Babylon 5 - The Lost Tales Trailer Posted 140
Space writes "The trailer for the upcoming movie Babylon 5: The Lost Tales — Voices in the Dark has been posted at the official Babylon 5 site. The movie's pre-production was mentioned in a previous discussion. For more on the creation of the film, the CG Society has an ongoing series of articles about the production's effects development."
Re:Sufficiently high tech might as well be fantasy (Score:5, Insightful)
People who think that 21st century science is the be-all and end-all of all knowledge display staggering amounts of hubris, especially since they are familiar with overzealous predictions like "everything that can be patented has been patented" and "there's a world market for maybe 5 computers".
Whether it's overused or not is another question -- that depends on the writer, and I think the B5 seasons treated techno-mages and psychics quite well. Especially compared to a certain Betazoid on TNG, whose sole purpose seemed to be, er, wear dresses and state the obvious.
Re:Babylon 5 - The Straight to DVD Tales (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't find the effects particularely cheesy there, I'm sorry if you did.
On the other hand, B5 always had to survive on a shoe string budget. One quoted number was that it at most for one episode, B5 got about 25% of what it cost to produce one Star Trek episode. With that in mind, I'm quite impressed with what they accomplished.
I always admired the designs and ideas of B5 and thought them to be inventive, ingenious and on the whole quite beautiful. Even if you're of course often more aware that you're watching CG, mostly due to the restrictive budget from what I can tell.
Re:Richard Biggs a.k.a Dr. Frankelin (Score:3, Insightful)
No indication that it's going to be aired, from what I saw, on Sci-Fi or TNT/TBS/Whoever had the series for most of it's run. That was according to IMDB.
I enjoyed the show and it's what got me into 3D animation and video editing, etc. all those years ago when I remember looking at Lightwave going "$2500 holy shit, that's more than my computer" and Blender was at version 1.8.
If it happens to get aired, I'll probably Tivo it. If not, chances of me ever bothering to rent it or buy it is pretty slim.
Re:Sufficiently high tech might as well be fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
There is also arrogance where a writer says, "If they accuse me of writing about magic, I'll just point out that it is in fact just sufficiently advanced technology", and then proceeds to write something that is really fantasy in terms of genre.
While we cannot predict what will be possible in the far future, we do know a lot about the world now. The important thing here is that I'm not talking about technology, but rather the many and various forms of literature and movie genres, the history of many religions, tribes and cults, the marketing of corporations, the temptations that even the best writers can fall pray to, etc.
Taking all those factors into account, it seems fair to hold the point of view that Babylon 5 includes fantasy elements (wearing the makeup of Clarke's Third Law), that it is not really trying to be pure sci-fi or speculative fiction. I'm perfectly happy to admit it might all be possible, at the same time as saying that I don't really think that is the point the authors are making.
Yes, it is entirely possible they wanted to play around with the idea of technology-as-magic. But by the time they've thrown in all the rituals, the astral plane metaphors, etc, you have to ask:
Are they still asking, "What if this could be done?", or are they in fact asking, "Wouldn't it be cool if these guys were like wizards, yeah, we'll call them Techno-Mages, you know, play the advanced technology card, etc.. ?" It's an exaggeration, but I suspect that the GP is right, and they are in fact including fantasy in their show.
This is not a bad thing in and of itself; that's a matter of personal taste.
It was real drama (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's SciFi damnit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, "SciFi" just a marketing label designed to make it easy to compartmentalize media in order to maximize synergistic sales. There aren't rules, canons and precepts governed by some international SciFi Body. And there damn well should never be rules like that either. Nothing kills creativity more.
Episodes of Star Trek, for example, could just as easily be classed as romance or murder mystery rather than SciFi. Get over it! And get it into your head that your definition of SciFi, is just that -- yours.
For me, Babylon 5 developed characters and story arcs in a credible and realistic way. People are stupid, weak, selfish and greedy. They believe in things that may not be true. Babylon 5 reflected that, whereas most TV SciFi prior to B5 did not. It asked old and new questions about the nature of belief and existence. And nota bene, that JMS did say online somewhere, that just because the Minbari believe in souls etc does not make it necessarily true.
Which does not mean it is invalid to explore those ideas around a SciFi context.
Leave the labeling and compartmentalization to the marketing drones, or to librarians -- and we all know librarians have something to hide.
Babylon 5 was a miracle (Score:4, Insightful)
Between the poor quality of the successor projects and the difficulty of getting anything good on the air in today's television market, the success of the original series is all the more remarkable. If you simply look at the odds, this show never should have happened, a statistical fluke. But the impossible happened. I wonder if JMS can make the impossible happen twice.
Re:It's SciFi damnit! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's SciFi damnit!
As for questions of the soul, that's an area of pure speculation, same with prophecy. So long as JMS keeps what he presents self-consistent, all is good. Personally, I hate prophecy storylines because they've been done to fucking death. I think it's poor storytelling. But I have seen good stories with precognition. For some stories the precognition goes along the lines of extremely educated guesses, like a chess master considering the state of the board eight moves ahead, only in this case there are a million more variables to consider. In that case, the turning points upon which the future rests become matters of extreme importance and there's always the danger of the Influential Man, the wildcard that can throw off all predictions. I've also seen good stories that use a more mystical means of showing the future. The worst ones have the future written in stone with fate and destiny shackling everyone to a fixed course of action. The better ones have precognition show a web of potentialities for the future, the seer catching quantum ripples chasing down from future to past. All and none of these futures exist and only the present exists to make those potentials real, cementing them into past.
Re:Wait--I remember B5! (Score:3, Insightful)
Way, way too late (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing about B5 was that, originally, it actually felt like you were in a big universe. The most brilliant scene in the entire show was when Catherine Sakai is telling G'Kar about the time her ship lost power when "something" -- an object so huge it blotted out the sun -- cruised by. Sakai describes what happened and asks G'Kar what the thing might have been. They're standing in the garden, and G'Kar sees an ant crawling up a flower stem. He puts his finger on the stem, the ant crawls onto it and onto his hand, and then after a few seconds he lets the ant crawl back onto the flower. He looks at Sakai and says, "That ant meets another ant and asks, what was that?..."
But after the third season, all that was out the window, and all that was left was a bad space combat show.
Re:Wait--I remember B5! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that you give the game away with that sentence. The fact that you describe it as boring suggests that you've not watched many episodes, after all if it is 'boring' then why would you? This is further born out by focusing on the 'psi power' element of the show, which although very much present isn't the only game in town. Even here your assertion that psi power has never worked too well too well in sf seems slightly dubious in the light of how many creators have bundled it into their work. It seems that everyone from Alfred Bester, who wrote the 'The demolished man' to George Lucas and his 'force' (ignoring midi-chlorians or what ever for the moment) have been quite happy to use it.
Also, given the number of people who bought the Babylon 5 box sets, releasing it as a direct-to-DVD movie seems to make perfect. This is a growing trend among series with a well established and perhaps older and richer fan base - see Stargate for another example. Whoever has done this is taking a risk, but not a very big one I think.
Finally what have you added to the sum of human knowledge, apart from the fact that you don't like Babylon 5 and that I disagree with you?
Re:It's SciFi damnit! (Score:4, Insightful)
An interesting historical point. I wasn't aware of the distinction between science fiction and sci-fi - could you provide it?
I tend not to bother with distinctions that will have no meaning to people not part of the group that have chosen to make it; it's as bad as cheap marketing ploys. Wouldn't be surprised if the original poster was happily using SciFi as an abbreviation for science fiction, good or bad, great and small. I understand the idea of specualtive fiction, because you could discuss the difference between "science" and "speculation" to your average or intelligent person and still make sense. Even so, that's just to acknowledge someone's perspective - I don't think the term adds much value except for insider discussions.
I think Harlan Ellison created that "distinction in terms" when he made that statement. Not to say the distinction itself was not there, he just gave it name (however good or bad). What he was trying to point out is that what we now label as "sci-fi" got away from what "science fiction" was about. In general usage "sci-fi" came to mean stories that are about laser guns, robots, and women in bizarrely impractical tin foil outfits.Its stories that use "science" as a magical way to resolve issues without really dealing with them. It is stories that are more about the gadgets than people. It is about escaping the reality into world that has nothing to do with our own.
Science fiction on other hand is not about those things. It is about people and the world we live in. No matter how alien the setup is and what aliens, robots, etc are the subject of the story, good science fiction is always relevant to us here and now. All the standard "sci-fi" items are not the point of the story, they are just tools to set up the story in a way that may not be possible (or at least easy) with straight fiction.
There are many good examples of the distinction in recent movies - "I, Robot" the "science fiction" book was a deep examination of human behavior by extracting the idealized behavior and overlaying it on a machine and then viewing it from a human perspective (among many other things) - "I,Robot" - the "sci-fi" movie supposedly based on the book, but really about killer robots. Or "Mimsy were the Borgroves" - a brilliant short story about "nature vs nurture" and the effect of the toys on the way the mind develops - "The Last Mimzy" - a "sci-fi" movie based on the story that castrates any sort of meaning from original work and instead does a random children's adventure with even more random environmental message (where did that come from?)
B5, Firefly, etc all were good science fiction because if you take out the space ships and laser guns and aliens, you still got a strong story about something. I mean B5's big conflict of "community" vs "individual" is universal and applies just as well to "Vorlons" vs "Shadows" as it does to "USSR" vs "USA" in cold war or "socialism" vs "capitalism" in general. It is a fundamental conflict that's as old as time and instead of rehashing it again from one side or another, B5 shows what it is like to be the little guy caught in the middle.
Now, I just want to add, there is definitely a place for "sci-fi" out there and truth be told, I enjoyed both movies mentioned above - but there is no way I can call them good science fiction.
Although I see you have no problem making such subtle distinctions .. I'm wondering whether the definition of Sci-Fi will be a tautology that excludes the possibility of it ever being great fiction.
As I tried to explain above, I don't see this distinction as all that subtle. "Sci-Fi" as we come to know it is not meant to be good fiction - instead it meant to be the opposite - escapism and distraction.
But rather than dwell on trivia about the us
Re:"Now that I'm dying I've never felt better!" (Score:3, Insightful)
Oddly enough, that unscripted statement happens to be *quintessential* G'Kar..