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Babylon 5 Theatrical Movie Falls Through
duck2ducks writes "According to a post from JMS, the Babylon 5 feature film has been cancelled. This is sad news indeed for all fans of one of the best sci-fi stories ever produced." From Straczynski's post: "In the end, however, the deal could be put together, and it did not
look as if that was going to change at any point in the foreseeable
future. So the option has reverted, and to all intents and purposes,
the project has dead ended."
The nice thing about Babylon 5, was that it had a complete story line before the first movie was even made. That means a completely intermixed story. The exact opposite from most other sci-fi shows that were out there at the time. Something that happens in the first episode actually means something, in one of the last episodes. (Londo's dream of how he will die.) And that is just the most obvious link. I for one had hoped that Crusade would have picked up where B5 left off, but it died a rather quick death. The movies were always good and it would have been great to see a new addition to the line.
What's a sci-fi movie geek to do??
Ok, we got Episode III coming out, but I don't think I'm alone in saying that my expectations for Star Wars have been decidedly jaded in recent years.
I guess it'll have to be all about stuff like War of the Worlds, which I personally have very high hopes for after seeing some preview stuff, and moreover, Hitchhiker's Guide, which will either be the greatest sci-fi comedy since Space Balls (if not, dare I say, better?) or else it will be despised and insulted to levels of previously untold fury. I mean, it's the same problem faced by Peter Jackson for LotR. You have such a truly great literary work, and you have to turn it into film, carefully balancing the unwashed masses who've never read the book on one side, and the die-hard purists who've memorized it line-by-line on the other.
... it's understandable, it's 2005 now, B5 is OLD. So much has come after it. In a world that contains Farscape and Firefly, B5 does look childish, dated and a bit hackneyed. However, you have to remember that when this first came out it really was groundbreaking sci-fi. Most of what came after owes it a big debt.
So, you probably won't get it now. It's too late. If you'd watched it in 1994, you'd get it.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
I like the story and ideas, and the production is secondary to me. I recognize that a lot of the acting is pretty bad, and the dialogure isn't great in a lot of spots, but that's just not what I'm watching for.
I'd rather see good ideas poorly portrayed than bad ideas expertly portrayed.
Since Richard Biggs is dead, any new Babylon 5 production wouldn't quite have the same aura as the TV series. Dr. Franklin was a strong supporting character, whose presence would be sorely missed.
I'm guessing it's a matter of expectations. Pause for a moment and consider every other science fiction TV series you've ever seen. In fact, we could probably throw in science fiction films too. There are some exceptions (and they are generally wildly popular, relatively speaking), but for the most part none of them sport acting or dialogue the least bit better than Babylon 5. Many are, in fact, far worse. In that respect B5 is par for the course for science fiction TV shows with regard to the issues of acting, writing and directing. And then you have that long 5 season story arc, which makes it stand out from the others. That's enough to gain serious attention from the sort of people (slashdot readers for instance) who will watch anything branded as sci-fi that comes on the television.
In essence B5 used that long arc (and the resulting back references to episodes from a season or more before) to provide a sense of character development (the characters to actually change through the course of the 5 seasons), and more importantly character depth through context (i.e. through all those back references). No, this sort of character depth is not a substitute for good per episode writing and good acting, but the relative depth and context was something that no other science fiction show was offering at the time. It is no surprise it developed a following (amongst geeks).
Jedidiah.
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Believe it or not, Slashdot is a forum where readers are occasionally allowed to disagree. :-)
To appreciate "Babylon 5", it perhaps helps to have been there when it first aired. This was ten years ago, when ST:TNG was an uncategorical success by any measure, ST:DS9 was well underway with plenty of funding, and studios were jumping on the sci-fi bandwagon left and right.
After several years of ST:TNG, we get B5 -- a somewhat gritty, dirtier version of the future which resembles our present world a heck of a lot better than Roddenbery's universe. The aliens are more alien. The technology follows the known laws of physics (well, aside from hyperspace). And the effects? Well, they may look substandard today, but at the time that was cutting-edge CGI and it was being used on a weekly television program. In fact, JMS was proud of saying that his show would come in consistently under budget because of the cost savings over model-based special effects.
It was a breath of fresh air for sci-fi fans who were tired of the sanitized Star Trek universe and wanted something more realistic now. On top of that, it employed a multi-season story arc which, despite the kinks thrown in by actors leaving and the fifth season almost getting cancelled, worked incredibly well and was a radical approach to television. (To look at it another way, of course, is to say the departing actors and near-death of season 5 illustrates exactly why television shows usually approach each season open-ended.)
And what a story -- it looked like just aliens fighting it out diplomatically and Earth getting caught in the middle. Instead we get galactic-scale alien civilizations stretching millenia back into time, alien religious prophecies coming true, a conspiracy to take over Earth's government and implement fascism in its stead, telepaths running their own plan for controlling everything, all while this little tin can orbiting Epsilon 3 at the @$$-end of space is dealing with union strikes, budgetary constraints, refugees from alien wars, and the occasional drug bust.
Simply put, it was the kind of thing we knew we'd never see in Star Trek. DS9 came close to it (partly because it was, intentionally or not, borrowing heavily from JMS's ideas), but B5 was there first. Roddenberry's edict was basically that Starfleet and humanity in general appear pristine and perfect to project hope for the future; JMS declared that humans in the future would be just like humans today, and despite that (or because of it) we'd still grow to be masters of the galaxy in the millenia to come.
Oh, and there's also Ivanova. Regardless what you think about the acting, it's impossible not to like Ivanova.
Oh, and as a postscript: despite what I said about respecting others' opinions, and regardless of your experience in the field, if you think Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar is an ineffective actor, you're just not paying attention.