Babylon 5 May Finally Get a Big-Screen Debut

Ars Technica reports that "J. Michael Straczynski will shortly begin work on a rebooted big-screen version of his 1990s sci-fi TV series [ Babylon 5]." From the article: According to JMS's latest announcement, the new script will be targeted at a 2016 theatrical release and will be a reboot of the series rather than a continuation. This is necessary for both dramatic and practical purposes—the series was in regular production from 1994-1998, and the cast has simply aged too far to credibly play themselves again during the series’ main timeline. Additionally, several of the foundational cast members — Michael O'Hare, Andreas Katsulas, Richard Biggs, and Jeff Conaway — have passed away. ... The movie rights to the Babylon 5 property remain in JMS's hands, but the creator is hopeful that this time around, Warner Bros. will choose to finance the film instead of passing on it. Nonetheless (at least according to TV Wise), JMS is prepared to fund the movie through his own production company if necessary — something that wasn't a possibility ten years ago — suggesting that B5 will in fact come to the big screen at last.

Comments

And so it begins...

[I'm just joshin]

The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.

Re: And so it begins...

[Z00L00K]

At least he had a good story on the TV series, which really was important. A lot of the CGI effects were at the time decent but today they wouldn't measure up. At least the CGI effects were in most cases only backdrops, so it didn't really matter that they weren't fully realistic. A good thing was that it held stories within the grand story.

The story itself did leave a lot of threads to follow outside the station with several untold stories. The technomages are still a bit of a mystery, who are they actually, and what were their origins?

Gideon: I thought you said you never hold a grudge.
Galen: Well, I don't. I have no surviving enemies... at all.

Re: And so it begins...

[Shakrai]

The story jumped the shark at the end. I'm sorry, as much as I loved Babylon 5, it simply doesn't stand the test of time when you watch it in your 30s rather than as a teenager. It was awesome at first, a character driven Sci-Fi show, and then Sheridan came back from the dead with a Messiah Complex. Delenn always had one of course, even the Vorlons were smart enough to know that (watching Jack the Ripper torture this character flaw out of her was priceless, too bad it didn't take for the long term) as they set her up as their Emissary or whatever the hell she was. What really irked me was the human characters betraying their oath to Earth and going native after they had kicked Clark out of office. The Whitestar fleet or at least one example thereof should have been turned over to Earthforce R&D after the war, but that would required Sheridan to surrender power, so of course it didn't happen.

There's also the complete mess that was Season 5, though here I cut JMS some slack because he was kind of screwed when it looked like the show was getting the axe. The most important piece of back story was pretty damned stupid, the Minbari have thousands of years in space but start a war of annihilation (a pathetic one at that, only 250,000 deaths in two years of war, JMS needs to read about the Eastern Front....) over a botched first contact? Then they stop the war because of some religious nonsense?

In fairness the show did have highlights, Garibaldi was the best human character I think (he was Babylon 5's Chief O'Brien) flawed in every way and very easy to relate to. Londo and G'Kar never jumped the shark, their respective stories stand the test of time. Even the stupid parts (the Earth-Minbari War) had highlights, the President's speech towards the end of "In The Beginning" still chokes me up when I watch it, and the way JMS wove all of the stories together was amazing.

Re: And so it begins...

[lgw]

So, wait, you're upset that the characters were flawed? Aliens acted in ways that made little sense? That's what made the show good - no one was perfect, the "good guys" did stupid shit too, and not everyone seemed rational. I liked it.

But yeah, season 5 had little to offer.

For me the show's attraction was watching Andreas Katsulas, Peter Jurasik, and Stephen Furst playing against one another, and the arcs of their characters. Londo discovering morality too late to do anything but suffer for his sins, G'Kar discovering what it means to be a religious leader (some of JMSs best writing IMO), and Vir showing that even in the most corrupt society, a strong moral compass serves you well in the long run.

Re: And so it begins...

[mrbester]

The CGI was groundbreaking and a great deal more than just "backdrops". Every ship, planet, piece of debris, weapons fire as well as the interior of various parts of the station was made on *Amigas* with zero model shots. When they had enough money for a small render farm they could create large space battles in real time.

They kept the details secret even though big names like ILM and Paramount wanted to know how the hell they did it with so little equipment and a shoestring budget (we didn't see the battle of Wolf 359, only the aftermath and even that was a few years later because it was too expensive to make). They released old methods to the big studios on a seasonal basis: Mars Attacks used Season 2 quality, ST:Voyager used Season 4.

Yes, the effects look dated. Because they are. But no one else could do what they did 20 years ago.

Re: And so it begins...

[CanadianMacFan]

If you want to know about the technomages then read the books about them. There is a trilogy by Jeanne Cavelos. Most of the books in the series are pretty good and fill in the gaps that were left by the series.

Re: And so it begins...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Except that the series jumped the shark when Sherdian came back from the dead, which was always part of the arc.

FWIW, I never saw it that way. With the powerful races that are in play by that point in the show, it needed someone from the younger races to do something that appears miraculous from our perspective to put us in the same league and make the final outcome to the main plot arc credible. What happened to Sheridan was that something, and it was clear from well before the critical event that the older races knew and understood things about what was happening that the younger races in the show and, by extension, we as the viewers did not, so personally I didn't find it either out of character or a random deus ex machina twist.

Season 5 is best viewed as a collection of disparate standalone stories, of which there are actually a few redeeming ones.

There I definitely agree. JMS didn't get to finish things quite the way he'd hoped, with the potential cancellation after season 4 obviously causing some reordering and early resolution of major plotlines, and things like losing a major cast member for related reasons that they couldn't fix in time when they did get the green light for season 5. However, a few of the individual episodes in season 5, particularly the ones that looked at the station and characters we had become so familiar with from a very different perspective, were some of the best single episodes of the whole series IMHO. There's a great little moment at the end of "A View from the Gallery", where something happens just in time, and it puts the often grand themes and seemingly awesomely powerful characters we normally see in the show in a very different light.

I wonder whether a reboot of the main series is the best way to go, though. It's hard to believe anyone could play characters like G'Kar and Londo with the brilliant individual performances and wonderful chemistry of the original actors. I can watch the new Star Trek films and enjoy a big space fight with the best of them, but I don't see Kirk and Spock, I see a different ship, a different crew, and a very different (read: Hollywood) style. It's more like ST:TNG compared to ST:TOS, a familiar environment but different characters and stories. I'm not sure trying to retell the original B5 story with a bigger screen, a bigger budget, bigger SFX, and none of the original magic is a winning move (although if there's anyone who could pull something like that off, JMS would be the one, and if they manage some exceptional casting as well then it might be worth watching).

Re: And so it begins...

[kenwd0elq]

As somebody who got INTO Babylon 5 in his 40's, I disagree; Babylon 5 was the best program on TV ever. (Barring, of course, the hot mess that resulted from the on-again/off-again cancellation of Season 5.) There were a few discontinuous episodes in Season 1, but seasons 2-4 were like old soap operas; you didn't dare miss an episode, or you wouldn't be able to catch up.

Even though I generally despise "reboots" of old favorite stories, I'm glad that JMS is doing it, and I wish him the best of luck in it.

Re: And so it begins...

[Antique Geekmeister]

Part of the "jumping the shark" was due to money craziness, and the problems when core actors decide they need to do other things with their career. The switch of captains was an enormous problem for fans and the story line, but we'd come to terms with it. The switch of first officers as well, was crippling.

The reboot of Star Trek was, admittedly, a failure. It lacked Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future as a better place as a more mature place and time with a frontier that tested and showed people who'd learned to engage frontiers with the hard-won wisdom they'd learned, who were actually making the galaxy a better place by sharing that wisdom But I was personally very pleased with the "Enterprise" series as an attempt to restart the series in an earlier period and recapture the exploration of a less mature series.

And for Star Trek/Babylon 5 comparisons, there can only be the Deep Space 9/Babylon 5 comparison. Anyone who didn't see parallels simply wasn't paying attention, and it was fascinating, as fans, to see how much better of a storyline Baboylon 5 was, and how much having a larger studio and a larger budget and franchise was able to help Deep Space 9. I really found myself wishing that Paramount, JMS, and the remainders of Gene Roddenberry's core crew and estate could have worked something out for Babylon 5 to have been told in the Star Trek universe with the larger budgets and resources.

I'm forced to admit that as a fan, I was delighted and thrilled to see Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, renowned as Gene Roddenberry's supportive wife, as Nurse Chapel and Lwaxana Troi and the voice of all the computers in Star Trek, pop up as the wife of the emperor in Babylon 5. It was wonderful to see the woman, herself, show her support of the excellent work at Babylon 5 by appear in a small bit fascinating role.

And Walter Koenig's hop from roles as Chekov in Star Trek to Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 was... well, you have to go watch the shows to understand the _completely_ different role Walter Koenig plays, and to applaud the acting and the writing that created it.

Re: And so it begins...

[marsu_k]

Regarding the Sinclair -> Sheridan switch (which I didn't mind, I never particularly cared for Sinclair), there was a quite good reason for it.

Re: And so it begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt. The pilot was made on Toasters, yes. The series was made on a render farm of NT workstations. Then somewhere around season three, they started compositing in some practical FX with the digital (improved explosions). There was no "secret", it was simply very good use of Lightwave, and there was no "real time"-- the CGI was rendered one frame at a time, and assembled / composited on digital tape. The primary benefit was cost-- Build one Hyperion class heavy cruiser, swap out the name plate texture, now you've got another... duplicate it a few times across the screen, create an Omega class destroyer, duplicate it a few times (and during "Severed Dreams", get the name plates wrong at least once), throw in a few dozen Star Furies-- you've got an Epic Space Battle-- whereas the model guys are shooting the same scene over and over and over and moving things around by hand. CGI made it faster and cheaper.

Paramount, and specifically the Star Trek crowd, insisted that CGI wasn't good enough, and they would only use model shots... well, that, and the computer generated stuff ILM filmed at fantastic expense for the first season of ST:TNG. One of their complaints was the harshness of shadows in space due to the lack of atmospheric scattering-- which is accurate, but looks jarring.

Foundation Imaging (the wiki page is badly flawed) had among it's team Ron Thornton (designed among other things the White Star, if I recall), an old hand at special effects-- he did a lot of work during Peter Davison's era on Doctor Who.

Then Foundation Imaging and B5 parted ways at the end of season three, and Doug Netter set up a company to do the CGI work for seasons four and five (and Crusade and the B5 tv movies).

Re: And so it begins...

[Shakrai]

Star Dreck was shit from the start, and Rottenberry's "vision" was at best naive claptrap and at worst unredeemable drivel.

That was kind of the point of Star Trek, or at least the point of TNG and to a lesser extent TOS. I'm sorry that you didn't get that, it wasn't for everyone, but it was and is the reason why the reboot completely sucks ass and has nothing in common with Star Trek other than the title and character names.

Is the near-utopia presented in The Next Generation attainable? Probably not, human nature being what it is, though if anything made it possible it would be an abundance economy with virtually limitless supplies of energy that can literally make food and consumer goods out of thin air. The notion of people working towards the common good rather than personal enrichment is a lofty one, hence the fiction part of Science-Fiction.

It was a lot more enjoyable than the dark depressing crap that passes for entertainment these days, like Law and Order Rape (err, I'm sorry, Special Victims Unit) or even some of the darker Sci-Fi stuff, like the really misanthropic episodes of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. Yeah, I get it, character conflict is fun to write. Does anybody know how to write uplifting stories anymore? It'd be nice to have something more grown up than Frozen to turn to when I need to escape for two hours.

Bad "science" (only loserboy nerds known as "trekkie pedophile geeks" can delude themselves into believing any of that shitty technobabble can ever be related to real science)

Star Trek at its best was never about the "science". It was about the story and the characters. As long as they remained consistent about the fake science who cares? Go watch the third, fourth, and fifth seasons of TNG or any of DS9 or TOS. The technobabble was there, but it played by a known and consistent set of rules. The particle of the week deus ex machina technobabble crap was primarily a 7th season TNG problem (the writers clearly ran out of ideas) and long running Voyager phenomenon.

B5 was vastly superior to DS9 (which was a shameless ripoff)

The only parts of B5 that DS9 ripped off were the Messiah Complex/Emissary crap of the Commanding Officer. Coincidentally, that was also the least watchable part of DS9. I wanted to shove Sisko out an airlock when he stopped talking about "wormhole aliens" and started talking about "Prophets".

Re: And so it begins...

[roc97007]

Regarding the Sinclair -> Sheridan switch (which I didn't mind, I never particularly cared for Sinclair), there was a quite good reason for it.

Wow, I didn't know. For O'Hare to be struggling with mental illness, and still be concerned about the rest of the cast, and for the show to continue, shows character like you seldom see anymore. And JMS trying to accomodate O'Hare where it was in his power to do so, even when it put the show at risk, shows integrity over and above what one would expect from the entertainment industry. Really puts today's spoiled, intolerant divas in a different light, doesn't it?

Netflix Time Now?

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

Maybe they could get around to putting the series up on Netflix so that the rest of the world, other than hardcore scifi nerds, will get a chance to view it and be ready for when it comes to theaters?

Re:Netflix Time Now?

[GrumpySteen]

It's a reboot, not a continuation. It starts from the beginning, so you don't have to see the TV series in order to watch the movie.

Re:What's a reboot?

[Snard]

I would say that "reboot" can mean different things, in much the same way that "Zathras" can refer to more than one individual, depending on how you pronounce it :) There is the one you describe (change the story line / concepts), but I think it's also possible to simply retell the story, or perhaps tell "more of the story" (i.e. start a bit earlier in the arc, or give additional background). Our technology has changed a bit since 1994 (I mean, gad, we were still running Windows for Workgroups back then!) so it makes sense that we can better imagine the future from this perspective. I respect JMS and believe he would not tamper with the core precepts in the series. And while there are lots of faithful fans who remember the original series, there is also a huge audience of people who aren't familiar with the original series & would enjoy an excellent space opera.

Re:What's a reboot?

[GNious]

I heard they wanted to do a reboot of Star Trek, which I guess could be interesting ... I mean, it's been 12 years since a Star Trek movie was last released.

The Jackson-Hobbit Syndrome in reverse

[tverbeek]

So JMS wants to take a story originally told in over 4700 minutes, and condense it down into a 120-minute feature film (or is he thinking a series of five of them)? What could possibly go wrong?

Seriously, one of the things that makes B5 a classic of the genre was the way it gradually unfolded an epic tale over the course of five years. Sure, there were a lot of B sub plots and C plot-of-the-week elements that didn't contribute directly to that overall storyline, but they provided the texture that made the A plot matter. For example, the viewers cared about the fate of the Centauri because they'd come to know (and seen the transformation of) Londo and Vir; without that, they're just a bunch of space vampires. To be honest, I'm not really a big fan of the soap-opera approach to storytelling that's become fashionable in hour-long TV dramas and monthly superhero comics... but B5 was a rare example of how it works. Without that format, without that scope, it would become just the Reader's Digest edit of The Lord of the Rings in Space.

Re:More Shadows, less Psi's

[Wraithlyn]

They thought they weren't getting a Season 5, which is why they rushed to resolve all the major plots by the end of S4, leading to a rather underwhelming S5.

So what you say is true, but not really their fault.

In breaking news

[0123456]

J.J. Abrams is signed to direct. He's never seen a single episode of the TV show, but he's sure that, if he uses enough lens flare and explosions, no-one will ever notice.

Re:...but there are already films

[lgw]

It was also very dependent on the cast. It takes a lot for the audience to relate to guys in alien costumes, even SF nerds like me. I'm doubtful the magic will happen again.

Wow, a lot of the cast died so young - Jeff Conaway to drugs, Andreas Katsulas to smoking, Richard Biggs at 44 to a heart condition. Good to see Stephen Furst still going (aside from playing my favorite character on B5, he successfully changed his dangerous lifestyle during the B5 years, losing almost 100 pounds).

But whatever else goes wrong, at least the fighters "in space" won't fly like jets. Did any other SF TV series or movie get that right? The space battles are still cool to watch, aging effects and all, just because it makes some physical sense.

Re:An Unconditional Truth

[Hartree]

No. There is another.

"Ivanova is god."