Why Moore's Galactica sucks ass!
Honestly - the new BSG still makes me mad. Not because they changed the skin colour or sex of several major characters of the original show, but because of the OTHER changes!
They turned a cool scifi adventure show into "depressed CNN anchors in space"! *spit*
I want my original Galactica back, with Apollo and Starbuck jumping from table to table and swinging from chandeliers Musketeer-style, while shooting Cylons with laser guns and exchanging witty remarks and saving space damsels in distress!
The original show actually made an effort to present the inhabitants of the 12 colonies not only as culturally different from earth, but actually went so far as to make them culturally different from one another! The new version is like "clichee US troops in spaceships" - the *only* detail (apart from the spaceships themselves) they made different from everyday Earth life was to cut off the corners of sheets of paper - which is all the more ridiculous when you *think* about it, because it's a waste of space on a page!
The characters themselves suck really bad, imho. The original Adama was not only the commander in chief of the fleet in the old series, but also a kind of spiritual leader, who actually *earned* and *deserved* the respect amongst his people. The new guy is just a militarist concrete-head who even has no trouble to mutiny against his legally elected political superiors on a whim, putting the president behind bars (season 1 or 2, I don't care...).
His second in command turned into an altogether outrageous asshole. Yah, the poor bastard is an alcoholic, so we're supposed to feel pity for him, but compare this guy to Babylon 5's security chief Garibaldi, and see how you do this so it WORKS, actually, instead of just being another bunch of lame clichees... The major points you need is a better actor and a much better script.
Clichees, clichees... The President... Sigh... Not enough that she's got to witness the holocaust of mankind to be shoved into a position she originally was never prepared to be in, nope, she also has CANCER! Weeeee! And when she makes her first hard decision to leave behind some colonist ships of *course* the last thing we see of them before they get blown up by the Cylons is a poor little girl with her teddy bear... ARRRGH! THE PAIN! PS: Back when they started of course wasn't now, but am I the only one who thinks it's a creepy coincidence that she looks a lot like a certain candidate for Vice presidency, who would have been - so to say - only a Cylon invasion away from presidency in the real world? ;)
Oooooh - and isn't it a *cute* "coincidence" that, just when the US are in conflict with certain people, one of the major new characteristics of the new Cylons is that they believe in a God and pretty much declare war on the colonies because "God told them to"?
Read on, for I'M NOT DONE YET!
We haven't touched most of the "SciFi Geek issues" yet!
Here we go:
I WANT MY LASER GUNS BACK!
What smeghead had the terrific idea to remove scifi weapon systems from the series to make it "more realistic"?!? BLOODY HELL! If I want realistic I watch a BBC documentary! This is supposed to be a SciFi Universe in which mankind built a race of robots so advanced that they, in turn can invent perfect genetics to build their own humans again and noone has got a smegging Laser Gun?!?!?! Instead we get starship battles in which they fart each other to death with machineguns! Bleh!
And - OH YES! THE STARFIGHTERS! Back in the 70s the Vipers were clearly invented to do unrealistic yet cool Star Wars like dogfights in space. Those things are *made* to ride into battle on their turbo boosters! And it bloody worked and it looked great! But of course the new Vipers have to do realistic zero gravity maneuvers - and it looks shitty, not *because* it's "more realistic", but because it looks crappy with those fighters. If you want to do this, use ships that were made for it, like the Delta Starfuries in Babylon 5 - those are *designed* for realistic space maneuvering! (actually some Nasa guys have suggested a "forklift" vehicle for the international space station based on that very design, the geeks there even want to name it "Starfury"! - just a little rumor, but it would be soooo cool! XD)
And what is it with the new Cylon Raiders?!? Like the Vipers those spaceships were one of the iconic images of the original show, so it was only logical to dump the design (except for one episode) and replace it with a ripoff of the Kilrathi fighters from the Wing Commander Games, eh? Oh, and because it sucked so much in the new Star Wars movies of course the classic version of a Raider with three Centurions in the cockpit (another iconic image of the original) was dumped for new fighters with an inbuilt brain instead.
By the way - thanks for dumbing down the Cylon background story for modern audiences: In the original the Cylons started as the robotic slave race of an alien race who had long ago rebelled and exterminated their original masters, built their own empire and now went after the humans. Of course that's too complicated for nowadays US audiences, so they turned it into a pretty lame version of Frankenstein, with the Cylons being a direct Human invention that turned against their creators, of course removing yet another layer of cultural diversity (see above) from the mix...
While we're talking about the Cylons: What was it like when the new series was planned? Was there a meeting where someone stood up and said something like: "Hey, I have another great idea for a change from the original series: Let's change the Cylons from guys in pretty cool looking suits into lame computer graphics! That's not only more modern, but also more expensive, looks *way* more unrealistic on the level we'll be able to do it, and will make human-Cylon interaction on screen much more difficult to shoot! And because it's more complicated and expensive we'll only be able to show it in like every 5th episode, and then only for a few seconds at a time!"?
Ugh - and, of course, because the new Cylons hate their old masters so much they do everything to copy them! Weeee! Get this: In the few years since they've been banned from the colonies they perfected genetic technology just to build new organic Cylons that are *exactly* like humans and make them their new leaders! Probably the original Robotic Cylons who thought of THAT were running on Windows Vista... oO
Many people think one of the coolest bits of this new series is Baltaar with his personal "number six" chick in the head. It isn't and they are smegheads too! First this idea was pretty much stolen from Farscape, where it was done much wittier. Then: While she's supposed to be eyecandy for the audience that bimbo looks far too artificial to really be sexy. Oh, no - not "artificial like a robot" which would be kinda cool and fitting, but "artificial like Claudia Schiffer or any other Vogue Zombie" which, for me, is pretty much a turnoff. Wanna make me go "rrrwarrrr!" about a chick in a scifi series? Hire Claudia Black, for smeg's sake! Oh - and the new Baltaar himself? *bleep* him too! *bleep* him right in the ear! Granted, the old Baltaar was a pretty one dimensional Bond-villain like kind of a guy, but I prefer an evil guy who at least knows what he wants every day over a whining depressive emo git like the new guy! It takes quite a bit to make me hate a character in an US series who has got a British accent (I *so* prefer all our European English accents to your American alternatives!), but they did it!
Last but not least: The new Galactica herself looks like crap too, even if it's "ribbed for her pleasure" now!
MAKE IT STOOOOOOOOP!
- ‹ previous
- 192 of 239
- next ›