A few years ago I would have been against this, but not that enough time has passed, I think they could do a great job turning BSG into a big-budget film franchise. Ron Moore's version was gritty and amazing, but the story arcs suffered the longer the show ran to fill out it's 24 episode seasons. I've always felt that BSG could best be told in a film format so that they don't have to come up with filler episodes week after week. Both versions of BSG suffered from too much fluff and too many side stories. 2-4 feature films could tell an excellent story, and keep things lean and mean. Thoughts?
It's about time. To me I loved the original Battlestar: Galactica and thought it would've been a classic had they gotten rid of what I call "70s science fiction" elements like the hokey stuff involving the kid Boxey and his robot dog (daggit). They also should've gone making the Cylons more obviously cyborgs in the H.R. Geiger mode than men in tin suit robots. Of course that was reportedly an ABC mandate. They couldn't even use the term "kill" when shooting down a Cylon ship because that would've implied the Cylons were alive to begin with.
The original BSG was a hokey, embarrassing piece of shit that tried desperately - and unsuccessfully - to rip off Star Wars. No further discussion on that is really required as it doesn't really exist in the minds of savvy sci-fi fans. The only real service it provided was giving us a rough template of that particular universe. Fast forward to the Actual BSG - Ron Moore's - which knocked everyone's socks off and is about as good as sci-fi can get. Actual BSG did something that most sci-fi can't do - it became mainstream, even winning Time Magazine's show of the year at one point. While I'd be interested to see this new BSG movie I really don't know how you'd top Actual BSG. It seems like they're already working from quite a deficit.
Not sure. nuBSG was fantastic, and whilst the 70's one has a place in my heart, I'm not how well they could do it today. I mean, your civilisation has been destroyed, billions dead and you're running from away from an enemy and towards the thinnest sliver of hope. Yay, put on the disco tunes! When you think about it, the original BSG was pretty much in a par with turning Auschwitz into a Day-Glo rave nightclub called 'Tanzen Macht Frei' It kind of needs the darkness, the fact you've been almost made extinct and your enemies are intent on finishing the job, kind of makes it that way. Doesn't man you can't have light hearted moments, just that for the story hang together you need a certain amount of dark pathos.
Now you finally know what it feels like to be a marginalized minority! It actually makes perfect sense within the context. Womanizing Gaius Baltar gets seduced and gives up the defense mainframe codes. It's not surprising that something dealing with sexuality went flying right over your head though....
Cylons weren't the robots. Cylons were an alien species from a distant sector who built and commanded the robots. I think they might have had tentacles and such. Yes, there was a novelization of the original series, and I read it!
And that is why nuBG was utter crap. Baltar in the original had completely mysterious and unusual motivations for betraying the human race that at times seems contradictory and difficult to fully fathom. The way he acted in "The Living Legend" and in "Baltar's Escape" made his personal motivations subject to all sorts of possible interpretations. The Baltar in nuBG is simply a guy who wanted to get a piece of ass. Which itself was not logical as throughout the series he was shown to never have any difficulty getting all sorts of ass without doing something so drastic.
I think it's just a writer's flaw to make villains of that magnitude deeply flawed and confused men instead of having the possess a starkly opposed world view, one which they fervently pursue as part of a self-reinforcing social movement. For example, why would someone want to destroy the Earth? Countless science fiction stories are premised on someone trying to destroy the Earth (it seems to be the basis for about half the Star Trek movies) yet they almost never offer a coherent or compelling reason, other than perhaps that it's there - and someone or something wants to destroy it. Yet if mankind colonizes space, and eventually other planets, there are some really compelling reasons to blow up the Earth. It's where every single nasty bacteria, virus, phage, fungus, parasitic worm, and blood sucking insect have evolved - and continue to evolve. We're not going to take many of them with us if we can avoid it, and indeed NASA goes to great lengths to make sure no pathogens get into space - not even a cold virus. Let's say we maintained that policy and ended up in the future where almost no plant or animal born in space has been exposed to Earth diseases. Everything is completely safe to eat. Crops don't need pesticides or herbicides. There is virtually no disease. And then there's that damnable cesspit of every type of plague imaginable, the Earth, where every animal and plant has a parasite and 150 different things trying to kill it, all because the nasty things evolved along with the nice plants and animals. So activists start talking about it, and how the Earth is unclean and diseased, and the source of potential plagues that could wipe out humanity by getting loose and infecting all our space crops, space pets, and us. Schools start teaching the "Earth is nasty" curriculum. It becomes a cause. We can make the Earth new again by saving all the useful parts of the food chain, sterilizing it down to the subsurface nano-bacteria, and then returning all the blue-green algae, diatoms, lobsters, flounder, dolphins, grass, trees, sea lions, and giraffes. We run experiments on space habitats and grow confident the scheme will work. And then we blast the living fuck out of our home planet. Now suppose the people who come up with the scheme didn't get unanimous consent. Suppose they're actually coming from Mars or some other planet, burning with conviction that in the long term, their cause is righteous and scientifically sound. \ They're not wiping out a planet, they're wiping out diseases. Though individual animals will die, the useful species will be preserved and repopulate the Earth. Because all we really need is the organisms' DNA. So now you have two conflicting views. Destroy the Earth to make it a better place, free of parasites and diseases so it can no longer serve as a billion-year reservoir of every nasty twist nature came up with, and other people who think the mass extinction of all life on Earth, even if somewhat temporary, wouldn't be a good thing.
I think this is just an example of "writers writing about what they understand". They can understand a man committing treason for sex (it is a staple of lots of spy stories anyway) but they can't understand the "high concept" motives of someone like the original BG's Baltar. Seems like many writers suffer from a lack of imagination.
People rarely act on "high motives." The reason you can't have perfect characters in ANY fiction is that real people aren't perfect, and many people are deeply flawed in one way or another. If Baltar was acting on some weird fetish for destroying Caprica, he wouldn't be relatable. All of the characters on nuBSG are relatable for this reason, including Baltar, which is what makes watching it so compelling--you so want him to do the right thing, just for once, but he does what he wants, usually to save his own skin, and that's realistic. @Baba would have loved this thread
Perhaps, but what was the "high concept" motive for original Baltar. An example of what you describe would be Palpatine/Sidious, but I don't recall any real exploration of Baltar's motive.
IIRC in the original pilot "Saga of a Star World" in dialogue between the Cylon Imperious Leader and Baltar (just before his execution) Baltar claimed that the Cylons had agreed to spare his colony. And that humans were NOT to be exterminated but (his words) "Subjugated!. Under me!". All of which to me strongly implied that Baltar had some kind of fantasy that the Cylons were basically agreeing to be his "muscle" in seizing control of the 12 Colonies. By the way this is backed up by later interviews with John Calicos himself who speculated strongly that Baltar was mislead by the Cylons.
Of course he was misled by the Cylons! But that's not high concept -- they offered him something seductive in exchange for help, he complied, they double crossed him. It's the same story as we see with nuBSG Baltar, really, just some variation in the nitty gritty. High concept would be that he manipulates the Cylons to get something he wants, and damn the consequences.
That is what Baltar thought he was doing. Manipulating the Cylons into destroying his enemies among the humans.
Okay, this: No, just no. I saw the original in first-run, and even once I was able to get past "What's Pa Cartwright in a bathrobe doing in that cheesy spaceship?" I found the plots silly.
Yeah, I liked it when I was a Star Wars-crazed 12-year old, but it's painful to watch as a grownup. I do like the hardware designs, though.
