I should have talked about Battlestar Galactica: Razor last week, after it aired on Sci-Fi, but hey: The DVD just came out yesterday, so it’s still timely. Right?

BSG: Razor was a big event on my Thanksgiving weekend. Former TW staff writer and Viper pit member Saxon Burns–who is now seeking his fortune in sunny Los Angeles–was back in town for the holiday and stopped by for the screening, as did Dave Maass, another former TW contributor who is now working for the Santa Fe Reporter.

We all agreed: This was a return to top form for Galactica.

The story was undeniably multi-layered, with flashbacks within flashbacks, so if you hadn’t seen Seasons 1 and 2 of BSG, you were probably a little lost. I don’t want to go all geek squad and get into how cool it was to see Admiral Cain deal with the original Cylon attack and its aftermath, or the depth of the characterizations or even how cool the Cylon lesbatron kiss was. So I’ll just say that it really captured the excitement of the first two seasons of BSG, which got a little lost somewhere along the line in Season 3, when the Cylons got religion, and the show lost a big chunk of its dramatic tension. Oh, and those special effects looked really sweet on my relatively new 48-inch Sony.

Plus, there was a love letter to the original series with those old-school Cylons.

In short: Loved it.

Maass has more on it here.

This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2007.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

11 replies on “Razor’s Edge”

  4. Hey Jim, I was doing my impression of the angry jock in “Revenge of the Nerds.” The one who goes crosseyed and tenses his fists together in an anti-nerd rage.

    I saw the opening episode of “Battlestar Galactica” and was both plussed and nonplussed, which left be about even. Does it get better once the episodes start? One thing that annoyed me was the repetitive use of a fake sudden zoom-in shot during a CGI sequence, to make it look less like CGI. It was a cool technique at first and then they drove it into the ground.

    I dig Mary McDonnell as the president though. She’s just like Hillary will be!

  5. It gets totally better once the episodes start. I didn’t dig the pilot movie very much the first time I saw it, but I gave the show a chance anyway and got totally hooked. Give it another try on your Christmas vacation!

  6. Technically, a geek is a guy who bites the heads off chickens in carnival sideshows.

    The fake jiggly hand-held camera shots to make CGI look more realistic were pioneered on TV by the sainted Joss Whedon on the short-lived “Firefly.” Oddly, he didn’t generally use hand-held cameras on the set, which would have been more consistent, but it also would’ve made the whole thing look like a documentary.

    I can’t comment on “Battlestar Galactica,” because I’m waiting for the series to end, whereupon I can borrow the DVDs from somebody and watch the whole thing at once, then bore people by trying to talk about subjects they discussed to death four or five years before, which is what happened when I caught up with “Buffy” and “Angel.”

  7. James: You should just go ahead and get started NOW. I’ll lend you the DVDs over Christmas break! Trust me, you’re gonna love it. Unless you’re still making your way through “Angel.”

  8. I agree with Sin Twister: Mary McDonnell does have a lot of Hillary qualities (and I don’t mean that in a good way). I just call her “Planned Parenthood”. I don’t think she would have a problem with unlawful wiretapping or waterboarding, though.

  9. Okay I’ll watch the episodes too. Oh, another thing that kinda bugged me about the pilot of “Battlestar Galactica” was the woman killing that baby. There’s a pretty good reason infanticide is a cinematic taboo — it’s nasty. Then again, everybody else eventually died too, so whatever horror they experienced from the death of their baby didn’t last long.

  11. That scene with the baby was shocking, all right. I heard–can anybody help me out here?–that it was removed when the BSG pilot was rebroadcast on NBC.

    The relationship between 6 and Baltar is one of the most amazing storylines in BSG, tho it ended up a lot less interesting in S3.

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