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Best Sci-Fi Space Battles?
ardor asks: "Recently, while watching Babylon5, I wondered about the space dogfights in popular sci-fi outings. I find the space battle in Star Wars VI to be still one of the best in existence, and some battles from B5 are amazing too. But where are more good space fights? I've found them to be surprisingly rare. Most are very short, or not very big (less than 5 ships). I know, large & complex scenes are very expensive, nevertheless I mean some with tons of small interceptor & bomber ships, large/huge cruisers, stations, and so forth. Have you watched a really awesome space battles, and if so, what show/movie was it?"
not big but good: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn :) (produced by ILM no less)
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big but not that great: one of the last episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (don't remember which one in particular) - yes, you can stuff too many ships on screen at once!
while not a fight per se, it was still funny: the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Worf slides from one quantum universe to another, and finally the Enterprise finds he hole that caused Worf to start sliding... 1500 Enterprise D's anyone? (and yes, one was semi-hostile and blew up another semi-hostile one - that was a small fight)
just getting silly and out there: the orbital fight at the beginning of the lost in space movie <shudder>
finally, while not in a movie, there were a couple of good orbital flights in Halo: The Fall of Reach - it's same that we had to loose Keyes in The Flood/Combat Evolved
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I'll not comment on the practicality of such battle tactics, nor on the movie's total disregard for the book, but Starship Troopers had some interesting special effects during the assault on Klendathu--the bug homeworld. Seeing the Rodger Young and other transports lumbering about, colliding stupidly, and eating bug plasma was pretty cool--a good example of what happens when close formations of stupid people in big ships blindly fly over excellent AAA.
Ack. If they'd just paid a little attention to Heinlein's book. Sigh.
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Book space battles are always better than movie battles. The stuff in the Forever war was some of the coolest battle gear.
The chase in 'Protector' by Larry Niven was pretty cool too.
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DS9 had some awesome battles towards the end of the series, during the Dominion War, and although they were often short by most people's standards, they were still pretty long action sequences for a Trek.
B5, obviously. You mentioned it already, but really, the battles in B5 are some of the best that I've ever seen, especially when coupled with the build-up to the battle provided by the storyline. "There is only one man who has ever survived a battle with a Minbari fleet. That man is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, you will leave." (Technically not a battle, but there's one shortly afterwards)
Battlestar Galactica had some cheesy battles that were actually pretty good for their time.
The Wing Commander movie had some good space combat in it, it's really too bad they felt the need to lobotomize the plot into some sickening Hollywood "Ooh Blair is one with the universe and has magic powers" tripe. Really not a bad movie though if you go take a walk for a minute anytime you hear the word "pilgrim".
Finally, as long as I'm talking space shows: Go buy Firefly. It has almost no space combat (seeing as the Firefly doesn't have any weapons to speak of) but it's got the whole "no sound in a vacuum" thing going for it. Besides, it's truly excellent. If you enjoy the depth and intelligence of the characters and story in B5, you'll like Firefly too.
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