Television review: Battlestar Galactica 2003

Takumi
25 November 2004

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314979/

Someone asked: But is it any good?

Apart from the whole "did it really need to be re-done" question... yeah, not bad. A lot grimmer than the original series (mind you, so was the original pilot/film); the visual style owes a lot to Space Above and Beyond (especially in the SFX, which are competently done and in places quite impressive), and (as far as I'm concerned anyway) it's a similar cast of unknowns.

It is rather an Idiot World: "hey, the nearly-invincible bad guys haven't shown up at the negotiating table for forty years after the last time we beat them, let's forget all the lessons we learned from fighting them"... it's also a bit soap-opera-ish (not only do I have to lead the military forces of what's left of humanity, but my son doesn't want to talk to me; not only have I just inherited the presidency of Earth, but I have cancer), and very early-twenty-first-century-Earth in style and sensibility...

Camera-work is variable - not horribly shaky and constant cutting the way much modern stuff is, but there's quite a lot of crash zooming and general wobble.

Overall, probably worth a look.