Battlestar Galactica on SciFi HD - Season 4 - Page 2

I'm not sure about now, but making a statement like this used to be a felony in Texas.

And the rest of that post defies comprehension, too.

Just goes to show you, talent and desire can out-do sheer money every time.

Well I certianly wasn't trying to cause controversy with my response...Heck *I* watched football live and recorded Battlestar. :-)

It did beat The Will on CBS though.

"I'm not sure about now, but making a statement like this used to be a felony in Texas."

Right you are (and still is), I am poking fun at the ball sports freaks on AVS and the mods too!

BTW: My towns HS football team did a four (4) years in a row 3AAA state champs in the 90's! Kind of neat, all things considered!

In the mean time, I do enjoy my SicFi! Even X-Files! er... AVS files. ;-0

Ugh! I was very surprised how much I hated this mess, as I was a fan of the campy, overacted, short-lived original series. It certainly couldn't be called "great", but it had pace and energy that this fiasco lacked. I found myself rooting for the Cylons--they can't help but be a more interesting race than this version of the Twelve Tribes of Kobol.

I found the revisionist casting to be idiotic. The female Starbuck was just terrible. The "Boomer" character was okay, but why bother to call her "Boomer"? Whatever. Balzar isn't nearly greasy enough .

I couldn't finish the last hour; I just didn't care how it ended. Being a diehard science fiction fan, I'll probably check out the premiere to see whether they've improved it any, but I don't hold out any high hopes.

But hey--it landed on SciFi. Any SF series, no matter how poor, has a chance on SciFi .

"But hey--it landed on SciFi. Any SF series, no matter how poor, has a chance on SciFi ."

Right you are, Bonnie Hammer not withstanding, they have done well by the Star Gate(s) OTOH: They need to get rid of BH, ASAP! She is killing that Channel faster than you can watch. Maybe she should have worked for Enron?

YMMV????????

Sci-fi has a spotty history...they dropped Farscape for a series that tanked.

Yeah, but how long did Farscape run? IMDB claims that it ran into a fourth season--it got its chance. (And there was a recent mini-series as a treat for the fans). Also, what was that strange thing that defies categorization? Lexx? Apparently, they ran 2 or 3 seasons of that. Neither series would have lasted five weeks on a major network.

(I just checked. There are four Farscape season-sets, comprising 36 discs available at Amazon for a great deal of cash . There are even sets of all 3 seasons of Lexx).

Funny - in the new series episodes, the female Cylon asked Baltar to ask her how she got the nickname "Boomer" - did you see the ending that revealed her true identity?

Let me guess: you liked Starship Troopers?

I watched the original as a kid and this revisionist version has wiped away all those bad memories of Lorne Greene and various 70's haircuts yelling cheap dialog at each other (is that energy you're talking about?) in between special effect shots which they shamelessly reused in every episode.

I thought the moral dilemmas were well handled (note how dialog is sometimes more interesting when whispered instead of yelled), the physics to be better than most sci-fi movies, the sets were incredibly detailed, and the acting and dialog was far better than in any sci-fi I've seen on TV for years. I really thought it was going to be cheesier than the original.

Agreed. I think they do a great job with it, and I've seen a lot of the episodes that have aired on SKY in Britain. It's consistently well done, and ep 10 is a blast. I wish I had Universal HD here on Comcast, I'd like to watch the episodes again in HD, as I did the HD premiere last nite. The original took a good idea and surrounded it with 80's camp...this one takes a good idea, adds a few more good idea, and surrounds it with good acting and good effects. It walks all over the original, IMHO.

I enjoyed the old BG as a kid. But watching it oh so many years later I can not believe how campy it was. I can't believe people prefer the old version to this. As one of the many who have been watching the new BG via the Internet from the UK, I feel many are in for a big surprise on how good this turned out

As for as Boomer and Starbuck being female................................Get over it already

As I stated before, the original series was campy and overacted, but fast paced, upbeat and kind of charming. As for the old series' "shamelessly reusing" special effects, it was made 26 years ago, when the special effects of today weren't even possible, and the ones that they had were expensive. Bad 70s haircuts were kind of endemic in the 70s. I'm not sure that I would like it today, but I found it amusing at the age of 20 (I recently rewatched Star Wars on DVD and found that 27 years hasn't been kind to it, either).

This new version was slow, grave and completely unappealing (to me). In the two hours that I watched I didn't find a single character to root for or give a damn about--it was easier to side with the Cylons. (By far the most interesting character was Number Six). I just wanted the Cylons to find them and finish them off. They created the Cylons, they were stupid enough to try to make peace with them--they deserved what they got. Of course, this was true in the original story as well, but the Cylons were much less cool .

Now, if I thought that there was a chance that the producers would let the Cylons win over this bunch of losers in the end, that's a series that I might watch .

I guess that my main problem with it is this: why take an old concept and rehash it, trading on its fame to pass off something almost unrelated? The original BG was a half-comical space-opera, ala Lost in Space. It was a poor man's Star Wars on TV. They're taking the same situation and turning it into some sort of dead-serious drama. The setting and character set doesn't seem designed for it and if that's the sort of thing that you want to make, why not build it around a fresh new idea? Personally, I don't think it's gonna fly in the long term, and as I asserted before, it wouldn't garner sufficient ratings to survive more than a month on a major network, but much worst things have gone on for seasons on SciFi, so if it has what it takes to attract a following, it will likely get its chance.

As for Starbuck and Boomer being female.........................I was never under it--doesn't make it any less goofy.

Obviously, these are only my personal opinions. I'm happy for those of you who are enjoying it. As I said, since SciFi picked it up, you'll probably get at least a few seasons of it.

And no, I didn't particularly care for Starship Troopers, though it was relatively true to the novel, which was a favorite of mine as a teen. Its main problem is that Casper Van Dien is a hard-of-acting pretty-boy, and no one seemed to be directing the dialog, anyway . Its special effects were pretty.

To me, the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica (other than the character's names) is closer to the Wing Commander PC video game universe than the original BG. The cylon "Number 6" gets quite a lot of good scenes in the new series episodes if you like her though!

That's actually one of the things I like about the show - humanity *is* losing. No matter how "victorious" they could be in the end, at the end of the miniseries they are down to what, 60,000 people? Plus whomever is on the mythical Earth? I never got the impression from the original that they were bigtime losers like I do with this. These are desparate vastly outnumbered people with limited resources, limited ammo, and really freakin' old fighter ships without many trained (let alone skilled) pilots, just trying to survive.

Watched my DVRed recording Sunday and quickly concluded it was 'true' 1080i and not an upconvert as I speculated above. Almost didn't watch or record the show because my NY Times weekly guide failed to mark it "HD."

Seemed a cut above typical SF series, such as the comical "Stargate" episodes contrasted with the excellent original movie feature. -- John

You are right, as a huge Wing Commander fan in my gamer days it did have the WC universe feeling. Much more so then the POS Wing Commander movie

The HD broadcast was ok. Space scenes were too dark. Too bad the series will be shown on Sci-Fi channel as that is SD......

Indeed

This is all true, but the original series didn't really have that much charm to me. Back then I thought it was just another sci-fi series that just "didn't get" sci-fi.

It was definitely slow and grave. No argument there!

So you wanted humanity to be wiped out because you couldn't find a character to root for? And they deserved to be exterminated because trying to make peace with cool Cylons was stupid?

That's exactly why it was a great idea to revive this old concept. The network turned a great idea into a space soap opera. It's still a great concept for a cable sci-fi TV series now that cable channels can program for niche markets instead of appealing to the masses like the original desperately tried to do. And it's fame is very marginal.

Consider the situation and the setting. In the beginning of both the old and new series, millions of people had been killed and thousands of people were fleeing for their lives on a dangerous journey. Now their leaders have to make grave decisions about what to do to prevent their entire race from being wiped out.

If this isn't "dead-serious drama" in a science fiction context then I don't know what is.

None of the original characters except Commander Adama and Count Baldar were worth bringing back. Neither series gave much time for character development other than making it clear that both Boomers shot their mouths off.

I had very very low expectations for this mini-series. I figured they'd dumb it down just like the original. Within the first ten minutes I was surprised to see they had really put some thought into what the original concept was about. They realized they'd have to lose the charm and zap pow excitement of the original if they really wanted to take the subject matter seriously.

I HATED the mini-series. Thought it was horrible. Poorly done. Unappealing. Characters I couldn't root for. Premises I couldn't believe, like the way the military operates on the show. A drunk for a CO? Constant bickering and in-fighting? Needless to say, I thought Moore was a dolt, and thought SCI-FI should have been firing people.

That being said. The series itself.... much much better than the crap mini-series. The direction takes some time to adjust to. And some points are slower than they need to be. But the character progression is MUCH better in the series, and much more believable. This past episode, very good IMO.

I do though think that the show REALLY needs to push ahead a little faster in terms of some characters and sub-plots, but otherwise I can see it lasting on Sci-Fi for a few seasons at least.

I don't think there was any way to satisfy both the die-hard fans of the original as well as the new fans looking for a fresh take.

As far as the drunk XO (not CO)...Galactica was about to be decommissioned. It was the oldest, least capable ship in the fleet. Noone was going to cashier out a war hero like the XO. They were just going to let him finish out his career on a backwater ship, not the regular fleet. Now he has to find that war hero within himself again...I think it makes for a good backstory.

I enjoyed the mini-series and I'm enjoying the current series episodes as well. STILL not completely sold on Starbuck as a female:couldn't they at least have picked an ATTRACTIVE female for the role? :-)

SciFi is running four of the first episodes of the original series this morning and I just watched some of it. It was so obviously trying to rip off Star Wars, it's not funny, from the title sequence onward. (The acting isn't as bad as I thought it would be, but I haven't seen any Adama yet. I'd completely forgotten that Jane Seymour was in it, though I'd remembered the character she played. The FX are pretty damn cheesy compared to today's standard, but it was 26 years ago ). It and Star Wars were never science-fiction proper, IMHO, but rather science-fantasy (I loved the Star Wars films). Neither the original BG or Star Wars ever took themselves completely seriously and both started injecting humor, heroic derring-do and arch villainry into the mix from the beginning--everything's drawn in broad strokes in bold primary colors. In the new series, everyone seems mildly depressed before the Cylons attack.

(Hey! I gotta an idea! Let's take Star Wars and "re-imagine" it as it might have been written by Camus or Nietzsche, recasting the Han Solo and Chewbaca characters as females. Wouldn't that be a hoot? )

I find that the gravity of the new series forces me to take a close look at how ridiculous the set-up is. "Humanity" creates artificially intelligent robots who rebel (plausible), after which a long war ensues (plausible), after which they come to an impasse and negotiate a peace treaty (starting to get shaky), after which they lose all contact with them for years and no one seems to care??? (BZZZZZ! You lose, but thank for playing Credibility!) I can buy that they might have negotiated a peace treaty with these machines so that they could lick their wounds and prepare to finally annihilate them. (Would you feel obligated to observe a treaty negotiated with ambulatory computers? After surprisingly being attacked by them, you're going to believe that you now understand them well enough to be able to trust that they'll keep their "word"? If we build machines that go whack and started killing people, it seems manifest that we should keep trying until we destroy all of them). Even if they were willing to trust them to some degree (stupid), that they wouldn't keep as close track as possible of their every movement is not something that I can believe would happen in this deadly serious tableau. These things are capable of reproducing themselves far more efficiently than we are--all they have to do is find the necessary mineral resources to create an army of insurmountable numbers in a very small amount of time. That alone was a threat; in the new series, they acheive a nearly effortless coup by developing a method to disable humanity's defenses. You can wink at this sort of thing in the fairy-tale that the original series was, but not so easily in this.

(BTW, scowl, I don't think the Cylons were at all cool until they developed the human forms, and that was apparently many long "yarns" after the peace negotiations).

I'm sorry if I offended anyone (which I obviously did--you'd think that the writers and producers of this nonsense were posting here)--I was merely expressing my opinion as so many others have gushed in this thread as to how much they enjoyed it. I don't disrespect you for enjoying it but we can't all like everything or see everything the same way. You don't see me picking anyone else's posts apart, point-by-point. In the end, I don't care enough about this to argue any further about it.

Hey--I actually intend to watch a couple of episodes of the series, to see if it's better than the mini-series as some people here claim.

I was going to say the exact same thing (old career officer with a drinking problem finishing his duty on a ship about to become a museum).

If you read the interviews with the writers/director/etc at SciFi.com you will find they intended the show to be just as it is. There are no real heroes to root for because they wanted humans to be portrayed as they are "in real life." "Everyone has some kind of flaw." When I first heard about the mini-series 1 1/2 years ago, I read quite a bit about it - first out of excitement that they would redo it (new special effects and such), but then to find out WHY they changed it so much. I wasn't happy about that (I was 10 when the first series aired, so I didn't know better . But, I actually like this version much better. And I really like how they made the ships, especially the fighters, more "realistic" by using small jets to control pitch/direction, etc (very much like a real spacecraft like the shuttle).

michaelscott, you should have gone down to the San Diego Comic Con the last couple years when the new BG producers/writers/stars were there and were confronted by many classic BG fans! At least the female stars were hot there to look at.

Yes - I kept hoping Mark Hamill or Biff/Maniac would show up! I still play WC 4 and 5 occasionally with upgraded higher resolution patches, they were revolutionary. Don't even mention that theatrical movie - human Kilrathi?

I wouldn't call the actor unattractive per se--she just plays the part (in the mini-series, at least) as though she's in the grips of constant "'roid rage". She needs to commit herself to natural body-building techniques and stop popping pills, before she alienates all of her friends. Also, in all of the scenes in the mini-series, they're obviously trying to de-emphasize her femininity. She looks pretty decent here, all dressed up, in a still from episode 11 of the series. (There's an "after" picture of her there in that same get-up, with hair mused and dark rings around her eyes, drink in hand, looking inenibriated and unhappy).

Oh I bet it got nasty
Some of them classic BG fans have a irrational hate of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica . At some of the BG fan sites you will be banned for posting about new series