JMS has posted a couple of new CGI renders from the FX sequences and main titles of Babylon 5: The Lost Tales here. (Am I the only one looking at the vaguely Fuji-esque series of streaks behind the B5 logo and thinking “Have you swilled Brevari and played Atari today?” 😆 ) The second shot, despite the fact that the nebula in the background looks completely different from the way it’s been portrayed before, almost makes my heart sing. Actually, parts of my heart are already singing. I just heard the most ungodly noise from from one of the ventricles – trust me, you don’t wanna know.
This brings to mind my recent purchase of The Legend Of The Rangers on DVD. (Hey, I got it on special.) For those who don’t remember Legend, whose name coincidentally shortened to LOTR, it was the last attempt to bring B5 back to our screens, following a series of generally well-received TV movies on TNT and the sadly premature death of Crusade. LOTR premiered early in 2002, went up against an NFL championship game, and came out of that battle in much the same shape that most bugs come out of a pitched battle with the windshield of a fast-moving car. In other words, it pancaked, despite being overpromoted by Sci-Fi Channel, a network that seemed really hip to having a new B5 series on its air.
So what went wrong? I’ll be honest with you: it wasn’t just the football game. It wasn’t the cast – many of them have appeared in other shows based in Vancouver, from the Stargate franchise to JMS’ own Jeremiah, and they were all very good performers, and of course this was everyone’s last glimpse of the late and sorely missed Andreas Katsulas as G’Kar.
Where LOTR pancaked was simple: the script. I’m both an admirer and a critic of J. Michael Straczynski. Babylon 5 sustained me, both in terms of providing entertainment and provoking thought, more than just about anything else that aired in the 1990s. There were some pretty dark patches in my life there where all that kept me going was just having to know what happened on the next episode of Babylon 5. When the show reached its natural and planned conclusion, I did not feel cheated. I can’t say that about many series finales (Star Trek: Voyager, I’m lookin’ at you). Crusade seemed awful familiar – the plot was almost point-for-point lifted from Star Blazers / Space Battleship Yamato, from the disease that will wipe out Earth in X months to the heroes’ ship having a mighty weapon that’s so mighty, the ship is left helpless after firing it. But the characters and their mysteries bode well for the future. I was in for the long haul. I think I was one of eight people who loved Evan Chen’s music for the show (and still do). Of course, TNT and JMS wound up at loggerheads creatively; TNT wanted the show to have more sex and violence (in the episode in which Dureena forced a telepath to tip his hand with her head full of violent thoughts, TNT sent JMS a note indicating that they wanted Dureena to seduce him instead) and JMS just wanted to tell a good story. Ha! Joe! You’re in Hollywood! What were you thinking?
And then along comes LOTR, and it just feels tired. Aside from it re-using the “dark ancient power from the galaxy’s past showing its hand for the first time in millennia” plot device, its dialogue was…well…to be frank, crap. The only character who seemed to have something to say was G’Kar, and at times it felt like surely the real JMS was writing G’Kar’s dialogue, and someone using JMS’ name was writing the rest of the thing. Let’s not even get into how you could make a drinking game out of every utterance of “We live for the One, we die for the One.” When one of the characters said, word-for-word, the following line: “As a wise man once said, we live for the One, we die for the One”…well, I was just about ready to watch the football game instead too. There was also a certain cheapness to the physical production – the sets and costumes – that bugged me, but it didn’t come as close to driving me away as the dialogue and plot did.
And yet Jeremiah, another show which JMS damn near wrote singlehandedly, positively sparkled. I never thought I’d like Luke Perry in anything, and Malcolm Jamal-Warner just blew me away, but it was all down to their passion for telling the stories as written in those scripts. LOTR almost seemed like a fan film – overemphasizing the wrong things, falling back on cliches, and just a little bit short on genuine character and plausible motivion and real human emotion.
I pray that The Lost Tales turn out better than that. Beyond seeing beloved characters returning to the screens, looking an awful lot like some equally well-loved actors, beyond just seeing Babylon 5 back on my screen, it’s gotta be better than LOTR. I’d like to think that there’s no way that it can’t be, but yet some of Dave’s reviews of JMS’ comics output over the past few years, and the revelation a few months ago of the JMS/Bryce Zabel pitch for a reboot of classic Trek, really does make me worry that JMS has a pony who urgently needs to be taught a second trick…because it seems like he’s falling back on the same basic structure time and again. And yet he’s come with stuff as unique as Jeremiah, or Midnight Nation, which is one of my favorite comics…well…ever. And I’m not really a comics guy. (I have to confess that most of what’s on my comic shelf is stuff that Dave has gracious shared with me after trading up from the newsstand issues to the graphic novels, which isn’t a bad deal, as generally if Dave tells me “You’ll like this,” he’s seldom far from the mark.)
The long and short of all this rambling is: c’mon, Joe, don’t let us down. We’re talking about the guy who’s probably done more than anybody else to cleanse the American viewing public’s palate for Sci Fi That Happens Not To Be Star Trek, which helped to pave the way for Stargate and BSG, and he did it with words, not just with spectacle. (Though of course, the spectacle didn’t hurt.) He’s come back to the plate, professing to have a new story to tell in the B5 universe, twice. So far, it looks like his record is one ball (Crusade) and one flat-out strike (LOTR).
Make that next swing count, and I’m in for as many of these direct-to-DVD doodads as you want to make.
I remember watching Legend of the Rangers. I was liking it. I ignored most of the things you mentioned (cliches, 2D characters, etc.). However, when I saw that warrior woman doing her dance moves in the weapons chamber (or whatever it’s called), I totally lost interest in the show (I was too busy laughing). The only thing that kept me watching was G’Kar.
You mentioned that the actors were okay in LOTR, but I didn’t think so. Other than Andreas Katsulas, the other actors weren’t likeable or memorable in their roles. They just weren’t able to carry the movie, in my opinion. Sure, the script was pretty much written Mad-Libs style, but if the rest of the elements of the film came together, it still would have had some redeeming value. The actors had no charisma, the sets looked cheap, and the whole thing had the reek of a low-budget Canadian production (like pretty much all of Sci-Fi Channel’s original output nowadays). The special effects looked like a nice evolutionary jump above the original B5, which was an easy feat. Really, nothing could have saved this film, not even a better script.