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Battlestar Galactica (2003)
An update that improves the original
(I'm not sure if there are spoilers here or not, so I checked the box as a precaution.) The original Battlestar Galactica was a movie and TV series that was very much a product of its time. It was a fantastic concept, unfortunately weighed down by the fashions (both literal and figurative) of the 1970's. Just as Star Trek benefited tremendously from its update and subsequent spin offs, Battlestar Galactica v2.0 has the potential to fulfill and surpass the expectations of both classic fans and current sci-fi connoisseurs.
The Sci-Fi Channel's original productions have been excellent where the budget allows -- witness Farscape and the two wonderful Dune miniseries. So when they announced the updating of Battlestar Galactica, I was anxious to see what they accomplished with it.
The resulting miniseries/pilot exceeded my expectations. It really constitutes more a rethinking of the entire approach rather than a reproduction. Still here is the original premise: Our machines race past us in intelligence, turn against us, and destroy humanity, forcing what is left of the human race to flee to the stars. Of the vast human fleet, only the Galactica evades destruction, gathering together a crazy quilt of surviving ships filled with the last 50,000 survivors. The resourceful Commander Adama cleverly leads the humans through their first non-defeat to escape to space.
Equally important is what has changed. The bizarre New-Agey names are gone, the villainous traitor Balthar has been transformed into the neurotic and mentally tormented Cylon expert Dr. Gaius Balthar. Boomer and Starbuck have changed genders (in a much more believable fashion than Dizzy between the book and movie versions of "Starship Troopers"). The Cylons have also changed -- they're human lookalikes, designed to infiltrate us and destroy us from the inside. As a character observes, "the last time we encountered the Cylons they looked like walking toasters", an obvious nod to the original concept. You might say that this is a cop-out: it's an obvious budgetary gimmick, they're too cheap to make real Cylons. On the other hand, the idea of the Cylons looking like us adds a heavy sense of paranoia to the proceedings. The enemies are not so obvious. An early gruesome scene on the home planet with a sexy Cylon infiltrator (Tricia Helfer playing a character named simply "Number 6") as well as the final cliffhanger scene, play this to dark perfection.
The original attack has also been significantly revised. Rather than a flat-out butt kicking, the humans fall prey (again) to their own technology by having all of their fighters and battle stars succumb to a Cylon computer virus. (It's worth noting that the term "virus" with regard to computers wasn't even coined until 5 years after the original TV movie, so this development makes even more sense.) Only the Galactica, an out of date ship currently used as a museum, has primitive enough electronics to be immune to the virus.
The cast, though mostly unknowns, is helmed by Edward James Olmos, who sports more than enough gravitas to make us forget completely about Lorne Green (rest his soul). Provided the series follows through on the pilot's promise, Olmos is set to join the ranks of Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, and William Shatner (as the movie Trek version of Kirk) as legendary starship captains in sci-fi lore. Olmos is utterly believable as Adama, and his exchange late in the movie with the President (also a believably hapless yet stoic Mary McDonnell as the 41st bureaucrat in line for the presidency after everyone else is incinerated at a conference) demonstrates the depth of character he brings to the role.
This is a dark, bleak movie, and it promises to be a dark series. But as Sci-Fi demonstrated with Farscape, they can do dark really well. This pilot TV movie is more than deserving of a DVD purchase -- and close attention to the upcoming series.
Contact (1997)
A good realization of Sagan's sole work of fiction
There's little doubt that fans of Carl Sagan were apprehensive yet hopeful over the prospect of Dr. Sagan's only work of fiction, Contact, being made into a movie. In the science community, the expectations were so high that the movie never really had a fair chance, and the average movie-goer might not buy everything that Sagan provides us in his story. Though flawed, Contact is a great sci-fi movie, and good science movie, and a loving enactment of Sagan's optimistic vision of the future.
The premise of the movie is based in one of Sagan's own initiatives, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The possibility of life on other planets and elsewhere in space was an obsession of Sagan's. He privately wished that we in fact had been visited by extraterrestrials, but was enough of a true scientist to reject the UFO enthusiast community wholesale. In Contact, Sagan spun a story about what would happen if we indeed received a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, what form it would take, and how we would react to it.
Jodie Foster is an excellent choice for Ellie Arroway, the optimistic radio astronomer who isn't far from a female analog of Sagan himself. Though Arroway runs into occasional ridicule, she is fortunate to spend much more of her time with supportive mentors. When the fateful day comes and a message is received from afar, she's there to make sense of it. The nature of that first message shakes everyone to their foundations -- was it a hoax? If not a hoax, why *this* message? Under the message is another message: instructions for how to build a device that will allow us to do....what? Travel there? Communicate with them? Nothing? Provide an entrée for a recipe from "To Serve Man"? (If you don't get the reference, check out the episode of The Twilight Zone of the same name.) Two groups rush to build the device, and Arroway's team falls behind. The rival group's contraption self-destructs, so only Arroway's project remains to see if the end product actually does something.
The movie's climax is 100 percent unadulterated eye candy. But ultimately, I was left unsatisfied by the movie's ending. Not only that, but the movie decides to take a pass on the mystical, numerological ending of the book. After all, Ellie is a scientist, not a trailer-park redneck. Her word should have meant a little more.
Contact is a good movie, and an important movie, and by science fiction standards, it's a great movie (a sad commentary on the effort put into sci-fi movies in general). It's not perfect, and it may leave you feeling a bit empty at the end, but it's still a worthwhile movie to see and a must-buy for Sagan devotees.
Cosmos (1980)
Simply the greatest science miniseries in TV history
Cosmos. Just saying the name evokes memories of science's best and most eloquent educator, Carl Sagan. By no means a slouch in the scientific field -- he was a planetary scientist who first hypothesized and presented the idea of "nuclear winter" -- Sagan will forever be known for a phrase he never said: "billions and billions" (it was actually die-hard Sagan fan Johnny Carson parodying his science idol). Make all the jokes you want about Sagan's plosive enunciation of "billions" (which he always did to make it distinct from "millions"), Sagan defined what makes great science television for a generation.
The 13 episodes of this Peabody and Pulitzer willing miniseries touch on nearly every science topic of importance: astronomy, cosmology, physics, biology, the mathematics of gigantic numbers, and relativity. It also indulges us in a targeted survey of science history, including sections on the Library of Alexandria, the birth of science experiment, the defeat of ancient Greek science by mysticism, and the lives of Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe (the original Odd Couple), James Goddard, and Edwin Hubble.
Episodes 1, "On the Shores of the Cosmic Ocean", and 13, "Who Speaks for Earth?", provide matching capstones for the other 11 volumes, which jump wildly from topic to topic. And yet there is a coherency across the entire run. Whether Sagan is describing conditions on the surface of Venus, the effects of relativity, or the futility of writing out a googolplex, Sagan is our patient, encouraging, engaging guide, making sense to the layman of complex scientific concepts. The script, written by Sagan and future wife Ann Druyan, educated and entertained. Only occasionally did Sagan's delivery approach pretentiousness, but his own enthusiasm for the topics effectively foils any from creeping in.
If you've read one of the Sagan biographies that emerged after his premature death in 1996, you'll know that one of the most effective and clever devices used in the series, the "Ship of the Imagination", was actually forced upon Sagan by executive producer Adrian Malone. This was one of the very few times that Sagan was wrong, because Malone's concept allowed us to step into cosmological situations much more believably than if we were presented simply with Sagan's exposition.
Although by all accounts the two men hated each other to the point of fisticuffs, Sagan and Malone's production surpassed all previous efforts at science documentary and continues to set the standard for all who have come since. Now that the Sagan family's feud with Turner has been resolved, it is now available on DVD.
A previous reviewer wrote, a plain simple "wow" just isn't good enough. Cosmos is, by the judgment of any person on this planet, one of the top 5 television productions in history.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)
An unexpectedly fulfilling series
Of all the television shows devised as spinoffs from movies, perhaps none was met with more trepidation and doubt than "Buffy", the movie of which was a rather silly Kristy Swanson vehicle that did not receive critical acclaim. The original screenplay by Joss Whedon was, he claims, subsequently tweaked by so many people during its development that the real tone he was attempting to set was lost. So, taking matters into his own hands, Whedon developed a TV show that would be harder, darker....and funnier. It's not an overstatement that "Buffy" pleasantly surprises everyone who watches it, and is one of the most critically underrated TV series ever.
The series is packed with veteran talent: Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy), Alyson Hannigan (Willow), and Seth Green (Oz) are long-time child actors vaulting eloquently into adulthood, and acclaimed British stage actor Anthony Head fits the role of Buffy's 'watcher', Giles, to a tee. It is a tribute to Whedon and his crew of writers and directors that even acting newcomers Nicholas Brendon (Xander, whose identical twin brother appeared with him in a 5th season episode) and David Boreanaz (Angel) give good acting turns and add to the depth of their characters, the latter of whom did so well he got his own series.
Any fantasy TV show, let alone one involving comedy and vampires, is terribly risky. Over seven seasons, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" has slowly received the critical acclaim and viewer attention it deserves. It has set the standard by which all past and future shows of the genre will be judged.