It’s been a long long long time since I’ve been able to talk about an episode of Battlestar Galactica that I JUST saw. Well… on Saturday night I was able to finally watch a new installment of franchise in the made for TV mini movie “Battlestar Galactica: Razor“.
The movie is a flashback to the first mission of the Pegasus once it came under Apollo’s command and a a flashback of the flashback (stay with me here) of Apollo’s new Executive Officer as she remembers first coming on board the Pegasus just before the start of the new Cylon War under Admiral Cain.
The main character of the movie is Apollo’s new first officer Kendra Shaw. Shaw first came aboard the Pegasus under Admiral Cain just before the Cylons launched their sneak attack. We follow both Kendra and Cain as the new realities they live under start to alter them, blurring their moral code ultimately leading us to seeing them do things that they probably would have never thought themselves capable of.
Now, under Lee Adama (Apollo) Kendra is the second in command and is tortured by her secret past while under Cain. Admiral Adama gives Pegasus a mission to find a missing scout ship, only to discover that the missing ship has been captured by OLD STLYE CYLONS from the first Cylon war (yes folks… the cylon models from the Original Battlestar Galactica serise), and the Admiral sends Pegasus back to rescue the crew of the scout ship, and to destroy the old Cylons.
THE GOOD STUFF (Possible spoilers)
Fist of all, it was so great seeing Battlestar Galactica on the TV again. Just hearing the theme music filled my empty heart with joy.
Second, seeing the old style cylons RULED!!!! Not only the robots, but also the old style ships being piloted by 3 cylons. The damn things even spoke in their classic robotic voices and one even said the immortal line “By your command”. I was grinning like an idiot when they did that.
Third, seeing more back story to Admiral Cain was great. Also, seeing how she went from a highly respected officer in the fleet, to the monster we saw in the second season of BSG was an interesting character study (SPOILER – We also find out that Cain and one of the Number Six models were lesbian lovers, which sort of explains a lot).
THE BAD STUFF
As much as I liked seeing Cain descend into madness, the descent was far to sudden (SPOILER – She literally went from one moment chatting with her Executive Officer who appears to be her best friend, to shooting him in the head… just like that).
The flashbacks of flashbacks of flashbacks got a little convoluted. Don’t misunderstand me… it’s not that it was hard to follow, it just took a lot of the flow out of the movie, The whole thing is a flashback, then Kendra flashes back from the flashback. Then Adama has a flashback in the flashback, then Kendra has a flashback of the flashback of the flashback. Some of the jumping around was good storytelling… but some felt intrusive and like excess baggage.
There was no point. This was the biggest flaw of Razor. If you’re going to have a flashback story like this one, it should serve a purpose to the larger ongoing story with where we’re at now… and Razor didn’t do that… EXCEPT… (SPOILER – At the very end, a dying Cylon hybrid tells Kendra that Starbuck if the harbinger of doom for the human race and that she will bring destruction on all humanity. That’s big… but it was one, totally out of place line that had NOTHING to do with the rest of the movie. So in essence, it felt like the whole 2 hour movie was just for letting that cylon say that one line, which sort of soured the who thing for me a bit)
OVERALL
It was great seeing Battlestar Galactica on the screen again, even better to see the old style cylons, and in general it was a good little tv movie. However, like the 2nd half of season 3, it felt lacking. I’m glad I saw it, but I certainly wouldn’t have been missing anything if I skipped it. Here’s hoping Season 4 follows the first 2.5 seasons and not the last .5
RAZOR pointless?
Rather, RAZOR has set the course toward the end of the show.
I think that the hybrid revealed at the end of the movie is going to have a LOT to do with the entire fourth season. Also, does anyone think that this is the last time that we’ll see Shaw? I don’t. The hybrid noted that he/it had been waiting for her for a very long time, so why would he just tell her that XXXXXX was the harbinger of doom? Just for us, the audience? That doesn’t make any sense, there has to be deeper meaning.
I think we’ll see them both again.
Just my two cents.
There was one thing about the Ron Moore “Galactica” series that always bugged me regardless of how good some of actors and stories may be. That was the shaky zig-zag camera shots. Just this once, I wished that they would restrain themselves from the practice, at least to show a difference between the past and future.
Unlike most of the regular seasons, I also found Razor to be badly written, in structure and character. Structure relates to flashback in a flashback, which has never worked in any film or show. Ever. Character wise, I found the Shaw character a bit much myself. However, in a slight rebuttal to Gio, the event where Cain kills her XO Belzen was mentioned by Fisk in an earlier Galactica episode but never dramatized. (Fisk also mentioned the killing of civillians to Tigh)
Still- it was rather pointless as I cared less about Shaw’s devotion to Cain (even if she had some remorse about killing a young girl) and wanted to get into the mission itself, but with all the trips down memory lane, I found myself unable to do so.
While I did like glimpses of Old School Cylons, there was this one shot where it was extremely obvious it was a CGI cylon, (looking more cartoon than organic) and while I knew they were leading up to the hybrid, there was a small part of me that hoped we would instead see The Imperious Leader or “Lucifer” (after all, the cylons do say ‘By Your Command’) or re-imagined version of either. I liked the scenes with young Adama going through the Cylon parts Clonus Horror plant and finding the folks trapped in that room well done (but, seeing how those scenes “stood out” in tension, tone, camera and color, that’s understandable)
Now I understand that the DVD comes out Tues with additional scenes. An extra minute with Cain and a Cylon perhaps? I betcha…a few extra seconds of liplock…and a few extra seconds of female cylon gettng smacked around in interrogation.
Oh wait! Was I the only one who noticed all the “Star Trek” references in there? I think were three but now I have no idea what they were.
So John, with the flashbacks, do you think they were, lets say, edited together in the wrong places? Do you think the flashbacks should have been in different places to make the film progress more smoothly?
As for me, I thought the movie was pretty solid. I liked it a lot, but thats just me.
I think to say, at this point, that Razor had no point is a little unfair. It does shed a lot of light on to a few scenarios that unfolded.
HOWEVER
This is NOT Battlestar Galactica, but Battlestar Galactica:Razor. Yes it does have the familiar recurring characters involved in the story, BUT the story was ABOUT Lt. Naughty Pout. I mean Lt. Kendra Shaw. To say that the Hybrid had nothing to do with the entire 2 hours is wayyyy off base, in my opinion. The Hybrid was the reason for EVERYTHING we have seen so far. I think we had to learn just how REVERED the Hybrid is to the Cylons, and why it was so important that Pouty and the Hybrid met at the end. The Hybrid was the reason the Cylons left and the reason the Cylons attacked again after 40 years.
I enjoyed Razor as a side-story to the regular season and I think that is ALL it was meant to be. They probably HAD to give SOME little tidbit to tease the viewers (hence the last little bit about Starbuck).
As an aside, I am just listening to the BSG podcast and it is neat to hear the writers speak about how Cain’s thought processes came to be. I didn’t think her reactions were all that night and day. She asserts herself as a decision-maker from the get go and that is all she continued to be throughout her doomed existence.
The show did frustrate me as it helped me realise just how much I miss that show.