A Really Bad Idea: BSG “Threeboot”

A Really Bad Idea: BSG “Threeboot”

Aug 17

Do we even need to talk about this? Maybe we do.

Word cruised down the Information Superhighway on Friday that Bryan Singer was on tap to produce and direct a big-screen version of Battlestar Galactica.

You may have had the same thought I did, roughly translated as “Whagahuh?” After all, the four season reimagining of BSG spearheaded by Ronald Moore and David Eick only just wrapped up its brilliant run in March. Singer and producer Tom DeSanto were in the running to helm that very reboot series back in 2001 before everything fell apart. (Drew McWeeney’s blog at HitFix broke the story on Singer’s new project, and has great background on the director’s turbulent history with the franchise.) Now Singer and DeSanto are returning to the well that they were themselves going to empty before two very talented TV creators came along and emptied it for them.

Let’s level with each other. This is a horrible idea. You know it, and I know it. (And if you think it’s a good idea, or even just not a horribly wrong-headed one, feel free to argue your stance in the comments.) There’s already been plenty of pixels spilled discussing how this is a bad idea, so I just want to point it out myself, just to ease my troubled soul.

Also, I’d like to remind everyone of one critical fact often overlooked in discussion of the new Singer movie: The original series, the one that has defied any reasonable expectations and inspired not one, but TWO major Hollywood reimaginings? That series pretty much sucked.

So it did have some great design work and FX courtesy of Star Wars turncoat John Dykstra and his team, and the core concept does have a few legs (although AGAIN, not many left at all since it’s been stripmined not once, but TWICE for major television series). And we were all young then and flush with the shock and awe of Lucas’ film juggernaut and so we were ready to slurp up anything that roughly approximated its core appeal, even if it was just a third-rate knock-off.

Because that’s what Battlestar Galactica is, at its heart, as originally created: A third-rate Star Wars knock-off. It may succeed admirably on those terms, and that may continue to make the original series quite watchable for nostalgic thirtysomethings who remember the days before you could pop a Star Wars film into your DVD player and watch it anytime you want.

But I’d argue it means this “threeboot” is one reboot too many. Moore and Eick’s BSG succeeded not because it utilized the original series to any great degree, but because it mostly ignored it and completely reimagined its concepts in the service of the core idea: Humanity is dying and the robots won. On the original series, that idea was an excuse to put thinly-veiled Han Solo and Luke Skywalker stand-ins through their space opera paces each week; on the reboot BSG, that idea launched a textured, nuanced character drama about what it really means when you’re the last people ever, and life in space kinda sucks, and there’s a war going on. Making Starbuck a girl may have seemed like stunt recasting at first, but they knew exactly what they were doing; suddenly Starbuck isn’t a poor man’s Han but has potential to springboard entirely new story concepts on her own without lurking in the shadow of the biggest film franchise of all time.

Where am I going with this? Why do you care? Oh, you’re reading this. I forget sometimes. Anyway, to play the fanboy cliche and outright condemn something before I’ve seen a single frame of it: Bryan Singer’s Battlestar Galactica is A Really Bad Idea. Good night, and good luck.