FROM THE VAULTS: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries review

With the Battlestar Galactica remake series having recently concluded a long and succesful run, we thought it'd be fun to dip into the old Darkworlds.com archives and share this essay from our former regular columnist, T. Ward Porrill. Here, Mr. Porrill turned in one of the rare negative reviews of the miniseries that launched the Galactica revamp. It's a reminder of just how shocked genre fans were when the show was new. Remember when the idea of a girl Starbuck sounded ridiculous?

The 1978 TV series BATTLESTAR GALACTICA was a cheesy, goofball STAR WARS/STAR TREK rip-off that was only able to stay on the air for a single season. Somehow it still managed to be entertaining, despite its sub-ILM effects, laughable costumes and make-up and generally bad performances by its cast. GALACTICA had at least two things going for it: those kick-ass Cylons and a much-needed sense of humor about itself. About the only thing the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries, premiering this week on the Sci-Fi channel (check your local listings – on second thought, don’t) has in common with its source material is the bad acting. Sadly, those sleek, silver Cylon bad boys have been given a horrific CGI makeover, rendering them completely unthreatening and uninteresting. But what is most astounding about this 2003 redo is just how seriously everyone involved is taking this truly pointless endeavor. It’s rather like turning SIGMUND AND THE SEA MONSTERS into an opera. Although the new GALACTICA features many familiar spaceships and names, this is a wholly different show – and it just plain sucks.

Among the familiar names are Commander William Adama, (played in a stiff-but-enjoyable manner by Lorne Greene in 1978, now just stiff by Edward James Olmos) and the Han-and-Luke flyboy prototypes, Captain Apollo and Lieutenant Starbuck, played to cornball perfection in the original by master thespians Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict; here, by Tom Cruise-clone Jamie Bamber and the feisty but dull Katee Sackhoff.

“Wait a minute – Starbuck is now a girl???”

That’s right, and that’s just one of the many tweaks this new GALACTIC has to offer - and just like everything else, it doesn’t work. Sackhoff’s Starbuck may suck on a stogie just like the original Starbuck, but she’s too much of a hothead to elicit any sympathy – or believability for that matter -from the audience. The new Captain Apollo is portrayed as a hotshot flyboy (think Maverick from TOP GUN) who, due to the death of his brother, Zack, is trying to reconcile his shattered relationship with his stern father, Commander Adama. If this sounds like a bad soap opera retread, that’s because it is, and the actors play the material so seriously that you feel almost as if you’re watching a Merchant Ivory production set in outer space. The one glimmer of humor in the entire show is Starbuck’s use of the word “frack” – sort of the Colonial substitute for the real “f” word (as in,” Let’s get the frack out of here!” “We’ve aborted this mission thirteen fracking times!”) Believe me, this dour bore of a show sure could have used a heck of a lot more fracks.

The plot of the new GALACTIC is largely the same as the old one – human space colonists must defend themselves against an invasion of evil Cylons – except this time the Cylons have evolved into humanoid creatures that are secretly integrating themselves into the unsuspecting Colonials’ society. The chief Cylon spy is Number Six, a (surprise, surprise) blond hottie who, besides engineering the destruction of an entire colony in the show’s opening scene, also manages to wear the same tight red dress throughout most of the miniseries. While the sexy Tricia Helfer’s vamping is obviously supposed to come off as something along the lines of the T-X in TERMINATOR 3, in actuality it plays more like a knockoff of the fem-bot from EVE OF DESTRUCTION. Further, one particular scene showing Number Six murdering a Colonial infant in its stroller is so off-putting and out of place for this type of show that it leaves the viewer with hatred not for the evil Cylon character but for the creators who thought infanticide was the one thing always missing from this beloved sci-fi series.

Also disappointing is the fact that the Cylons themselves disappear after the show’s opening, only to re-emerge in one of the show’s final scenes. Sure we get plenty of shots of the menacing Cylon Raider ships attacking the Colonial Vipers (the frenzied battle scenes being the show’s sole saving grace) but the Cylons themselves are nowhere to be seen – imagine STAR WARS without the Stormtroopers. A brief shot showing a rendering of an old school Cylon in the opening scene only serves as a cruel reminder of just what is missing from this souped-up, but empty, “GALACTICA,” which let’s face it, was a really fracking bad idea to begin with. - Reviewed for DARKWORLDS.COM by T. Ward Porrill.