Battlestar vs Battlestar

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31265759.post-41404400661891936552007-08-06T11:37:00.000-07:002007-08-06T11:55:19.945-07:00Battlestar vs BattlestarThe curious thing about remakes and "re-imaginings" [surely the most obnoxious term to come out of Hollywood in the last few years] is that for reasons that may never be fully understood by we mortals, the Hollywood suits choose to remake films and TV shows that were great to begin with and didn't need another version. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974], Black Christmas [1974], Halloween [1978], The Twilight Zone [1959-1964], The Outer Limits [1963-1965] - they were all fantastic to begin with. Did we really need someone to come along and make an inferior copy? Surely it would make more sense to revisit a production that showed some promise but which, for whatever reason, ended up never quite achieving its potential? That's exactly what happened with Battlestar Galactica and look what a fine job the remake team made of that. The original Battlestar, broadcast on ABC between September 1978 and April 1979, was one of the earliest and most high profile examples of the effect that Star Wars [1977] was having on popular culture in the late 1970s. Lucas' space fantasy blockbuster revolutionised the way that film and TV producers thought about science fiction - prior to Star Wars, 70s American science fiction cinema produced the likes of Colossus - The Fobin Project [1970], The Andromeda Strain [1971], The Omega Man [1971], Dark Star [1974], Phase IV [1974] and A Boy and His Dog [1975]; even less successful efforts like Silent Running [1972] and Logan's Run [1976] at least made an effort to appear intelligent and look like they'd been made for grown up audiences. Post Star Wars, juvenile space opera was largely the order of the day [the likes of Alien [1979] and Blade Runner [1982] notwithstanding], with the likes of The Black Hole [1979], Battle Beyond the Stars [1980] and Flash Gordon [1980] dictating the way that science fiction was perceived by the general public. Television got in early - Glen A. Larson was a veteran TV writer with credits that included episodes for The Fugitive [1963-1967], Twelve O'Clock High [1964-1967] and It Takes a Thief [1968-1970] before turning producer in 1971 with the hugely successful comedy western Alias Smith and Jones [1971 - 1973]. Always a shrewd operator, he was quick off the mark and was the first TV producer to notice the seismic effect that Star Wars was having at the box office. Cannily deciding that this was the start of something big, he pitched his idea for a small screen equivalent and Battlestar Galactica was born - though Larson long maintained that the series was actually conceived as long ago as the late 60s when it was known as Adam's Ark. Larson originally saw Battlestar as a series of expensive one-off TV movies and indeed what eventually became the pilot film was deemed good enough to get a theatrical release outside the States and reached big screens in its homeland after the series had begun broadcasting. It ran into controversy the minute the first footage was seen, when Twentieth Century Fox, who had bankrolled Star Wars, sued Universal [the studio who had picked up the tab for the very costly Battlestar] claiming that it infringed on its copyrights in no less than 34 distinct ways. But Universal, Larson and ABC weathered the storm [Universal counter-sued, claiming that Star Wars had lifted much from its Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials from the 30s as well as more recent product like the aforementioned Silent Running] and the series went on to enjoy some success before declining audiences and rising costs put paid to the show in 1979. The two-part story The Living Legends was stitched together to form the 1978 TV movie Mission Galactica The Cylon Attack which was released to cinemas in Europe and Japan and a dreadful revival series, Galactica 1980 limped through 10 episodes before it and we were put out of our miseries - a further cut and shunt job was created out of several episodes and barely bothered box offices around the world under the title Conquest of the Earth. The original incarnation was very far from perfect - like so much small screen television, it looked cheap away from its excellent effects sequences [most of which were repeated so often throughout the episodes that they ended up feeling like old friends] and insisted that all alien races should wear silly diaphanous gowns, ridiculous uniforms and strange hairstyles. The scripts became increasingly juvenile as it wore on [and they were hardly mature to begin with] and prolonged exposure only highlighted just how slight and uninteresting the characters really were. However, what Battlestar had - and one suspects that this is why it remains so popular today - was a mythology, a complex and fairly consistent back story that few American genre TV shows had tried up until that time. Even Star Trek [1966-1969] didn't quite manage the epic feeling of the story that underpinned Battlestar which ironically bore resemblance to Trek creator Gene Rodenberry's desire to create a "Wagon Train to the stars" than Trek ever did. Drawing heavily from Greek, Roman and Biblical mythologies, Battlestar had a fantastic base on which to build but the episodes that followed the pilot became increasingly formulaic and banal and failed to realise that potential. When the show was "re-magined" [ugh…] in 2003, it kept much of the epic sweep of the original show but gave the show a harder edge, one informed less by classical mythology than by the events of 11 September 2001 and its fall out. Both shows used the same basic, intriguing premise - the last surviving ships of the Twelve Colonies following a devastating war with the robotic Cylons, flee in a vulnerable convoy searching for the almost mythical lost colony known as Earth. But the post-Millennial Battlestar departed from its parent show in many other ways and its these changes that makes the remake, for some of us at least, so much better than the original. The crew of the original Galactica were meant to be "the best of the best" but, the new crew are a flawed and very human group who are simply doing the best they can and barely scraping through; the characters are far more appealing and far more identifiable than the unconvincing stock "sci fi" characters that populated the first incarnation; and the Cylons are no longer an alien race [there are apparently no alien races in the universe explored by the new Galactica crew] but human technology that has rebelled and is now bent on slaughtering its creators. Perhaps the remake's Cylons are its greatest disappointment. Those huge, clunky machines from the original are something of a genre design classic and while I have no argument or issue of any kind with Tricia Helfer as Number Six, the new Cyclons themselves seem a bit… well, just wrong really. Not quite as iconic. Which may explain why the producers decided to go with the notion of the humanoid Cylons, twelve different models that resemble humans so closely that it's impossible to detect them. The notion that these humanoid Cylons [an idea first used, briefly, in an episode of Galactica 1980] have infiltrated the Galactica and that the identity of five of them remained unknown even to the Cylons themselves until the climax of Season Three, forms the greater part of the ongoing storyline in the remake. Which version of Battlestar Galactica you're going to enjoy the most is largely going to depend on your taste in science fiction - if you go for flamboyant, action-oriented space opera then the original is pretty well unbeatable. If you want darker, more character-driven drama then it's the remake all the way. Neither incarnation is entirely flawless but both have much to enjoy, from the grandiose sweep of the original's mythology to the gritty machinations of the remake. Battlestar Galactica is the way all remakes should work - take an original that had a serviceable idea but wasn't as well executed as it could have been and do something fresh with it. Not taking something was great to begin with and screwing it up. Not that anyone in Hollywood is likely to be listening… KEVIN LYONSKevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09058994682929578573noreply@blogger.com