And like my masters, Harry and Drew, I don’t know my way around “Babylon 5.” Well, okay, I know a little. It’s kinda like “Deep Space Nine.” I gather. And I think Will Robinson from “Lost in Space” was in it. And Pavel Chekov from “Star Trek.” And that guy they kicked out of “Taxi” to make room for Christopher Lloyd (who played a Klingon in “Star Trek III”). And Sid the Snitch from “Beverly Hills Buntz.” And the really bland “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” guy who played Tron in that Jeff Bridges movie. The guy who created “Babylon 5” is writing an amazing comic book titled “Rising Stars.”
People bitch at Herc all the time because Herc never reviews Sci-Fi Channel shows. But Herc would happily review Sci-Fi shows if Sci-Fi would send Herc a screener. Even once. Sci-Fi, it appears, doesn’t consider AICN/Coax readers its target audience. Which is odd, because they seem like a pretty bright bunch.
Yes, I digress. People who are not Herc wrote in to AICN/Coax about “Legend of the Rangers.” One liked it. Another liked it considerably less. It finally airs Saturday night at 6 p.m. And 8 p.m. And Sunday at 2 p.m. for those with lives.
Evil mastermind Drew McWeeny posted this on July 20:
Yes, I digress. People who are not Herc wrote in to AICN/Coax about “Legend of the Rangers.” One liked it. Another liked it considerably less. It finally airs Saturday night at 6 p.m. And 8 p.m. And Sunday at 2 p.m. for those with lives.
Evil mastermind Drew McWeeny posted this on July 20:
Anyhow, Just saw the Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers Rough cut. It was without effects shots and no Music or sound effects.
However after some apprehension about the series, I was actually impressed. We all know about "Crusade" and it's eventual downfall. I thnk it was the theme music that brought that show down.. Anyhow, "Rangers" starts off on Minbar. David Martel is a Rangers captain that recieved criticizsm about "escaping a battle" when his ship was crippled. He goes back and is repremanded and G'Kar makes his apperance and saves the day.
The captain is somewhat demoted and given a piece of crap 20 year old Haunted space ship. This ship dissappeared of a couple weeks and suddenly came back..sans crew. He hooks up with his new crew made up of friends and new people. This inicludes a ass-kicking Narn female who is the engineer, a Cocky asian navigator, and a female human Weapons expert from mars who jumps down a tube and floats in space while punching and kicking laser shots to the enemy. (No I'm not kidding!) I found the characters in the film to be very fleshed out and believable, the cheesyness factor was kept at a minnimum. (except the punching and kicking zero-g martial arts weapons officer).
So they go off on a mission escorting "Alliance Ambassadors" to a secret location. Captain Martel's enemy from the Rangers School "they just don't like each other" is piloting the huge new ship called "The Valen" that is carrying the ambassadors.
Of course something goes wrong and ships looking strikengly like shadow ships attack and the Valen launches it's escape pods for Captain Martel's piece of crap ship to pick up. More space fighting ensues resulting in the Valen ramming one of the ships and being destroyed and MArtel's piece of crap ship getting away.
G'Kar and the other ambassadors are rescued and come aboard and more chaos ensues. Martel's 1st officer is injured but he's Mimbari and can see dead people on the ship (the previous crew that got killed I guess). There are some humerous scenes here and there when the ambassadors interact with each other.
Anyhow the ambassadors wre meant so see and Archeological Dig that found a city deep within the planet. Here, there is an ominous structure. G'Kar explains this to Martel. This "pyramid" is a gateway to another "dimention" where the new race called "The Hand" resides. It is said by one of the characters later (I'm not giving everything away) that this race was banished billions of years ago as is so powerfull that they make the Shadows look like "insects".
Anyhow, more evil Alien ships come back and Martel saves the say by destroying them in a cleaver manner that is quite entertaining. (I'm not giving that away either).
So there ya have it B5: Legend of the Rangers... is actually pretty good. Good characters upon which to build a series. The catpain is very much like Kirk and the scenes defiinately reminded me of the feeling the original Star Trek had on me. Hopefully it will have a good intro and soundtrack nd of course some effects such as rendered ships would help too.
After being dissapointed with Crusade this new series looks very promising.
Reflux Out.
Headgeek Harry Knowles posted this on Oct. 16:
Captain Christopher Pike here.
I've been plugged up to this computer for seemingly ever without writing you Knowles. You betrayed and left me to be mutated by those bulbous headed makeup dudes and usually I'd squat and squeeze to feed you what you deserve, but I just saw Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers. It's a movie scheduled to air early January on Sci Fi. It is really bad.
It is better than Crusade, which...to me at least...pretty much represented how low Babylon 5 could go. But it's still no good. Mike Vejar...usually a very talented B5/Trek director...brings nothing interesting or inventive to the table here. In fact, his work feels hurried and unrefined.
The FX are somewhat improved over Crusade, but there's nothing particularly *special* about them. Far too much over-reliance on FX simulating a rumbling, shaking camera when ships fly past, land, etc. Nearly every substantive FX in the movie employs the shakycam, diminishing the impact of the conceit, and frequently distorting the image so severely it's often difficult to see what's actually happening on-screen. Which totally removes the viewer from the action.
Spaceship designs are very poor but Hyperspace now looks more like a PC screensaver than the red "hell" we saw in B5 & Crusade); jumps into & out of hyperspace look different (more swirly/swishys in the toilet bowl effects); the spinning centrifuge of Babylon 5 (the station is seen in the last shot of the movie, although we never board it) is considerably slower; and the cities of Minbar now look more like Blade Runner than the crystalline sprawls witnessed in the series set a few years earlier.
A lot of old, old, ineffective clichés. The main ship is haunted: the people (old crew) haunting it look like dorks dressed-up as a Scooby Doo zombie for Halloween. The characters feel like the line-up from some defunct Glen A. Larson series: a young, maverick captain & a slightly renegade crew of loyal-but-irregular Rangers. Including: a warrior vixen (think Tasha Yar, or Worf's woman from Trek: TNG); a big, loveable oaf Drazi, a mousy ship's doctor, and a guy whit a holosuit which allows him to imitate any character. We've seen all of this...or variations of all of this...before. Joe Straczynski (B5 over god) used to rail against SF clichés, but he seems to have has no problem slathering them on this time around.
Andreas Katsulas (reprising his role as G'Kar) does nothing but dispense sagely advice, which often is so oblique it's meaningless. He repeatedly interrupts Grey Council meetings (!?!?!?!?). He's generally a pest, and even annoying at times. His character is pushed sloppily through the plot, allowing him only a few opportunities to say something which passes as "important". And when he says "important" stuff? It feels like a tedious lecture, or a tiring pontification. A waste of a great actor and character. His presence feels tacked-on.
In one of the dumbest ideas seen on TV in some time: the ship's gunner-babe has to dive into a VR bubble to operate her vessel's defensive systems When she does this, we see her flying through VR-sim space like Superman (one arm back, one arm, thrust forward), hurling balls of flame out of her hands and feet (representing her ship firing at its opponent). We almost never cut away too see her ship actually *doing* anything in battle. It's all told from her point of view. This chick is flailing about (with poor wire work), discharging fireballs from nearly every orifice of her body, blowing-up stuff we can't see clearly. A really bad way to draw viewers into the tension of battle.
One interesting new "approach" for the series: the show tries to convey much of its action in a slightly pumped-up way. Christopher Franke's score...usually cacophonous & atmospheric...is very up-front in this movie. Reasonably strong melody lines roll throughout action sequences, like Michael Mann employed in Last of the Mohicans, or Jerry Bruckheimer utilizes in many of the movies he produces. But there's not enough visual energy (often due to a decided lack of coverage) to support what they're trying to accomplish. Speaking of Bruckheimer: there's a scene in this movie who is almost exactly like a sequence in Armageddon: the Rangers are flying through the tale of a comet & it looks just like the approach to Armageddon's asteroid (swishy blue tendrils of shit coming at them, etc).
Acting in the movie is all over the place. A few performances might have worked with better writing, but Joe gives 'em nothing to do. And, many performers are just plain *bland*. The K/S people (a contingent of Trek fans believing Kirk and Spock were gay lovers) will have a field day with the two leads in B5: LOTR (notice how LOTR = Legend of the Rangers, *and* also Lord of the Rings I mean Minbari. It's *very* Trek. In fact, the whole show is *very* Trek. Anyone who thought Crusade was inspired by its competition ain't seen nothing yet.
New villains show-up. They're called The Hand. The show melodramatically informs us these guys are tougher & more bad-ass than The Shadows we saw in B5 ("They make The Shadows look like insects!"). Maybe The Hand looks good on paper, but they're stupid as hell. It doesn't take much to blow-up their ships (silver/blue starfish), and they're easily tricked. I'm not quite sure how these folks made it through kabillions of years of galactic history if they've always been this dumb. And, for serious B5 junkies, it's never explained whether this "The Hand" is the same "The Hand" referenced in the Sheridan/Ivonova dream of the original series, or is in any way related to "The Hand" which ran around trying to kill Michael Caine in a 1981 feature film (the only hand really needed here is the one which should be slapping Joe). .
There are a few flashes of cleverness or coolness throughout the movie, which suggest...somewhere down inside...Joe still has a bit of "B5 spark" left in him. But the entirety of the work doesn't do much to convince me he's the person to be mastering the franchise right now. I think there are many B5 stories still waiting to be told, I'm just not sure if he's the person to be telling them anymore. Maybe he's blown his wad. Or, maybe his muse ain't pulling her weight. This movie has been in the can for some time now but they've said nothing about picking-up Legend of the Rangers.
Now that I've seen it, I'm not surprised.
Captain Christopher Pike unplugging
