Babylon 5 Movie Starts Filming in April 397
An anonymous reader writes "According to comingsoon.net, the first theatrical Babylon 5 movie, "The Memory of the Shadows" starts filming in April. The story was written by series creator J. Michael Straczynski."
Question ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Joining her is Galen, a techno-mage who has been charged with keeping the technology out of the hands of those who would abuse it.
I don't recall, but isn't he the guy from Crusade? I only saw two episodes but that name sounds familiar.
B5 Series vs Movies (Score:3, Interesting)
Have things changed? I don't know. I certainly hope so, but B5 Fan that I am, I'm still probably going to wait until the dollar theatres for this one.
Unless the previews look absolutely fan-freaking-tastic, of course. Then I'll probably get suckered in, like always. *raises a fist at the sky and shakes it* I swore after Legend of the Rangers, never again. Damn you!
Re:Galen (Score:2, Interesting)
B5 went downhill... (Score:1, Interesting)
I mean... I understand that JMS had to rush to get the "President Clark/Earth's Civil War" storyline resolved by the end of S4, because it wasn't certain if there WAS going to be a season five. But after the drama, tension, and climax of S4, five was a long, drawn-out, letdown. "Whiney goths in space" is NOT good television; and it was all I could do not to change the channel every time that wanker Byron was on screen.
After that, "In The Beginning" and "Thirdspace" got my hopes up. But "Call To Arms", and "River of Souls" were lackluster. And "Crusade" was sad.... just plain sad. I saw the first ten minutes of "Legend of the Rangers", at a friend's house, and could only think that I wasn't missing much, not having cable.
This movie is going to have to be seriously spectacular in order to convince me that B5, as good as it USED to be, isn't played out.
cya,
john
Re:B5 went downhill... (Score:1, Interesting)
I also admit, I didnt think that the first half of season 5 was up to par with seasons 3 and 4. BUT BUT BUT the 2nd half of season 5 was!!!
Also, you liked thirdspace??? I thought it was terrible lol. LOVED in the beginning and a call to arms though!!! (how could you not like a call to arms, it was badass!)
I also liked a lot of crusade, remember it was just supposed to be the first season, but it got cancelled.. we were gonna see the telepath war and stuff... think of how dissapointed in b5 you would have been if you just saw the first half of the first season.. woulda been really, really lame!!!!
Best Sci Fi Ever? Nah! That would be: Firefly! (Score:4, Interesting)
Not quite.
Clearly the best Sci Fi series ever is: Firefly [scifispace.com] :)
Seriously, if you haven't seen Firefly, rent all 4 disks from Netflix or something, you won't be disappointed. My favorite episode is the last on the disks: Objects In Space. All 9 main characters are interesting, complex, believable, and bounce off each in a manner consistent with their personalities. The action is great, plots are fairly unpredictable, and the writing is packed full of sharp humor.
For alternate opinions, check out the reviews of the Firefly DVD's on Amazon: 1200 reviews, average rating: 5 stars
B5 I'd say would be close behind on the rating scale overall... Mostly I think for it's ambition, and intricate tapestry of dramatic plotlines.
JMS will come through (Score:3, Interesting)
I asked him what he thought about the upcoming movie project, whether he thought it would be good or not. He replied, "It's going to be shit." After a moment I caught the sarcasm and I realized that he would not be doing this movie if he didn't have a great story to tell.
Judging from the stories he has already told, I think it's going to be well worth the wait.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Re:Not sure if I'm going to see it (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the reason why the networks never really liked B5, but it's also the thing that makes B5 way cooler than any other tv series. Instead of the old "problem of the week" format of most tv series, B5 has a five year coherent story line.
I love the feeling when in (say) series 4 they reference something that happened way back in series 1. Totally mind blowing: "No way
My wife hates most sf, end even she became an addict after I showed her the dvds.
PS If you can't afford the dvds, maybe try something like netflix
A history of my attempts at watching B5 (Score:3, Interesting)
My second encounter with B5 was...let's say it was less negative. It was an episode with a character who wore a very 2001-ish astronaut's uniform, and unfortunately for me, it was an episode full of flashbacks and hints of things to come. The episode didn't totally grab me, but it intrigued me enough to seek out the show if the chance came.
It was the dawn of a new age. The TNT cable network picked up B5 and made it one of their flagship programs. Now I could watch the whole series from the beginning, and I could watch each episode 2 or 3 times a day. And that is exactly what I did. The first time I watched the whole series, I was blown away by the interweaving of plots, the complexity and ambiguity of the characters and the richness of the cultural allusions. The second time through, I could better appreciate all the clues and hints which I had missed. The third time through, and B5 lost a bit of its magic for me. I'd notice flaws in the writing or other faults.
Crusade, the spinoff series which followed B5, never grabbed my attention the same way. Crusade felt like so many random elements mixed together without ever truly blending.
I think I would watch a B5 movie, but then again, I'm familiar with the characters and the premise of the show. A big hurdle for a B5 theatrical release is how they can balance satisfying longtime B5 fans against the need to be accessible to people who have never watched the TV series. One of the strengths, and perhaps the strength of the show was its complexity, and I don't think that a 2 or 3 hour movie can encapsulate that.
Beg to Differ (Score:1, Interesting)
And that kicks ass.
Another Trek? Hardly. (Score:5, Interesting)
This means that while the pilot movies are filled with action, they tend to appear shallow and sometimes confusing to the casual viewer. Only further developments in the main story or careful analysis of the pilot will give you some clues. Let me give an example.
The B5 pilot The Gathering is filled with action, lots of characters and a convoluted plot. In the end it appears that "the bad guy" is G'Kar, having smuggled the assassin on the station. Well, yes. Except that G'Kar wasn't behind the turbolift sabotage. Working in the background, Lt. Commander Takashima was trying to escalate this conflict into a full-scale war. See See Lurker's Guide [midwinter.com] for an analysis. This plot point would later be rearranged and used in 2nd season.
The similarities in A Call to Arms and Legend of the Rangers suggest to me that the man has a massive story thought out; one which probably would last another 5 seasons and which he would like to tell us eagerly.
Early on, B5 was compared to Trek, but it turned out to be something different. I suspect that Crusade wouldn't have been your Trek clone, either. Myself, I can hardly wait for the movie and the eventual TV series.
B5's strength lies in the TV series format (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as the popularity or "perceived quality" of Babylon 5's seasons go, I think a lot of fans (dare I say most?) would agree that it increased from season one through season three, each successive season being better than the previous.
To me personally this was the case all the way until the end of season four. But I realize not everyone prefers season four over season three. Many seem to like the grander scale of the Shadow War over the civil war.
The good thing about season four was that there were hardly any "filler" or non-arc episodes. I assume everyone knows the reason for this so I won't go into it any further (in short: the series was in danger of cancellation after season 4). This is also, at least in my mind, the root cause of the problem with season five.
JMS, having the initially well laid out and pre-planned story arc completed by the end of season four, was suddenly faced with the fact that the show was renewed for season five (thanks to TNT picking it up from Warner) and he had a very limited timeframe to come up with scripts and some sort of a mini story arc for the last season.
Add the very last minute leaving of Claudia Christian from the show (which forces JMS to toss out Ivanova's character and come up with a replacement) and you have a recipe if not for disaster, then at least for a "not so great" season. Under the circumstances I would say JMS did a decent job (I remember reading on the usenet B5 newsgroups that 4 or 5 hours a night was pretty much a good night's sleep for him at the time).
Now don't get me wrong, I hated (and still do) the whole Byron / Tragedy of telepaths subplot. A lot. I don't know anyone among my friends who likes it (and they're pretty much all big fans of B5). Imho the only good part about it is that the annoying teeps get what's coming to them. But the whole thing takes up only about eight episodes from the start of the season (which some will argue is 8 episodes too many). That still leaves almost two thirds to take care of the pretty decent mini arc dealing with the shadow tech and the Drakh's plot concerning Londo and the Centauri.
I think season five overall is a bit underrated. It has a host of good episodes (including one of my favourites, The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father) and the latter part of the season is pretty good with a nice build up to the Fall of Centauri Prime. Also, at this point in the series the "weight of history" (for lack of a better term) of the character's and their actions gives a lot of the scenes and drama some extra gravitas, which I like.
With this rather long and boring rambling I've hopefully arrived somewhere near my actual point. Which is that Babylon 5's main strength in my view is the pre- planned, conceived and written story arc that tells a great story and a bunch of smaller stories intertwined over a (long) period of 110 episodes. It allowes for such wonderful foreshadowing that carefully builds up to the dramatic and climactic events. This is very hard to replicate in the time constraints of a motion picture.
And this is the reason I believe the four TV-movies haven't been the best B5 can offer (although I personally like In the Beginning a lot). Also this fundamental issue or problem probably can't simply be undone with a larger budget (which the big screen adaptation will likely have compared to the TV-movies).
So with a somewhat spotty track record of B5 (TV) movies so far and the aforementioned problem my expectations are moderate at best. Having said that, I'll probably be in line to get a ticket to the premiere..
Btw, in case you already haven't done so, remember to check out The Lurker's Guide's page for The Memory of Shadows @ http://
Re:Why B5 sucked after season 4 (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never seen her in command of that much firepower before. Thought a few screws fell loose when she fought Clark's "elite forces"?
See what happens when she commands a pair of GOD cannons, a wad of railguns, two huge missile banks, and I forget what else...
Re:Best Sci Fi Ever? Nah! That would be: Firefly! (Score:5, Interesting)
The humour is a relief from the sheer po-faced gravitas of Voyager and a large part of the ST genre. Humour is what (mostly) set aside the first ST series, and is pretty much absent from the subsequent ST series.
And I definitely have the hots for Zoey. Whooey...
h
B5 didn't have a 5 year arc..... (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact is that news came through the series was gonna be cancelled while they were filming the early stories of season 4. So, in a truly Herculean effort, JMS rewrote the last *two* seasons on the fly, compressing them down into one season.
The Shadow War was supposed to take up the whole of S4 and the Earth Liberation War was supposed to be the main arc of season 5.
Then Sod's Law kicks into play and TNT announced they'd pick up the fifth season of B5 as the last episodes of S4 were airing. On the surface this was good news, but unfortunately JMS didn't have enough material left, he'd just filmed it all and used up all his good plotlines.
This is why season 4 seems rushed and flawed and why season 5 is a stinking pile of crap for the most part. It also explains the very odd series finale. Although it was shown at the end of S5, and appears like that in the boxsets, it was actually filmed at the end of series 4 but they held over transmission for the last year. That's why Claudia Christian appears in it when she'd been absent for the rest of the last series.
IMHO JMS shoulda ditched the (mostly) lousy plot he used for S5 and used that year to give us a B5 / Crusade hybrid series, kinda sneaking Crusade in the back door. Now that would've been a helluva series, but hindsight is a wonderful thing....
Re:B5 went downhill... (Score:2, Interesting)
But then, we knew it would be something bad due to the way it came into his posession.
What happened towards the end (SPOILERS) (Score:5, Interesting)
As others have pointed out, the episodes were written a season at a time. This partly explains why season 5 was only OK compared to the brilliant seasons 3 and 4: they suspected that they might not be able to make it, so the final episode (ultimately shown as the final ep of season 5 when it did go ahead) was actually filmed at the end of season 4, and a lot of the details seem to have been moved forward a series to guarantee that they were there. Series 5 didn't fit in as well as the others, because most of it was expendable to the main story arc.
Personally, I would rather they hadn't made that final episode anyway, nor the official final episode to season 4 (the one jumping into the future more and more). IMHO, they should either have done season 5 properly, or have finished everything with Sheridan and Delenn on the ship on the way back to B5, with a stronger voice-over about space being ours to look after now. Alas, the TV execs apparently didn't leave this as an option they could plan for in advance.
The looking into the future episodes, particularly those so far ahead that all my favourite characters are long-dead and the universe has moved on, always diminished the scale of the main series to me, rather than showing how worthwhile it had all been as I suspect JMS intended. Far better to set another series slightly after the original -- as Crusade would have been, and the film apparently will be -- where you've got the grand framework of the main series as a backdrop, making a difference.
Oh, and the fates of Marcus and Lennier -- the only two truly honourable characters in the whole series -- were very sad, too. Their destinies may have been perfect for the reality of the series, but if we can save the whole universe, couldn't they at least have found room for two characters in five whole series to have the happy endings they deserved?
I watched the original series from the beginning, (Score:1, Interesting)
Babylon 5 was much more intellectually stimulating than other SF television series, and I have always loved "SF on a grand scale" as Greg Benford would put it; the Lensman and Skylark series of Doc Smith, and Benford's Galactic Center series are some of my favorites. Babylon 5 is definitely this type of story.
In general, I wasn't as impressed by the movies as by the series itself. I did like In The Beginning, and Thirdspace was kind of cool, but the others were somewhat disappointing compared to the original series. But compared to other television series such as Voyager or late season 2 to early season 3 Andromeda, before I lost interest and stopped watching it, they are quite good.
So I look forward to Memories of Shadows with eager anticipation.
By the way, I have met Joe Straczynski, his wife, and a good number of the Babylon 5 actors, and have found them to be pleasant people with a good sense of humor, fun to spend time with. I was deeply saddened by the death of Richard Biggs.
Re:Hardware Requirements (Score:3, Interesting)
But also: Warner Brothers managed to LOSE the cgi files. They were kept in anticipation of re-rendering the show in HDTV when hardware was faster. (Would have come in handy when making the DVDs)
But they managed to lose the cgi files, so for the "Legend of the Rangers" failed pilot, they had to make new models. And I think they used Maya instead of Lightwave for that.
Babylon 5 fan-films (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm looking forward to the fan film Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning [starwreck.com] getting Finnished.
Movies on another site, the space battles [spacebattles.com], are kind of amusing, but pretty silly.
More grand scale novels (Score:2, Interesting)
Slightly offtopic, have you tried the following?
-The "Reality Dysfunction" trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
-David Weber's Honor Harrington series (first two novels available online at the Baen Free Library [baen.com]), starts with "On Basilisk Station"
-The Gap series by Stephen R.Donaldson
-The Miles Vorkosigan Series by Lois Mc Master Bujold
Gotta have the whole quote! (Score:4, Interesting)
And, with that, her White Star begins opening a serious can of whoop-ass on the Earthforce ships...