’s) hated it. But I could hear other people around us talking who liked it. I then noticed that the people who liked this movie were all young – early 20’s at the oldest. While my friends and I were aghast at the horrible story and the liberties taken with history (for example, it was embarrassingly bad to see the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Perry-class frigates in a World War II battle scene), these younger people were all talking about the cool battle scenes and effects, and the romance between the characters.
The point (yes, I’m coming to one) to this is that I think that for many, if not most people today, visual effects and such are more important than a good plot line. As long as there’s a lot of action, sex, explosions, etc., a good plot just isn’t all that important. I just don’t think audiences today are as critical as they once were in regards to things like plot and character development. They are primarily focused on excitement, and that’s the reason I think you get something like this re-imagined BSG. The producers of a show like this obviously want to make money, and to do so, they’re going to make the show appeal to the least common denominator. To them, it’s better to make something mediocre that they’re pretty sure 10 million people will like rather than go for higher quality that maybe only 5 million will like.
I do think this thing will be made into a series – or at least a series of “Sci Fi Special movies” or something like it. I think they just have too much money invested in sets and such to call it done after just the mini, and it seems that for a cable network it did get respectable ratings. If it does become a series, maybe it will be better if they get the chance to develop the characters, and actually become something worth watching. But based on what I saw in the mini, unless it runs on a Friday night, and I don’t have a date that night, and my friends are all busy, and there’s nothing better on TV, and my DVD and VCR players are broken, I won’t waste my time finding out.