Lens flare alert!
Get your JJ Abrams the hell away from this franchise!
I love the noughties remake of Battlestar Galactica. Like, firstborn-son love it. I don't necessarily revisit individual episodes as often as I do with Doctor Who or Supernatural, but that's mainly down to being incapable of leaving it at one; if I watch 'Pegasus', you better believe I'm watching the rest of season 2 marathon-style. And if I'm not working tomorrow, season 3 as well.
There's not any one thing that really makes or breaks the show; it's the simple fact that every single creative element behind it gave 110% and found a common path upon which they could push themselves as workers whilst still committing to the same singular goal. The writers shake things up so hard so frequently it's a wonder anyone can stand up on the Galactica without falling over. The directors pull you from one end of the show's world to the other fast enough to lose your breath and yet still make every scene, every development, crystal clear. The cast give career-best performances all around, and I have never cared for an ensemble in any form of fiction as much as I did for these assorted officers, pilots, politicians, sawbones, religious nuts, kooky lawyers and meat robots. The production design team crafted fleets of spacecraft of all shapes and sizes, built interiors where no space is wasted and every single element has a purpose, AND decided that wasn't enough and invented the most eerily-minimalist interiors they could for the Cylon baseships and their computers controlled by puddles of water because God magic. Bear McCreary's musical cues brought me to the verge of tears repeatedly, from the haunting Six theme to the big jungle percussion for space dogfights and his sparing, selective use of the '70s Galactica title music. AND AND, Tricia Helfer was in it and...ah...Tri...
triciaaaaaaaa aaaa
:D
wat
...What? Oh. Um, yeah, so, it's the best TV show ever, and at least one person at the Network Formerly Known As Sci-Fi Channel recognises that, as ever since the show ended (happily on its own terms), they've been trying to continue it via spin-offs. First came Caprica, which was intelligent and well-acted and often dramatic and absolutely not at all what I wanted to see, sadly. Whilst I applaud Ronald D. Moore and company for trying something markedly different, the show we wound up with was so far removed from Galactica that the only thing connecting the two was that one robot Cylon with the girl's mind in its head. Everything else was all corporate espionage and stuff from The Sopranos with more pronounced class warfare. Though I wish it had lasted longer so that it could have organically found the time to complete its many long-running plotlines, I wasn't surprised by its cancellation.
Then came Blood & Chrome...except it didn't. Well, not really, but...it's complicated.
See, Blood & Chrome was designed to be almost an apology to the fans for Caprica. We would be back in the familiar turf of human/Cylon war, the Galactica itself would appear, there would be Vipers, Raiders, nukes, Centurions, everything. Everything that...was scrapped or sold off to charity after the show ended and would cost far too much to replace. Woops. But not to worry, because some bright sparks at the VFX company had taken full 3D scans of all the old sets, and thus it was decided to shoot virtually all of the new show's pilot on greenscreen before digitally adding the backgrounds in post. Sounds complicated. And expensive. In fact, it was so complicated and expensive that 'SyFy' (UGH) cancelled the series before anyone had actually seen the pilot, only to later let it appear on the Machinima channel on YouTube...except apparently it was always supposed to be a web series, but...y'know what, I don't know, this makes no sense. Can we just talk about the show itself now?
The Plot: In the midst of the First Cylon War, William Adama (Luke Pasqualiano) - a young, reckless jock pilot - has just been posted to his first assignment aboard the Battlestar Galactica, where much to his annoyance he's stuck flying one of the less sexy Raptor transports alongside ECO Coker Fasjovik (Ben Cotton), who's more concerned with the imminent end of his tour of duty than taking the fight to the Cylons. Their objective: transport doctor Becca Kelly (Lili Bordán) to an unnamed location within enemy space and await further instructions. Without further questions, and ignoring Coker's complaints, Adama takes off, little knowing how dangerous this mission will grow to be - or how much he still has to learn about the nature of war...
Just to be clear - there are ROBOTS up in here.
The Good: It's Battlestar. Insofar as it feels like it; the ships, the costumes, the music, it's all comfortingly familiar and tickles that part of my brain that enjoys relatively recent nostalgia. Even beyond that, though, everything has that same solid feel of belonging that Galactica always played on; everything is in its place for a reason, no space wasted needlessly, a uniform feel to a uniform-driven world.
Our two primary leads, Pasqualiano and Cotton, aquit themselves very well in their roles. Coker is something of an unforgiving part; we've all seen the 'grouchy veteran waiting for his retirement' trope before, but nevertheless Cotton infuses it with a soul all his own. Part of this might be down to the fact that Coker isn't actually that old - he's just fed up, and believably so. Pasqualiano, meanwhile, arrives with the weight of at least two previous Williams Adama (in this continuity) weighing on his shoulders, and smartly chooses not to kowtow to either Edward James Olmos' titanic performance or Nico Cortez' brief but impressive appearance in BSG: Razor - something which could have easily made his work feel like little more than impersonation. Instead, we get a young hotshot Adama that, if nothing else, explains why he later cared so much for Starbuck...because he virtually was Starbuck growing up. Suffice to say, both actors share a very easy chemistry too, even when playing hostile to one another.
Though it's perhaps a bit top-heavy in this regard (I'll come back to that), the action beats are well-thought-out and exceptionally crafted, doubly so given the limits placed on the series' production. Another thing I missed during Caprica, frickin' space dogfights, which B&C delivers. Seeing the older Cylon Raiders back is a joy, and the addition of a rear gun on the Raptors finally justifies why you'd ever bother bringing those things into an actual battle (previous strategy was 'do 1 missile strike, then hang around until they get shot').
It's also nice to see the designers weren't afraid to bring new ideas to the established Galactica universe. Mainly I'm giving props for finally confirming that the human military does in fact have capital ships that aren't Battlestars, with the 'phantom fleet' and the Osiris in particular showing a wider visual range than 'just the Galactica with bells on' and still appearing consistent with what already exists. The new Cylons are also a welcome addition, though I've seen some fans claiming otherwise...no idea what their problem is; the Cylons are an originally-machine species, of course they're going to continually change over time, just the same as how you're not using the same computer you were 3 years ago. It's entirely believable that they'd tinker continuously with the established Centurion design to make models like the 'Mandible-Mouth' Cylon (above picture) or non-humanoid models like the 'Cython' snake-thing, either to adapt to different environments/tactics or to further their quest to embrace the image of the One True God. At the same time, of course they'd still keep the earlier designs in place, like the Guardian Centurions in Razor and Daybreak, since they'd need to preserve resources during wartime. There's also a believable sense of devolution between Mandible-Mouth and the Centurions of the main series; Mandibles is more advanced, but when the Cylons finally cracked the 'skin-jobs' development they wouldn't need for their expendable frontline robots to feel pain or whatever, so they backtracked to a less-humanised model for efficiency's sake.
Tricia voice cameo goooooooo.
The themes of the original series also survive the transition, mostly. There isn't a lot of time in many of the episodes for pondering - it's too tightly paced for that - but the exchange in the finale between Adama and the Galactica commander about the nature of the mission is fittingly grim and eye-opening, not to mention in-keeping with the parent series' frequent apathy toward propaganda and sugar-coating.
The Bad: I really hate picking on any one member of a cast, but I wasn't really feeling Lili Bordán as Becca. Not because she had the misfortune to share a name with my least-favourite Tekken character...seriously, she could be Nina Bordán and I'd still be kind of iffy. She's just a bit too stiff, even for someone who's keeping secrets. She has moments of flair, usually when she's put on edge - like when Mandibles is stalking her in the kitchen, or the point in the Cylon relay base where everybody has guns out and it's like Reservoir Dogs all of a sudden - but she just doesn't project the necessary warmth or hurt otherwise for her eventual betrayal to have much of an impact.
Sticking with the cast - and this is by far the dumbest nitpick I have - the appearance of actors from the Galactica series here, playing different characters from their original roles, was very distracting. Not as much as, I don't know, Jamie Bamber appearing as Not Apollo - there's nothing on that scale - but I can't see Ty Olsson in a BSG series of any kind and not think he's playing Captain Kelly, then be weirded out when he can't possibly be Kelly.
Going back to that thing I said about the action, though we do get plenty of it, it's kind of loaded a bit too heavily towards the start of the series, whilst the last two or three episodes are comparatively lacking in kaboom. This did make the finale ring a little disappointing to me, although that might have also been due to the delayed release of each episode in its web format. Maybe when I get the BR and rewatch it as one whole movie, maybe that effect will be reduced.
Oh, effects, right. Now I wanna be clear here - I am not saying the FX people behind B&C did bad work. Bear in mind they had to essentially create every single 'set' or environment by themselves, plus robot Cylons, plus spaceships, plus probably explosions and such. That's one hell of a workload across a 90-minute feature, and it's to their credit that things look as good as they do. Even so, sometimes the actors just don't 'blend in' with the CG backdrops like they're supposed to, and it's a hard thing for the eye to ignore. I don't know exactly what the problem is; it seems to more be a case of light-spilling on the actors than any issue with the backdrops themselves, even if some do come as videogame-quality.
And one last thing - lens flare. Stop it. Just stop it. I don't know what it's supposed to accomplish - it does not make things look 'nice' or 'futuristic' or 'full of space shit because we're in space bro', it's just big white-blue lines smeared across the screen, blocking us from seeing more details. It was annoying in Star Trek '09, it was annoying in Super 8, it was annoying even when minimally employed in Captain America: The First Avenger, and I refuse to believe the success of those movies was down to this one effect. Here, all it does is make things from the parent series Galactica look less like they come from Galactica, which cannot have been the point. STOP IT.
I will never grasp the purpose of those giant ribbed collars,
but they do look positively darling.
The Verdict: Blood & Chrome feels like a fan project made good. It doesn't so much expand on the mythology of Galactica as add a bit to the start that we all could've just assumed went down the way it did anyway, and it trades heavily on the audience's fondness for its parent series; but at the same time it's made so well that you can't help but appreciate it for what it is instead of lamenting what it's not. Other than an excuse for more Galactica I don't know what it was ever really trying to accomplish, nor do I know what it could conceivably reveal or develop if it ever evolves into a full-fledged series...but I do kinda want to see it grow, even if all we learn is how Adama's voice got so scratchy or where he learned about rolling hard 6s in a universe where we've never seen anyone use dice for any sort of game. In any case, I salute the cast, writers, directors, producers, and especially those overworked CG boffins, for taking me back to one of my favourite fictional worlds and reminding me why I love it. 8 out of 10.
Blood and Chrome is currently up for viewing on the Machinima Prime YouTube channel and will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray in January 2013.
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