Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Diaspora => Topic started by: karajorma on November 09, 2012, 07:28:21 am
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Here's the thread for talking about B&C. Please don't post spoilers elsewhere as not everyone gets to see it the second it goes up.
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i think i'll love it... :)
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And here's the link to the first episode. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT79x4qM4FE)
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And here's a link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_384573&feature=iv&src_vid=pT79x4qM4FE&v=jdisGiivP9c) to the second episode - next one will be available on the 16th.
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So it starts okay. Please don't disappoint.
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I have a very good feeling about this so far :). Waiting for more.
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So far so humbug. This is the mediocre surface skimmings of BSG, populated by stock characters, stock action, and without a single interesting idea to discuss.
So far, at least!
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Now I know what a flashbang grenade in your face feels like. Jeez, what's with all the lens flares? In interior shots, no less. I'm still seeing green ducks every time I close my eyes. I'll post a more coherent opinion on what I've seen so far when I stop feeling like my apartment just got stormed by SWAT.
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It's probably something they do to conceal the all-CGI sets. Maybe it lets them render backgrounds at a lower res?
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Nah, stuff like that would have been visible regardless. I'd speculate this is just an artistic choice. One I don't particularly care for, but meh. Seen the first two parts, it wasn't BSG mini level of brilliant, and it certainly didn't reinvent the wheel, but I feel like I haven't seen enough to decide if it'll go somewhere or not.
For the record, splitting it into 12 minute chunks on youtube is pretty ****ty treatment.
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Yeah I was going to disagree with you GB, pointing out that it just might start slow or something, but then I recalled how BSG started in its first minute, with that crazy red woman mind****ing you on several ways.
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Yeah, in the first twenty minutes of BSG we got 'Are you alive?' (a pretty heavy question!), that amazing tracking shot of Galactica's corridors, and a bunch of character relationships. Here we get a load of military aviation cliches.
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Agreed so far. Once I got through the first 20 minutes of BSG mini I already knew I was loving this new amazing show.
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Preface: I used to joke we should make the ECO shooting sidearms from the open side door of the Raptor a Diaspora feature. This was made purely in jest.
I haven't seen it yet, but when I saw the clip newman posted in the preview thread where Adama blew his canopy and preceded to shoot up a Raider with his sidearm it made me throw up a little in my mouth. The bile tasted suspiciously of Galactica 1980. Unless I see some rave reviews of this thing, that somehow elevate it past a Saturday morning 1980s cartoon I'd rather not have my fond memories of BSG tarnished.
Are RDM and Eick even involved with this project?
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For the record, splitting it into 12 minute chunks on youtube is pretty ****ty treatment.
You can simply replace those asterisks with the sound of a wrench hitting the ground.
I didn't dislike it but it's relying too much on the audience being familiar with BSG and not setting up anything itself. Galactica is the show's namesake yet so far it seems like it could just be another ship and Adama's just another pilot, we haven't got any reason to care about them that doesn't stem from having watched the main series.
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So in ep 3 Cylons kill Adama right there in the raptor, the co-pilot fourth walls us with a smug smile Problem?, rapes the engineer (because it's a family show come on), and goes on to become the real protagonist of the series.
EDIT: Wait the frak up. I know what they're doing. They are turning BSG into JJ's Star Trek. It's *all there*. The corny amazing new academy guy who gets trashed because he's an asshole, the simulation test whose score is out the roof because of an idiotic stunt, the girl who won't abide to his charms, the girl who does, the drunk friend, the lookin' out the window to see the legacy starship he has to "conquer", the ship hangar, the attribution of a ****ty ship to the corny protagonist, the getting into a pit of wrecked ambushed ships, the aforementioned glares...
Man, I'm really slow jesus christ.
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When you run out of ideas before you run out of money, always double down on explosions and cheese.
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I wasn't expecting any kind of deep meditation on the meaning of life from B&C. Everything about it, all the way back to the spiritual pilot in Razor, said it would much heavier on the action-adventure elements (while Caprica, for instance, went big in the opposite direction, with lots of character and philosophy, but very little action until the end). And even with the video game, handgun-versus-a-fighter opening (speaking of, shouldn't Adama have lost points for dying of radiation poisoning?), it's still not as over the top as Adama and a Centurion having a shootout and fistfight at 30,000 feet.
I wanted cheeseburger sci-fi, (but a good cheeseburger) and that's what I'm getting. A lot of the details are interesting. I like the old Raptors. Gotta wonder why the Galactica is not only so overgunned compared to what she ended up being, but compared to the other Battlestars in B&C, and what changed. Same question for the hangar bay. Maybe the Viper Mark IV was so awesome they decided they could close up the hangar bay a bit and do with only a quarter the original squadron size.
No such questions about the CIC though. That fits perfectly with the evolution we saw from the Galactica to the Pegasus/Valkyrie of smaller, more automated command systems. That's a lot of monitors and extras to be replaced by just Dee and Gaeta, but it fits.
Curious if the use of the holoband is going anywhere, or if it was something they were saving for the series. The prop looks dumbed down from the Caprica version, but we would've seen them around later if they'd been able to make them safe against the Cylons. That could be coming later in this movie, or a plotline saved for the potential series. In the mini, Adama really seemed to take it personally when he told Roslin that a lot of people died on Galactica because they wanted a faster computer to make life easier. It could be that Cylon computer infiltration hasn't yet become much of a thing.
Did we ever see Adama's back before? I know we would've remembered if he had a tattoo, even a little one. It's just as weird as I expected seeing the Caprica FBI agent as Commander of the Galactica, especially when he starts bringing up the Adamas' old mob ties.
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I'n having a love/hate relationship with the new Raptor. I like it having a rear turret, feels right for the first war era. Ditto for it not being jump capable. What I dislike are the new engines and the B-24 tail; they look like they took them off another ship and welded them on.
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C'mon guys, some of you are being too harsh. It's new Battlestar with some decent effects and story. Just finished episode 2 and I'm already loving it. The acting isn't great (I like Adama's copilot), but you have to remember it is a glorified web series....
Overall I'm impressed AND slightly perplexed. This is a decent product of an established and well loved property, why the hell did Syfy avoid showing it as long as they did? Somebody over there needs to be fired.
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According the webmaster for the Battlestar wiki, he's spoken to people involved with the show (including the script) and the Vipers on Galactica aren't retconned MkII's but are actually MkIII's. I'm taking that with a pinch of salt seeing as it flies in the face of Adama being established as a MkII pilot during the war.
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C'mon guys, some of you are being too harsh. It's new Battlestar with some decent effects and story. Just finished episode 2 and I'm already loving it. The acting isn't great (I like Adama's copilot), but you have to remember it is a glorified web series....
Battlestar was important (to me, at least) because it was science fiction TV that could swim in the same pool as 'real' dramatic television. By that metric Blood and Chrome's first 24 minutes are decidedly unimpressive - even Caprica came out of the blocks a little stronger. It certainly wasn't shot as a web series, so that doesn't earn it any forgiveness.
Overall I'm impressed AND slightly perplexed. This is a decent product of an established and well loved property, why the hell did Syfy avoid showing it as long as they did? Somebody over there needs to be fired.
They avoided showing it because the effects took forever to finish, and apparently used up so much money that some of the shots are lifted straight from other BSG products.
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Well we got a good shot of first war era Archer AA missiles :)
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Also:
(http://media.battlestarwiki.org/images/d/d7/Battlestar_Galactica_-_Blood_And_Chrome_Appearence.png)
Although this confirms what some people have said since the miniseries that the ship was stripped of armor, there's an issue in that the PD guns on the nose are covered by armor plates!
Unless sometime between year 10 and 12 of the war (Razor) a refit was done that scrapped some armor and artillery in favor of more PD guns.
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According the webmaster for the Battlestar wiki, he's spoken to people involved with the show (including the script) and the Vipers on Galactica aren't retconned MkII's but are actually MkIII's. I'm taking that with a pinch of salt seeing as it flies in the face of Adama being established as a MkII pilot during the war.
That's kind of weird. I mean, the cockpit is exactly the same (because it's the same set), almost all of the shape and details are the same, just slightly altered (it's a lot less drastic than differences in the Mark VII or the Zephyr retcon models. Heck, it's less drastic than the difference between the six-foot and four-foot models of the Enterprise-D on Star Trek). And Galactica is obviously the same ship, and it's not even a retcon. We're supposed to believe they ripped off half the guns and walled off three levels of hangar bay.
On the other hand, a borderline-imperceptical model change like that does make me feel better about my headcanon that that sketch from the SDS revival that became the Mark VII was the Mark VI.
They avoided showing it because the effects took forever to finish, and apparently used up so much money that some of the shots are lifted straight from other BSG products.
That's how it seemed at first. IIRC, set photos of them shooting were leaked around February, 2011. There was silence about progress until November, 2011, when Doug Drexler said B&C had just wrapped (http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/update-on-the-update-time-to-get-the-mains-back-on-line/). Bear McCreary revealed he was scoring it sometime within the next two months, and by February of this year, he said he'd finished recording. Music is pretty much the last thing done, so at that point, it was ready to go. That was confirmed in March, when the leaked teaser came out, showing a bunch of completed scenes.
So, yeah, they've been sitting on this for at least eight months since it was ready to air. Possibly as much as a year, since Bear reported it as something he was now allowed to announce, not something that had just happened, so it might've really been finished-finished, editing, sound, music, the whole shebang, when Drexler made that blog post.
The interesting part is the lengthy gap between photography and wrapping post. The apparent answer was that B&C was biting off a lot more than they could chew and it took almost a whole year to do all the 3D work. That's ruled out by the CGSociety article on B&C (http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/battlestar_galactica_blood_chrome) which mentions that post took up five months (which, yes, is a lot, but it's a lot less than the eight months Drexler's post suggested, and a hell of a lot less than the two year total between shooting and release). My guess is that there were delays during production caused by Universal and SyFy constantly going back and forth on if it was a webseries, if it was a movie, if it was a pilot, if it was cancelled...
As for the stock footage, so far the only incidences of that were in the opening narration, and there wasn't any stock footage beyond that in any of the trailers. My suspicion is that it was added in fairly last-minute, mostly stock footage and a couple of new or refurbished shots that could be banged out quickly. I'd bet the Cylon carrying the kid was originally shot for the montage/trailer in the Caprica finale, and cut out or never finished.
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So I watched the first two episodes.
My general impression is .... well, it's not as bad as I feared and not as good as I hoped. The microepisode format is irritating as hell, with each episode being constrained to one or two scenes, and each episode having to deliver some sort of big moment. Not my favourite sort of forced storytelling; I really hope that whenever they get around to recutting it for TV, the pacing works better.
Also, lensflares. I likes me some sprinkling of nice lensflares, but this.... it'S way too obnoxious.
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C'mon guys, some of you are being too harsh. It's new Battlestar with some decent effects and story. Just finished episode 2 and I'm already loving it. The acting isn't great (I like Adama's copilot), but you have to remember it is a glorified web series....
Battlestar was important (to me, at least) because it was science fiction TV that could swim in the same pool as 'real' dramatic television. By that metric Blood and Chrome's first 24 minutes are decidedly unimpressive - even Caprica came out of the blocks a little stronger. It certainly wasn't shot as a web series, so that doesn't earn it any forgiveness.
Overall I'm impressed AND slightly perplexed. This is a decent product of an established and well loved property, why the hell did Syfy avoid showing it as long as they did? Somebody over there needs to be fired.
They avoided showing it because the effects took forever to finish, and apparently used up so much money that some of the shots are lifted straight from other BSG products.
Well made points. But c'mon, don't tell me you didn't get chills when they showed the old girl (or in this case, the young girl) for the first time?
As I understand it Syfy has been sitting on the finished product for a LONG time. My point is they could have easily shoved aside one of their crappy "original" movies on a Saturday and aired this in its entirety. Unless I'm speaking too soon and the quality drops off significantly, this seems more than good enough to air and pick up some ratings full of Battlestar starved fans.
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Wonder if it's worth waiting for the full "unrated" 2 hour version next year. The way they are broadcasting this is really bizarre.
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Well I've told people to keep the spoilers in here, but it only takes one halfwit to ruin the plot for you between now and February (or whenever they air the whole thing).
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Yeah, I won't lie it's good just to see the ships and hear Bear again.
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So what do people think of the BSG Blood and chrome pilot series being shown on Machinima Prime you tube channel?
So far i think its ok but i have one huge complaint and some minor ones. Biggest one of them all, is that every light has a huge lens flare effect on it and in some scenes it nearly covers up the actors! It just ruins the shots if you ask me, that was one thing that was drilled into us at uni during the Film & Tv part of my course. Lens flares as good if you keep them to a minium and when there is a reason to use them but to just use them on everything is bad and ruins the film. I know for a fact if i handed in some like blood and chrome to my tutors for an assigment i would fail. I remember they used Star Trek as prime example of this during lectures.
Also why are all the swear words, even the mild ones which can be aired before the watershed(well here in the UK anyway) all bleep or somebody dropping spanner when the word is said.
Apart from these its a pretty good show, get to see some classic Cylon raiders and Baseships!
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Your first complaint, which I share, reminded me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAaX8Aq6smQ
So far I think it looks ok, but I really hope the storyline picks up, maybe even discreetly continue what started on Caprica, but that's just me.
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There's a thread about this in the Diaspora forum
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Merged the topics.
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Well I've told people to keep the spoilers in here, but it only takes one halfwit to ruin the plot for you between now and February (or whenever they air the whole thing).
Not too worried about spoilers, just wondering if it might feel like a more coherent experience.
I find the massively expanded CGI sets really disconcerting. CIC is pretty unrecognisable. Also I guess the greenscreen set up means they can't have corridors, hence all the fancy lifts and a.. tram?
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Although this confirms what some people have said since the miniseries that the ship was stripped of armor, there's an issue in that the PD guns on the nose are covered by armor plates!
The new armor plating is a retcon since the original CG model was built as if the ship had always looked like it did. Some of those new guns also clip through the hull :P
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The new armor plating is a retcon since the original CG model was built as if the ship had always looked like it did. Some of those new guns also clip through the hull :P
Not to mention two of those guns are built directly on top of where the missile silos were established to be.
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So, adding space-to-ground missiles explains why two of those guns were ripped out. Who wants to take a whack at fanwanking a reason they'd remove the other forty? ;)
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I find the massively expanded CGI sets really disconcerting. CIC is pretty unrecognisable. Also I guess the greenscreen set up means they can't have corridors, hence all the fancy lifts and a.. tram?
I'm gonna pretend that's meant for moving stuff between storage and the flight deck (and The Bucket didn't have anything to put in storage during the series). I never realized how much I liked the corridor scenes... I get the feeling that everything we've seen has been cut together to fit the 10min format, mostly based on how the scenes jump around so much, and only like 3 people have names so far.
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It's a sad day when Forward Unto Dawn, a web-show based on a game has more nuance and character development then a web-show based on a TV show regarded for its character development.
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I find the massively expanded CGI sets really disconcerting. CIC is pretty unrecognisable. Also I guess the greenscreen set up means they can't have corridors, hence all the fancy lifts and a.. tram?
I'm gonna pretend that's meant for moving stuff between storage and the flight deck (and The Bucket didn't have anything to put in storage during the series). I never realized how much I liked the corridor scenes... I get the feeling that everything we've seen has been cut together to fit the 10min format, mostly based on how the scenes jump around so much, and only like 3 people have names so far.
It's just bizzare that they can't even get the money to build a cheap generic corridor set. One L-shape of corridor with greenscreen at either end would have let them do a whole lot more.
Or why they felt the need in the first place to make all these expansions, which surely take more time and money to set up and render than a CGI version of the original set would. It doesn't feel like the Galactica any more, in fact it barely feels like real ship.. just a selection of brightly lens flared cavernous spaces. Connected by swooshy lifts and trams for no good reason.
I'd really be quite happy with quite a shallow action packed BSG prequel, but having even that be a mess of overly shiny CGI..
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I'm sure they could've done a corridor shot on greenscreen (heck, they still might), and they absolutely could've redone all the sets as they were. Part of the idea in doing this as a CG series was to do stuff they couldn't have built physically. Personally, I always wondered exactly how they got the Vipers from one pod to the other in the Miniseries, and it irritated me that in BSG's haste to not be Star Trek, we never once saw an elevator in six years. And no one is going to be walking an injured crewman from engineering to sickbay across a mile of corridors and down thirty flights of stairs.
Did they go over-the-top in making more elaborate versions of the old sets? Yeah, probably. But as Drexler pointed out, they made sure to use the original sets as a starting point, so you could see where they line up with the versions in B&C. As far as near-unrecognizable hand-waved "refits" of sci-fi ships go, it's a lot more faithful to the original design than the U.S.S. Enterprise from the Star Trek movies was to the original TV show.
It's interesting to mention "Forward Unto Dawn," since the only thing FUD and B&C have in common are the distribution method and the rough release date. FUD was intended to be a more character and plot based exploration of its universe, to flesh out the action-oriented take the video games provide. B&C has the opposite aim, to provide an action/adventure story of the BSG universe to counterpoint the more cerebral and deliberative tone of the parent shows (remember how there was exactly one space battle in all of season 3)? Also, not negligibly, FUD had a $10 million production, while B&C was made with $2 million. For comparison, "The Lost Tales," the Babylon 5 direct-to-DVD project five years ago, also had a $2 million budget. Now, they did get a corridor, but not much else. (That budget is also why I forgive them for the candy-colored, bloom-and-flare art style. They don't have any live-action to match, like when they put in a centurion or did a set extension on the hangar on the old show, nor do they have a giant James Cameron production apparatus to get their CG perfect in isolation. It's understandable that they'd use every dirty trick in the book to set the actors into the backgrounds, even it has the effect of making the real stuff look animated rather than the animated stuff look real. Still, I like animation. Clone Wars, good stuff).
Right now, I have a feeling that my biggest issue is going to be the plot structure necessitated by developing the movie as a seven-part serial. It's like commercial breaks on steroids, since it seems part of the the aim was the make each section kind of stand-alone. I don't know if it'll be possible, since we've only seen a quarter of it so far, but maybe the longer TV and DVD versions shuffle some scenes in the edit so the plot isn't so obviously broken into discrete chunks.
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I don't mean to be a major n00b here, but does anyone know how I get to view it in Australia? I had a brief look and it doesn't look like I can watch it here.
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B&C is giving us some great glimpses of Colonial hardware we've never seen before. I imagine that for the mod/game makers it's providing a lot of good fodder. So far we've seen a bunch of other large ships surrounding the Galactica (warships or support vessels do you think?), an older Raptor, what is possibly another model of Viper (and there's no reason both couldn't be in service at the same time), and now have canon proof that Battlestars aren't the only category of warship (Heavy Cruiser). We're also getting to see what things were like when the Galactica was operating as she was intended, with no shortage of resources or personnel.
Yeah the absence (so far) of any deep characterization is disappointing, but I find the complete lack of the horrible metaphysical garbage that has plagued the franchise from the start to be most refreshing. It's a straight up war story, playing the 'real world military IN SPAAAAAAAAACE' aspect to the hilt, and I'm perfectly fine with that. I would think people who have spent considerable time and effort making a game that revolves around exactly that would be more appreciative of what they're getting in this latest show.
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This is nowhere near a good 'straight up war story'. It's not a war story and the flat characterization and lack of anything interesting happening means it's not a good story, period.
BSG had a lot of metaphysical claptrap, but also a lot of really interesting questions about utilitarian vs deontological approaches to crisis management in politics and warfare, and the difference between faithful simulation of humanity and 'the real deal'. None of that here yet.
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The metaphysical shenanigans of BSG were quite interesting to a point. I saw the whole thing as an experiment on "how far can we go and what crazy things can we devise as we move along", but then they kinda blew it taking it too damn seriously. Particularly joyful were the first two seasons where you really did not have a clue on whether the metaphysics were real, were psychological devices, or just blatant political lies that kept the fleet united. They kept the audience guessing and in the meantime there were lots of interesting questions on how politics and religion got hold of a desperate population, how detailed and formulated and sometimes downright machiavelic the crafting of these ideas are, and what role all these have in the creation of a people. How people were moved by believing in them, the hope they gave, and the sheer tension all these promises had with the absolute absurdism of everything surrounding them.
The show was just amazingly good at portraying humanity in its entirety at its peak tension.
Theeeen it kinda wandered to somewhere boring, clumsy and facepalmworthy. But it was really something for a while.
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I feel it wandered into straight up stupid at a certain point. They spent a long time with things being ambiguous. Moore even says so on one of the commentaries. Is it coincidence or divine intervention that keeps saving Baltar, for example? For a couple seasons at least either interpretation is valid. And then the show just went off a cliff and resulted in a final season that I would rather just forget even happened. Not unlike Lost.
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The first two seasons of Galactica were the perfect "aircraft carrier in space." It had tight story lines and characters and solid depiction of a military unit on the run and responsible for the last vestiges of its civilization. The mysteries of the Cylons, the questions about the overarching story of the colonies and the possibility of divine intervention just added delicious icing to the cake. Its proof a good SciFi war story can be made for the TV that's smart and engaging. When those mysteries were resolved in an unsatisfactory manner, for me, and the focus shifted away from a tight depiction of that carrier in space concept I felt it suffered much for the loss.
Blood and Chrome so far has not been a return to form, in fact so far it hasn't captured any of the above. I'd love a to have more of the first two seasons of Galactica with the added bonus of an entire theater of war and its attendant complexity. BSG only dealt with a couple of military units and a few rag tag fleet of civvies, the First Cylon War offers the opportunity to depict an entire military and civilization worth of quandaries and dilemmas as they are driven to the brink by an implacable foe. A foe that is in fact a culmination of their hubris and sins, almost like another universe I can think of. Hell I'd forgive some of the terribad things they've done to Galactica and the Vipers if it were otherwise solid. What's been given so far is more like a cheesy cartoon of BSG. Popping your canopy and shooting Raiders with a pistol is straight up 80s GI Joe shenanigans. Toaster anacondas look like they ripped off Thundercats or He-Man. More guns, more Vipers, more lens flare a good Battlestar experience does not make. Trying to excuse it as an war story holds no water, BSG already proved how great tightly packaged war story can be. I admit I maybe am being a little harsh and it might improve immensely as it goes along but if the whole thing is similar to the first two episodes then I'd frankly rather watch TOS.
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i think we're judging this show a bit early... Yeah the show starts whit something very ''last action hero'' style,but if the story will be focused into the Bill's Point of view,we should see the show grow as his main character.
What worried me is that after the pilot this show will never see the light of day,and all this story will not have the time to grow and become a good BSG show...that's all.
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Unfortunately that's a given at this point - the show will not be picked up for series.
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Popping your canopy and shooting Raiders with a pistol is straight up 80s GI Joe shenanigans.
To be fair, Adama knew damn well it was a simulation and that he'd win if he killed the toaster before he was killed. He was just exploiting the game in order to win. Now if we'd seen something like that in a real life situation, I'd be just as inclined to think it was stupid.
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Popping the canopy scene became more tolerable after finding out it's a sim, but otherwise I'm inclined to agree with Slayer. "It's a war story!" doesn't excuse it from lacking substance, atmosphere, or having some pretty bad design / style / editing decisions. Look no further than BSG mini / season one for an example of a well executed war story. So far, this doesn't hold a candle to it. To be fair, it's storytelling job isn't made easy by the idiotic "let's split it into 12 minute chunks" decision that only contributes to it feeling like a cartoon.
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Popping your canopy and shooting Raiders with a pistol is straight up 80s GI Joe shenanigans.
To be fair, Adama knew damn well it was a simulation and that he'd win if he killed the toaster before he was killed. He was just exploiting the game in order to win. Now if we'd seen something like that in a real life situation, I'd be just as inclined to think it was stupid.
To be honest I always figured when the balloon went up against the Cylons pretty much all the meatbags on the "web" using those holo googles where going to have their brains fried. There was something always delicious about that virtual escapism consuming all those who used it a blinding flash of destroyed synapses and obliterated neural networks courtesy of the Toasters. In a society that is now supposed to be rejecting technology in order to survive I figured all those holo interfaces where going to be one of the first things in the trash compactor, I don't recall them in BSG.
Plus if its a legit military simulator and not Call of Duty actually destroying a fighter with your side arm is stupid. Many of the lighter machine guns mounted on World War Two aircraft where found to be lacking in kill power and Adama's going to plug a Raider with a pistol?.
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You are out of order, soldier. Raiders' HP was artificially low. One must check the $Armor Type figures before spreading all these libelous lies against one of the best meatbag pilots we have in our navy. Have you even bothered to read the armor.tbl of that raider son? I'll have you cleaning the decks of this ship 24/7 for a whole week if you repeat this frakkin nonsense again, understand? Carry on, soldier.
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Which key do I press to pop the canopy in Diaspora? Also, when my sidearm runs out of rounds, what do I press to eject? I figure if I extend my fist while I eject, I can punch the Raider with an additional 1000 HP worth of damage.
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Which key do I press to pop the canopy in Diaspora? Also, when my sidearm runs out of rounds, what do I press to eject? I figure if I extend my fist while I eject, I can punch the Raider with an additional 1000 HP worth of damage.
We wanted to integrate this particular game mechanic as seamlessly as possible into the game; for this reason, there is no key command for this - you activate it by discharging a real sidearm (team recommends 9mm or .45 standard) into your monitor.
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Call me crazy, but I thought both episodes (watched them twice now) were TERRIBLE. Bad sets, recton everything, and terrible acting. Literally nothing looked right to me except the uniforms.
Funny thing is I thought "The Plan" was a bit fanboyish, but Blood & Chrome feels like an out-and-out foreign film knock off of the series.
I'll probably watch the rest of them anyways given the lack of scifi on tv, but I'll have to pretend it isn't BSG to enjoy it.
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No I don't think you're crazy. The script is insultingly shallow so far - the cocky rookie out for blood, the weary vet just a few missions from retirement, the hero ace who's ALL A SHAM, the sexy and icy but slightly undercompetent civilian, the ~secret mission~. All so tired.
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The problem ain't the clichés. The problem is the boringness of the chosen clichés and its boring execution. You can almost hear the yawning of the show's writers. Or is that my sleep deprivation?
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Now if we'd seen something like that in a real life situation, I'd be just as inclined to think it was stupid.
Not to belabor the point... (http://www.veoh.com/watch/v1375557rkxSN7yZ?h1=BSG+Razor+Flashback+4)
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LOL! i almost forgot! :D
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I completely forgot. I need to watch Razor again. o_o
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Now if we'd seen something like that in a real life situation, I'd be just as inclined to think it was stupid.
Not to belabor the point... (http://www.veoh.com/watch/v1375557rkxSN7yZ?h1=BSG+Razor+Flashback+4)
I won't argue its dumb, but at least they both missed.
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I'm still waiting for the Cylon snake. Hopefully, it will be on a plane and someone will mutter the phrase, "I have had enough of these motherfraking snakes on this motherfraking plane!" old Adama could pull that off but I'm thinking Coker's got young Adama beat.
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Well, it's not a snake but from the trailer, it looks like there's a robot wolf thing there.
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Revisiting the Viper Mark III, I took this diagram Doug Drexler posted of the B&C hangar deck with Vipers (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151098819296104&set=pb.570346103.-2207520000.1352928227&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-prn1%2F51722_10151098819296104_1110263665_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-prn1%2F63361_10151098819296104_1110263665_n.jpg&size=1576%2C2048) and did a to-scale comparison with the Mark II and Mark VII. At first I though there must've been some mistake in either the marked scale or my conversion given the size, but comparing the cockpit to the one in the Mark II (which is the same set), it looks like it really is that big (and, thus, not a Mark II retcon or variant). I guess it's another one of those things where since they didn't have to build one in real life (and crate it up and truck it to a ferry for filming), they could make it a bit less fun-sized than the original Vipers.
(That link also has some interesting comments from Drexler answering questions about the design process. It doesn't fully explain why, say, Pegasus had the same basic hangar design as the pared-down Galactica, but I suppose the only difference between a bulkhead and a closed sliding door is if you ever see it open. And it led me to this photo (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=319594018094543&set=pb.153581084695838.-2207520000.1352929325&type=3&theater) from earlier in the year, with a front view of what looks like a B&C Viper, but they say is a render of a concept for the Viper II from the miniseries. I've never seen it before, and Google reverse image search doesn't recognize it).
[attachment deleted by a basterd]
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The question is, does it fit the launch tubes at that size.
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And it led me to this photo (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=319594018094543&set=pb.153581084695838.-2207520000.1352929325&type=3&theater) from earlier in the year, with a front view of what looks like a B&C Viper, but they say is a render of a concept for the Viper II from the miniseries. I've never seen it before, and Google reverse image search doesn't recognize it).
That's definitely the basis for the model used in the show, if you look here the only difference I can see is the elevation on the nose that that MkII also has. (http://i4.minus.com:81/ibqEe8QvEJcBFI.png)
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The clay model is also missing the raised racing stripe between the canopy and the nose, which fits with it being an early version and not just a mislabeled leaked still from B&C. It's always interesting when older, discarded stuff finds its way back into the limelight. I wonder if they'll ever figure out a way to use the Thirteenth Colony Viper. (http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=420)
(The link doesn't explain what it was intended for, but judging from the fact that the canopy matches the Mark II, and that Starbuck's Mark II when she first returned was all CG instead of the full-sized prop on a gimbal and greenscreen like it would normally be for a shot like that, my guess is they considered having her come back in a new Terran Viper instead of the one she blew up in, but changed their minds during post-production).
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I seriously hope they don't. :p
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Our approach was that 40 years ago, Galactica was the tip of the spear, able to go toe to toe with the Cylons, and meet them head on. With the end of the first Cylon War, and as newer more efficient ships came on line, Galactica became displaced, eventually becoming second, or even third string. Economically she became a white elephant, whose cost to run was out of proportion to her worth. Facilities were stripped to the bone, bulkheads went up where there used to be extensive service areas, and flight crews reassigned to more advanced ships.
So I took the sets from the last show and said, that wall wasn't always there... this ceiling used to be higher, those viper service bays used to handle a steady stream of planes.The Eddie Olmos BSG established a modest number of (three or four) elevators that brought vipers from the landing deck above. The turn over capability was insufficient. Even if you only landed 50 vipers, it would take forever to get them downstairs, inspected, repaired, refueled, re-munitioned, and back on line. Our solution was that back in the good old days, each viper bay had four levels, inspection, minor repairs, avionics, munitions and fueling. Each bay had it's own independent conveyor system. It's almost like a Tokyo car park. With this system, each bay was like the magazine of an automatic pistol, the vipers being bullets. You could just keep pulling that trigger and launch wave after wave of vipers, as fast as you could land them. I remember in an early story meeting I described it as the viper "hot stack". David Eick loved that, and it got a big reaction all the way around. Ding! Ding! Ding! The boy wins a cigar!
So now we got an explanation of the Galactica "retcon".
... The Galactica was designed to counter a Basestar, and you've seen the cloud of raiders a Basestar can launch. So figure that the Galactica carries almost 2000 vipers. There are about 20 planes in a squadron. That is an immense force, but when you consider the size of a Battlestar, not so out of sight. Our civilian" cargo" doesn't know her ships. Not really her specialty. The Archeron is in reality a Battlestar.
Well, Battlestars are so far still the only canon large warship designation. Hmph.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151098819296104&set=pb.570346103.-2207520000.1352928227&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-prn1%2F51722_10151098819296104_1110263665_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-prn1%2F63361_10151098819296104_1110263665_n.jpg&size=1576%2C2048
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2,000 does seem like a large number, especially when factoring in the crew that would go with it. That said, a Nimitz-class carries 1/20th of that, with less than 1/4 the floor space, no 3-tier system and significantly larger aircraft. It'd be very busy, but I think it's feasible.
I've no problem with the idea of retconning the main series hangar bay to be a stripped down version - some thought's gone into there at least - but the external stuff could've been done a lot better: half the guns intersect with the armour and they've blocked off at least one of the RCS thrusters (http://i.imgur.com/r5BQC.jpg).
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Yeah even with some disarmament BS the over armament doesn't work from a structural standpoint when comparing the real Galactica and this modified turd.
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Drexler hasn't said anything about the guns or the armor, but my explanation ever since seeing the Columbia was that the additional armor plating was found to be superfluous and was removed (except for places that actually needed the protection) so the ship would be lighter and faster. Even the up-armored versions have asymmetrical gaps, so it's plausible the hull and ribbing was thought to be strong enough in general. As for the guns, I'm going to say newer batteries were developed with higher rates of fire, so they were consolidated into a few clusters rather than having them (and their highly explosive ammo stores) spread around the ship.
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The changes structurally do not work with the real Galactica. They show a painful lack of thought or planning other than "lets add more guns and more lens flare."
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Watched episodes 3 and 4. I found them horrible, honestly. I'll just list the stupid:
- Adama evades giant plungers while flying a raptor in a true 1990 video game fashion. When a scene reminds you of "Attack of the Clones", it's not a good sign.
- Valkyrie during the first war? Have these people even watched the original show?
- Berzerks are in there too. Did the colonials have any ship that wasn't over 40 years old at the time of the fall? We'll be seeing the Pegasus in there soon at this rate...
- Osiris: ugly, fragile looking design that has reflective hull for some reason. Interior looks like a ww2 sub with lots of lcd screens added.
- Plot: nothing interesting so far.
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The Valk being very recent is fanon, fanon that makes some sense though...
Since there is an untextured ship in the scene I'm wondering if using the Valk was a placeholder for an era-specific light battlestar... (basically something like the Sobek)
The heavy cruiser we briefly see isn't too bad, and the Osiris seems like it *should* be fragile as a type of electronics warfare capship.
Wasn't a huge fan of the FTL plunger sequence (didn't really like it when they showed off the drive in S4 for that matter either).
Honestly the Valk was the first true total cringe moment from me. I'm wondering why even bother with the MK3 considering that on a cursory look there's less difference between that and the MK2 than the MKVII and the season 4 in house CGI version. I know that there are more differences, but at a glance it mostly looks like a different skin.
The rear turret Raptor variant seems like the best thing to come out of this so far, and even then the XXXtreme quad guns seemed overkill.
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The Valk being very recent is fanon, fanon that makes some sense though...
While they didn't outright go and say "This ship was never in 1CW", I wouldn't call it fanon - I'd call it common sense. Here's what we do know about her:
- much smaller than Galactica, with less firepower and smaller air wing;
- Adama used to command it, then got reassigned to Galactica as a form of punishment.
- the Valkyrie was apparently considered a pretty good command.
- you'd typically send a modern ship on a stealth black ops assignment if you can help it, leading to conclusion that the Valk is small, but state of the art. Especially during peace time when your fleet resources aren't stretched thin and you can choose.
- the exterior and CIC resemble more modern battlestar lines, and compare well with the Pegasus style.
Basically, if the Valkyrie was also over 40 years old at the time of the fall, then how is reassigning Adama from a smaller 40+ year old ship to a larger, more powerful 40+ year old ship a punishment? Feels more like a reward to me. Sure, the Galactica was about to be decommissioned, but how much time would a 40+ year old Valkyrie have ahead of her at that point anyway?
I'd say this is yet another example of just throwing everything in without thinking it through. I guess we could pretend the Colonials used the same Valkyrie space frame because it's essentially good, and just kept updating it's systems and weapons over the years without too much external differences. So the old Valkyrie we saw here could be the original, and the ones in nBSG could be like tier 4 refits or something. That would explain almost everything apart from the modern lines that seem to suggest "modern light battlestar", not "1CW slugger".
And no, there's no way you'll defend the horrible, reflective hull Osiris. It makes the Berzerk look good in comparison :)
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I just watched the first few episodes and, all in all, wasn't disappointed, but wasn't blown away either. As was mentioned earlier, you start to worry when you think of the Star Wars prequels, and since by the end of the first scene I was half expecting a couple of droids to jump on his wing and start tearing at the fuselage after he shot the Cyclon ship with a hand-gun, it didn't get off to the best of starts.
Then there is the contrived 'send the rookie on a secret mission' plot which would have had the likes of SFDebris and Confused Mathew crying down their microphones. Frankly, if the war was going so badly that they had to pass war-vital missions to new recruits, they wouldn't be able to hide it.
Comments on the plot aside, the acting itself was pretty good for the main part, though possibly the difference between the war-jaded vets and the starry-eyed rookies is overdone on occasion. Adama himself wasn't badly acted, but I didn't 'feel' Adama in the character.
To be honest, I enjoyed the rendered stuff for what it was, fun space-action, but since we know how the war ends anyway, and that Adama survives it, you worry more about Adamas co-pilot during combat than Adama himself. As for the quality of the models etc, well, I suppose a bit of leeway has to be given considering the situation, and as someone who grew up watching the original BSG, with its ships on strings with toilet-roll tube thrusters, it's still a massive improvement ;)
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The quality of the models isn't in question. Some of the designs are, as well as the oversaturated, overlit, everything-blue, full of lens flares rendering style.
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I thought that the Valkyrie was the large Galactica-type battlestar on the far right, while the ship that looks like the modern Valkyrie (there's actually 3 of those) are CGI stand-ins for lighter support ships.
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Basically, if the Valkyrie was also over 40 years old at the time of the fall, then how is reassigning Adama from a smaller 40+ year old ship to a larger, more powerful 40+ year old ship a punishment? Feels more like a reward to me. Sure, the Galactica was about to be decommissioned, but how much time would a 40+ year old Valkyrie have ahead of her at that point anyway?
The punishment angle always seemed stupid to me (what? Something stupid in the backstory for "Hero"? (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Hero#General_2) Impossible!). Even if Galactica was old, she still would've a crew and airwing that was several times larger than Valkryie's, plus a wartime history implied to be comparable to the Enterprise in World War II. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CV-6)) Even if they ripped out the engines and tied it to a rock, commanding Galactica would've been a position of tremendous responsibility and prestige (like commanding the Constitution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution)), nothing like being reassigned to a desk job or quietly encouraged to take a lobbying job in the civilian sector.
Luckily, our only evidence for that is Tigh's drunken rantings, and third season Colonel Tigh is the least reliable character in all of BSG-dom.
I guess we could pretend the Colonials used the same Valkyrie space frame because it's essentially good, and just kept updating it's systems and weapons over the years without too much external differences. So the old Valkyrie we saw here could be the original, and the ones in nBSG could be like tier 4 refits or something. That would explain almost everything apart from the modern lines that seem to suggest "modern light battlestar", not "1CW slugger".
It's also possible that the Valkyrie they mentioned was the larger battlestar, and the one see in "Hero" is it's replacement, which coincidentally shares a design with the smaller battlestars in the ghost fleet (which is needlessly baroque from a storytelling standpoint, and if they wanted it to be a different ship, they would've used a different name, but it's an option). We always had evidence that they kept ships cosmetically identical to Galatica in service (one in the mini, a couple docked near Pegasus in Razor), and Galactica was treated as an anomaly for never having had better computers installed, so the age of the hull design isn't a big deal.
Adama himself wasn't badly acted, but I didn't 'feel' Adama in the character.
He reminds me a bit of Starbuck, which makes sense (his second or third scene in the miniseries has him saying she reminds him of him), but I'd say the biggest influence is Joe Adama in Caprica. I love how young Bill pronounces "Adama" with the same accent as his father. Though (and this really goes back to Razor), I'm not sure how I feel about Adama being born as Admiral Badass. All I could think about after seeing the scene in the CIC with Commander Nash was whether that ever came back to Adama during the series. Like, say, right before his one-ship assault on Occupied New Caprica, or his one-ship siege on the Cylon Homeworld.
I just imagine him looking around the CIC, suddenly remembering the first time he stood in that spot, and hearing Nash say, "I think you're a cocky son-of-a-*****," and then picking up the phone and giving his New Caprica speech. The one that goes "You all know this mission is a one-way trip... to total success." And then thinking, It ain't being cocky if you're really that good.
I feel like it might've been more interesting (and, again, Razor set the precedent) if Adama actually had to develop his insane confidence instead of having it, and being able to back it up, for his whole life. It would've made him seem more relatable.
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That'd make him like the brat from gundam seed destiny... ugh, no thanks..
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David, you bring some interesting points - agreed about the punishment angle and I suppose that valk theory is possible (but I consider it something of a stretch, tbh). BTW, anyone else feel like the guy they had as young Adama in Razor did a far better job of convincing us he was Adama than the kid in B&C? I'm just not feeling the Adama vibe from him.
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The punishment angle always seemed stupid to me (what? Something stupid in the backstory for "Hero"? (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Hero#General_2) Impossible!). Even if Galactica was old, she still would've a crew and airwing that was several times larger than Valkryie's, plus a wartime history implied to be comparable to the Enterprise in World War II. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CV-6)) Even if they ripped out the engines and tied it to a rock, commanding Galactica would've been a position of tremendous responsibility and prestige (like commanding the Constitution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution)), nothing like being reassigned to a desk job or quietly encouraged to take a lobbying job in the civilian sector.
Luckily, our only evidence for that is Tigh's drunken rantings, and third season Colonel Tigh is the least reliable character in all of BSG-dom.
My thinking on it is this. I do think Adama is being punished by being given the Galactica. But the issue is that the Valkyrie Spec Ops mission is a complete secret. So they couldn't suddenly assign him to a garbage scow without people wondering why. It would draw attention to something they don't want to.
Sticking him on Galactica on the other hand, is a way of giving him a commission that gets him out of the way but doesn't actually look like a punishment to outsiders for the reason you state. Tigh on the other hand picked up on exactly why they did it.
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That's actually a really good explanation. To outsiders, it looks like his last command is supposed to honor his service before retirement. To those privy to the circumstances, it's actually a dead end job.
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True, it was more of a way to slowly drum him out to retirement without making it too obvious as to why. Had the mission been a success they might have made him an admiral.
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According to prop uniforms Osiris is a battlestar :wtf:
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According to prop uniforms Osiris is a battlestar :wtf:
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Well she came across as some kind of communication/recon ship. I was always under the impression a Battlestar was supposed to be able to successfully engage a Basestar, but the crew of the Osiris is acting like a Basestar will rip it to shreds. I know there are different classes, but I thought they all should be able to hold against one Cylon ship. Guess not?
I enjoyed Ep 3+4. Fun action and I thought the Ghost Fleet was pretty cool. It's a nice show to turn your brain off for and just enjoy the ride.
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According to prop uniforms, "Kobol HQ" is a thing that exists. And the "G" in "BSG-75" stands for "Galactica," since the "T" in "BST-39" stands for "Triton." No reason to get excited, especially if it's never legible on-screen.
Oh, incidentally, they must've been playing with more than just the Vipers from the early days of the show's CGI. The landing deck of Galactica has "BSG-75" written on it instead of "BS-75," like in the series, something that was present in the earliest publicity shots from the show (http://www.modelermagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/kg_cg_ns_galactica-042.jpg), but was corrected long before airing (http://www.modelermagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/kg_cg_ns_galactica-047.jpg) (though it couldn't be removed from the version of the seal on the sets and uniform patches, leaving us with the somewhat-clumsy "Battlestar Group" retcon). Another fun thing is that the CIC had "Security footage" on some of the monitors of this shot (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:1104Tube_Mini.JPG) and this shot (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Porthangardeck.jpg) from the miniseries.
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I know there are different classes, but I thought they all should be able to hold against one Cylon ship. Guess not?
There's probably been more than one class of Basestar, considering there's more than one class of Battlestar. Or Osiris could be a pre-war class and as such the Basestars were literally built with it in mind.
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I've always seen battlestars as battleship/carrier hybrids with a minimum of two pods. If it's not a well armed and armored ship capable of deploying it's air wings, it's not a battlestar - and if it only has a single pod (hangar) it's probably more of an escort carrier. I have never seen battlestars as fragile, podless, reflective hull uglies that look like they'll fall apart if you look at them the wrong way. I wouldn't rely too much on B&C though, it's basically Galactica 1980 - The Next Generation. Or in other words, never happened :P
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I guess I'm not terribly upset about B&C 'damaging' the dignity of the franchise or not doing justice to its source material because I feel that that very source material ultimately took a giant steaming crap all over itself (although it's up for debate precisely when that happened). First with the increasing dumb culminating in a thoroughly unsatisfying and stupid finale in the main series, and then with Caprica. I really liked the idea of Caprica, and appreciate what they were trying to do, but the end result was...meh. The Plan also could have been a lot better and more interesting than it actually was.
All I wanted out of this was new ships and battles, and that's what I've gotten. Hopefully it will provide both a lot of new content and inspiration for modmakers. Frankly I have a lot more trust in fans like you to do justice to the setting than 'syfy'. You've already proven that you're worthy of that trust with R1.
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Your standards for the show proper are good but your standards for the battles are too lax. BSG hasn't had any good battles since the beginning of Season 3, and I'm including Blood and Chrome.
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The Plan was not thoroughly planned. Quite frankly, Neo-BSG sucked post New Caprica.
And I am looking at you Angel "Six/Baltar", You ain't scapin' my opinion of how terrible an idea y'all were.
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For me, this (http://i.imgur.com/KYL3y.gif) will always be the pinnacle of the show's battles.
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There were only, like, three shots in it, but "The Captain's Hand" is my favorite cinematographically. The lighting style and animation were the same as in "Resurrection Ship" (which was also gorgeous), but the staging was more in-your-face and actiony, rather than the God's-eye-view from RS. There's one long shot of the belly of the Pegasus blasting out flack and launching Vipers (which was edited into three, go figure) that I adore.
I think part of the reason space battles became more sparse as nuBSG went on is that they wanted to do something novel with each one, so it didn't get to the point where it was like the old show, where they needed to punch up an episode so they played the same three pieces of stock footage from the pilot (though, would it have killed them to render one more "combat landings" shot? Hell, just take the old one and move the camera).
I finally watched "Forward Unto Dawn" yesterday. It was better than I expected, though it, like Blood and Chrome, had a lot of stock characters and cliché elements (albeit different, more modern stock characters and clichés). I think the most instructive thing for Blood and Chrome if it goes to series would be the main character's arc. One of the themes in FUD was developing leadership skills, and though it was kind of glossed over in execution (Lasky punches a guy who provokes him, and suddenly starts paying attention in class and his training squad starts listening to his crazy ideas?), it could be transferred over to Young Adama, especially if B&C doesn't end with everyone on Galactica magically deciding Husker isn't an annoying little prick after all. His long-term plot could be something like a cross between Lee's and Kara's. Lee, in that he needs to come into himself and find the ability to inspire the best from others, and Kara, in that he has none of Lee's humility or self-doubt, but all of her cockiness. So he'd be starting off where Starbuck did in the mini, as the best pilot on Galactica, but a second-stringer because of his attitude problem.
The trouble with doing a coming-of-age story like this is that you're walking a tightrope between naked wish fulfillment (see Wesley Crusher) and Goofus and Gallant didacticism (Beginning-of-episode Adama rushes ahead and is shot in the shoulder by a Centurion and his buddy has his guts ripped out while saving him. End-of-episode Adama methodically sweeps the Cylon base and eliminates all enemies with zero casualties.)
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I think the most instructive thing for Blood and Chrome if it goes to series would be the main character's arc.
It won't, though, so it won't face those problems. Overall though, for those saying that it may be stupid plot wise but at least it's good action - it's not. It's dumb action, there hasn't been a single fight in it so far that wasn't boring. There was nothing even close to "Resurrection Ship", or the battle of New Caprica. The awesome moments got replaced by ones that break suspension of disbelief by being so silly/unrealistic that you know your protagonists have plot armor, so it becomes boring.
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Your standards for the show proper are good but your standards for the battles are too lax. BSG hasn't had any good battles since the beginning of Season 3, and I'm including Blood and Chrome.
Whaaaaa? Come on, what about the first parts of the finale battle? Or the battle for the Resurrection Hub? And the season 4 opener, while it had its problems, was at least 'good' by most standards.
Still, yeah; BSG was at its best when it was furthest from that stupid religious/mythological/jigsaw puzzle supernatural crap. 'God did it', apparently, and that would make God a complete monster who fuels xenocide for fun.
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The changeover from Zoic to inhouse ushered in a flood of lousy retcons and diminished technical prowess. The Mark VII suddenly gets turned into a hand vacum, Pegasus spontaneously sprouts an extra turret mid battle, the raider shows up with a centurion frowny face. Even New Caprica when compared to prior work shows a dramatic drop in overall quality. While NC has lots of showy crap going on like the atmo jump and the Pegasus ramming if you actually compare the details between the zoic's work and inhouse you can see it easily. Galactica was pitch perfect the first two seasons both from a CGI perspective as well as the much tighter storyline.
If you need proof just watch this bit from the Rez, take note as every battery and CIWS mount is utilized and every piece of lead is accounted for. That simply doesn't happen after season two, heck in most of the battles I saw Galactica's main weapons sat in their cradles the whole time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avjisR2kXnk#t=1m16s)
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maybe you're right, but honestly i can't be so bad whit the In-House visual effects:
I love both MkVII and basestar retcon, and,as i said in another thread, the spaces backgrounds are less...well, ''empty'' :)
I mean they used nebulas, space dusts and a more coloured deep space,very different from the same black skybox used by Zoic.
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I dunno, I feel that while a nebula in itself is more visually interesting than deep space, it takes me out of it when they pop up so often you forget space is supposed to be black, it's certainly been the case with B&C so far. You kind of lose a sense of scale when the background in every shot is something of finite size.
Also, mourn the physical sets:
(http://i.imgur.com/x5w4U.png)
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I dunno, I feel that while a nebula in itself is more visually interesting than deep space, it takes me out of it when they pop up so often you forget space is supposed to be black, it's certainly been the case with B&C so far.
Yep. One of my hobby being amateur astronomy, Zoic's version of space is much closer to what it really looks like. The colorful nebulae everywhere.. yea no. Space is mostly empty, but when you find something beautiful in it it just means so much more because of it. Filling it with oversaturated crap in every pixel of the shot just doesn't feel right to me.
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And yet, the sparseness and bleakness of the first two seasons VFX helped reinforce the reality of the show. I don't need all the colour everywhere all the time, I want the graphics and action to be clean and, for lack of a better word, realistic (As any astronomer will tell you, colours in space are a deliberate abstraction, generated by mapping UV or IR radiation into the visible spectrum). The action in Zoic's scenes was always readable, it was always clear what was going on, who was firing on whom, and what the ships were actually doing, the later scenes lost this.
Add to that the lack of consistency issues, and it's clear to see why Zoic's stuff is preferable to the inhouse stuff.
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I dunno, I feel that while a nebula in itself is more visually interesting than deep space, it takes me out of it when they pop up so often you forget space is supposed to be black, it's certainly been the case with B&C so far.
Yep. One of my hobby being amateur astronomy, Zoic's version of space is much closer to what it really looks like. The colorful nebulae everywhere.. yea no. Space is mostly empty, but when you find something beautiful in it it just means so much more because of it. Filling it with oversaturated crap in every pixel of the shot just doesn't feel right to me.
You guys must hate the backgrounds in Homeworld...
Unless this is BSG-specific.
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Different aesthetics. Homeworld works because it's basically fantasy anyway; In a strongly realistic drama setting like BSG, it's out of place because it doesn't fit the mood, as it were.
In addition, it's a big stylistic shift whichever way you go. They basically changed the visual formula established in S1 and S2, which is a ... questionable decision.
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That makes sense. I don't really have a strong opinion either way, myself.
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Same here. I didn't pay attention to the background in BSG as much since there were other bigger problems since Zoic left.
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Pegasus spontaneously sprouts an extra turret mid battle.... Even New Caprica when compared to prior work shows a dramatic drop in overall quality. While NC has lots of showy crap going on like the atmo jump and the Pegasus ramming if you actually compare the details between the zoic's work and inhouse you can see it easily.
"Exodus" was the last episode before they went totally in-house. It was done by Atmosphere VFX, who also did a lot of Centurion work in season two and "The Hand of God," among other shots spread around throughout the first two seasons. It's hard to get an exact itemization, especially in episodes where multiple companies may have contributed shots. For instance, Atmosphere got an Emmy nomination for "Resurrection Ship, Part 1," but does that mean they did the whole thing? I don't know. There aren't any shots from it in their reel, nor in the portfolio of an artist I know who works there.
My point is, let's not start fetishizing the first half of the show. It's not like Zoic or Atmosphere never screwed anything up. I can think of three shots off the top of my head there were obviously roughs that never should've made it to air. One of theme was a stock shot used several times before, so the use of an unfinished version was totally inexcusable. There were also a few cases of pieces of battlestars missing in certain shots. Maybe Pegasus's extra turret was to make up for its missing flight-pod struts. (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Pegasus_Hi-Res_5a.jpg) Or the fact that it didn't get a flight deck until "Razor" (remember the really tight camera work on the Vipers landing in "The Captain's Hand"?).
As for the Babylon 5-ification of space in the latter half of the series, I'm not sure how much of that you can blame on the actual artists. For one thing, there were a lot more motivated appearances of weird space stuff. The New Caprica nebula, the Lion's Head nebula, the star cluster, the Eye of Jupiter nova, the Ionian Nebula, the trinary star system, and the black hole were all written in the scripts. While there were other instances of colored space just for the hell of it (though they were sometimes also motivated, like to visually differentiate different areas of space, as when Boomer was jumping to the Colony or when Gaeta was lost in his Raptor), I'd say at least half, possibly more, were the writers' doing. Also, let's not forget that the first two seasons weren't exactly 2001. The miniseries had Ragnar, and didn't even bother to say (or clearly depict) if it was a planet or just a negative space wedgie. Then there's the "Hand of God" asteroid thicket, the "Home" asteroid thicket, the "Scar" asteroid thicket, the "Hand of God" dust cloud, and the New Caprica nebula.
There were also a couple of shots in "The Plan" that perfectly matched the first season aesthetic, so the change in style was definitely a deliberate choice and not a case of incompetence or inability.
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From the panoramic skybox shots it's easy to make out Ragnar as a gas giant, but it's a bit trickier to do that from just the show.
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From the panoramic skybox shots it's easy to make out Ragnar as a gas giant, but it's a bit trickier to do that from just the show.
In most (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Ragnar_Escape.jpg) of the shots, (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Ragnarbattle3.jpg) it looks like it just stops a few miles away from the eye of the storm. Never mind the idea of a funnel cloud stable enough to fly a mile-long starship through, to the point where they're numbering the kinks in it.
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So the latest episodes are up on the tube...
Hahah heh heh heh
I'm fairly convinced they hired the team who does all those ****ty Saturday SyFy movies like sharktopus to make B&C.
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dat bad huh
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Your standards for the show proper are good but your standards for the battles are too lax. BSG hasn't had any good battles since the beginning of Season 3, and I'm including Blood and Chrome.
Whaaaaa? Come on, what about the first parts of the finale battle? Or the battle for the Resurrection Hub? And the season 4 opener, while it had its problems, was at least 'good' by most standards.
Still, yeah; BSG was at its best when it was furthest from that stupid religious/mythological/jigsaw puzzle supernatural crap. 'God did it', apparently, and that would make God a complete monster who fuels xenocide for fun.
Those battles were all terrible (though perhaps only because we had the godly artistic movement of the Res Ship battle to compare to). I'm with Starslayer here - I'm guilty of fetishizing the battle from Res Ship 2 as one of the pinnacles of CGI, a nigh-perfect convergence of artistic direction, technical excellence, and narrative catharsis. I think it deserves all the praise it gets.
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Haven't watched yet, does something like this happen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBizgLZX7W0 :p
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Pretty much, a giant toasterconda rears up from the planet below and eats the Osiris.
Actually something to add onto Battuta's comment is that by and large the battles in the first two seasons where much simpler affairs. Yes, Hand of God had Lee pull a pretty fancy piece of flying, but otherwise they were without any flashiness beyond being very well executed. Ragnar, 33, Scattered, Rez, Captain's Hand where all straight up gun/missile duels with clear objectives and play our in a believable fashion. Starting with New Caprica we start to seeing battles more about some kind of "wow moment" gimmicks. Belly flopping battlestars, crazy ramming scenes, tow roping Vipers, Raptor rocket volleys, Shadow battlecrabs. All this crap that really was like condiments meant to distract you from the fact that the Prime Rib had been swapped out for Salisbury Steak.
Rez is poetry in motion, but it also was straightforward and grounded enough that the overarching tension of Lee's crisis, the fate of the Fleet in the face of Cain and Adama's conflict was always looming like a spetcre over the proceedings.
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Oh God, 2 minutes in and where in the hell did the Cylons get missiles that can punch straight through a battlestar without exploding or at the least fragmenting into tiny pieces?
This is awful. I was expecting the Osiris to at least put up a decent battle but who the hell is writing this thing?
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This is awful. I was expecting the Osiris to at least put up a decent battle but who the hell is writing this thing?
Blood and Chrome was written by Michael Taylor, credited writer for the Galactica episodes, "Unfinished Business," "Taking a Break From All Your Worries," "Crossroads, Part I," "Razor," "The Ties That Bind," "Sine Qua Non," and "Islanded in a Stream of Stars," the Caprica episodes "Ghosts in the Machine" and "End of Line," and the Deep Space Nine episodes, "The Visitor" and "In the Pale Moonlight."
The story was developed by David Eick (exec producer for Galactica, credited with story for "Kobol's Last Gleaming I and II," and credited writer for "Home I and II" and "Hero"), and the writing team Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, (who together are credited writers for "Act of Contrition," "The Hand of God," "Scattered," "Valley of Darkness," "Flight of the Phoenix," "Scar," "Downloaded," "The Resistance" (the webisodes), "Exodus I and II," "Rapture," "Maelstrom," "He That Believeth In Me," "Revelations," "Sometimes a Great Notion," and "Someone to Watch Over Me").
The director was Jonas Pate, who directed "Colonial Day" and "Rebirth."
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You do realize that was a completely rhetorical statement, right?
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Yes. And it's rhetorical purpose was to imply that B&C was a quick cash-in slapped together by untalented hacks that the suits pulled off the street after the dramaturgical gods among men that made nuBSG moved on to bigger and better things. "The Organization" to nuBSG's "In the Heat of the Night." It was the second post today to make the same point, in fact.
The sad, terrible fact of it is that pretty much everyone involved with B&C except for the kid playing Adama worked on the parent show. And on the good episodes, too, not just meandering, pointless garbage like "Litmus," "Black Market," or "A Day in the Life."
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"In the Pale Moonlight."
I'm not sure I believe you. Hell, I'm not sure I believe them.
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That just brings to light a different issue: what the hell went wrong? As has been stated numerous times in this thread B&C just isn't as good as S1 and S2 of BSG.
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I think one problem with Blood and Chrome is basically that they learned the wrong lesson from Caprica. Caprica was low on the action and high on dialogue and characterisation. For all its (many) flaws the main characters weren't one dimensional stock characters precisely because the show spent maybe too long on character and not enough time on actually having them do something important to the plot.
Blood and Chrome went too far in the other direction. It's all flashy CGI and space battles but with no characters in the show we actually care about, who cares? I'm not certain how much of that is due to them removing large chunks of the show in order to butcher it for this webisode madness. Maybe the extended version will make me care a bit more about the people involved, but I am starting to doubt it.
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cylon meat.... WTF?
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Well we do know that the Cylons end game was to make the skinjobs, so it's not that far-fetched.
The real problem is that it then seems kinda odd that they'd need to be doing what they were up to in Razor. If they already had cyborg snakes, they were almost there already anyway.
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That's assuming the script went through some sort of peer review / sanity check. It doesn't look like it has - I don't care how much good stuff were these writers involved with before, they cocked up this one. Uninteresting plot with bland two dimensional characters that perform incredibly unrealistic, susension of disbelief breaking actions every few minutes. I really can't help but be reminded of the Star Wars prequels every time they release an episode.
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Hm, the Osiris would have had a chance, if they didn't order the ship on Naboo, but from the Separatists instead.
It started bad, and with every episode it gets worse.
I'm not quite sure what purpose these Snake hybrids serve, apart from having another pointless scene.
The entire skinjob/ hybrid thing should have dropped for B&C...with pretty much everything else they showed us.
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Ramirez! Protect the Burgertown!
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^ I loved that line, just for the way it un-self-conciously adds to the confusing Gordian Knot that is race and ethnicity in the 12 Colonies. What would a Colonial named "Ramirez" look like? I don't know, all the latinos we've seen so far are from Tauron and speak ancient greek. Baltar and Sharon both have hints of an Aerilon accent. The Gemenese tend to be dark-skinned, except when they aren't. It was all just slipshod world-building from day one, so why not have some fun with it?
That just brings to light a different issue: what the hell went wrong? As has been stated numerous times in this thread B&C just isn't as good as S1 and S2 of BSG.
No, it's been stated several times that B&C just isn't as good as the best episode of BSG. There were a fair amount of clunker scenes and clunker episodes in the parent show, but aside from some half-hearted allusions to the miniseries (by this point, we'd seen a woman in a red pantsuit and watched Starbuck make four laps through Galactica's one figure-eight hallway!), no one seems to be rating it in comparison to all the episodes of the show. Remember Sharon's optical-out port in her forearm and ability to take over for the ship's computer? The ten-episode Kobol arc which probably could've been done in five? Adama solving everyone's problems with a Captain Picard speech in "Litmus"? Apollo Return-of-the-Jedi-ing his way into a Cylon mine? Practically everything about "Scar" and "Black Market"?
But no, let's compare it to "Resurrection Ship II," an episode where the action was utterly superfluous to the drama. You can't say RS was a better action/adventure story that B&C, because it wasn't an action/adventure story. You could cut the entire actual Resurrection Ship from the plot and it'd still be an amazing episode, because the problem of the episode is that Cain has come in and turned the fleet upside down and will probably kill everyone, not that there's a big Cylon thing that needs blowing up. "The Hand of God," "Scar," "Exodus," or the middle third of "Daybreak" would be better comparisons. Saying B&C isn't as good action as RS is like saying "Independence Day" isn't as good of a disaster movie as "North By Northwest." One may be better than the other, but you're comparing apples to oranges while saying you're not. It's not useful criticism.
Here's some useful criticism: The artificial ten-part structure requires a strongly serialized plot (Eick compares to Republic Movie serials from the '30s like The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon). Each part needs to stand on it's own as a little story, but also needs to plug into the larger whole, leaving little space for intimate side-scenes, so character development is done with a broadsword (Coker meeting his buddy, Beka talking about her dead husband), because they can't count on the viewer remembering something from fifteen minutes ago because it might've been two weeks ago for the typical audience member. The use of stock characters and military clichés compensates for this, but it isn't exactly a solution (hopefully, the additional material for the TV and DVD edits is more stuff like Coker's buddy, and less pew-pew shooting).
They obviously don't want to do a Battlestar Galactica retread, so they've been try to split out specific elements of the parent show for the spinoffs, rather than trying to do another high-tension action/drama epic. The trouble is that they've been going too far towards the extremes, and then need to hew back to the mixed approach of the original show (the whole "less dancing, more shooting" shift between Caprica's first and second halves).
The young Adama section of Razor was clearly treated as a prototype for this series, and it was a big pile of top-gun clichés and stupid action and everyone loved it. Adama's girlfriend who got fridge'd in the opening, Adama flying off against orders to chase the two Raiders down to the planet because he's The Young Hothead, the Point Break skydive fistfight, the Centurions which may or may not have been bleeding blood, the freaky biological experiments which both explain why Adama leapt to the conclusion that the first guy he met with the sniffles was a robot and make you wonder why no one else was expecting humanoid Cylon spies to start showing up. And don't forget Little Lucy Cain (her actual, credited name) and her dolly, a stock character that makes Coker the drunken short-timer look like Hamlet.
B&C is the Razor Flashbacks, but longer and with more money, which is exactly what was promised.
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But no, let's compare it to "Resurrection Ship II," an episode where the action was utterly superfluous to the drama. You can't say RS was a better action/adventure story that B&C, because it wasn't an action/adventure story. You could cut the entire actual Resurrection Ship from the plot and it'd still be an amazing episode, because the problem of the episode is that Cain has come in and turned the fleet upside down and will probably kill everyone, not that there's a big Cylon thing that needs blowing up. "The Hand of God," "Scar," "Exodus," or the middle third of "Daybreak" would be better comparisons. Saying B&C isn't as good action as RS is like saying "Independence Day" isn't as good of a disaster movie as "North By Northwest." One may be better than the other, but you're comparing apples to oranges while saying you're not. It's not useful criticism.
Man, I could not disagree with this paragraph more. The climactic action sequence of the Res Ship arc - including especially the shots that are entirely CGI porn - is inextricably tied up with the thematic and narrative course of the story and could not possibly be excised without dramatically lessening the whole. The reason everyone loves the battle in Res Ship 2 is that it is not the same as Hand of God or Daybreak pt 2; it's not mindless CGI filler to keep stupid viewers entertained. It's beautiful, purposeful visual art that is also an integral component of the narrative and thematic climax. The soundtrack, the score, the acting, every plot thread, they all come together right there, and the CGI acts in support.
I also think you've badly misjudged the central problem of the Res Ship arc. It's certainly not 'Cain has arrived and will probably kill everyone'; it's precisely the opposite - Cain has arrived and her monstrosity might, horrifyingly, be what saves everybody. That's the danger: are her methods the only way to survive? Would we then still be worthy of survival?
As for B+C, it strikes me as so much less than what was promised. It wouldn't even make for good Stargate, let along good BSG.
e: One of my big problems with B+C is that it is bad at the micro level. Everything about it feels lazy. Each individual line is trite and familiar. The camera work during the effects shots follows the swooping mold of the Star Wars prequels, abandoning the visual stylings set by BSG. The rendering itself is lazy. Nothing in the story is anything we haven't seen before in BSG products. It asks no interesting questions, offers no interesting choices, presents no characters whose fates we care about.
We saw the black guy die first. We saw the guy who ~had a baby~ sacrifice himself (as of course he inevitably would). The ship crashed and they skidded right to the edge of a cliff! They fell down a hole and were attacked by a monster!
A BSG war show should be an arena to question the lengths to which humanity will go to survive when threatened with extinction. It should be a place to question the distinction and interdependence between man and machine. It doesn't need to be a Buck Rogers serial.
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*snip*
B&C is the Razor Flashbacks, but longer and with more money, which is exactly what was promised.
Actually, i expected that B&C continue what the Razor flashbacks started - instead we got this.
With the Razor flashbacks, they had a good template to build upon, but they decided instead to turn everything upside down, retcon the **** out of it - to the point where it doesn't look or feel like a BSG show.
The decision to turn the B&C pilot into webisodes and cancel the show even before the pilot was aired happened for a reason. And after watching the B&C webisodes, i'm glad they canned it.
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^ I loved that line, just for the way it un-self-conciously adds to the confusing Gordian Knot that is race and ethnicity in the 12 Colonies. What would a Colonial named "Ramirez" look like? I don't know, all the latinos we've seen so far are from Tauron and speak ancient greek. Baltar and Sharon both have hints of an Aerilon accent. The Gemenese tend to be dark-skinned, except when they aren't. It was all just slipshod world-building from day one, so why not have some fun with it?
That just brings to light a different issue: what the hell went wrong? As has been stated numerous times in this thread B&C just isn't as good as S1 and S2 of BSG.
No, it's been stated several times that B&C just isn't as good as the best episode of BSG. There were a fair amount of clunker scenes and clunker episodes in the parent show, but aside from some half-hearted allusions to the miniseries (by this point, we'd seen a woman in a red pantsuit and watched Starbuck make four laps through Galactica's one figure-eight hallway!), no one seems to be rating it in comparison to all the episodes of the show. Remember Sharon's optical-out port in her forearm and ability to take over for the ship's computer? The ten-episode Kobol arc which probably could've been done in five? Adama solving everyone's problems with a Captain Picard speech in "Litmus"? Apollo Return-of-the-Jedi-ing his way into a Cylon mine? Practically everything about "Scar" and "Black Market"?
But no, let's compare it to "Resurrection Ship II," an episode where the action was utterly superfluous to the drama. You can't say RS was a better action/adventure story that B&C, because it wasn't an action/adventure story. You could cut the entire actual Resurrection Ship from the plot and it'd still be an amazing episode, because the problem of the episode is that Cain has come in and turned the fleet upside down and will probably kill everyone, not that there's a big Cylon thing that needs blowing up. "The Hand of God," "Scar," "Exodus," or the middle third of "Daybreak" would be better comparisons. Saying B&C isn't as good action as RS is like saying "Independence Day" isn't as good of a disaster movie as "North By Northwest." One may be better than the other, but you're comparing apples to oranges while saying you're not. It's not useful criticism.
Here's some useful criticism: The artificial ten-part structure requires a strongly serialized plot (Eick compares to Republic Movie serials from the '30s like The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon). Each part needs to stand on it's own as a little story, but also needs to plug into the larger whole, leaving little space for intimate side-scenes, so character development is done with a broadsword (Coker meeting his buddy, Beka talking about her dead husband), because they can't count on the viewer remembering something from fifteen minutes ago because it might've been two weeks ago for the typical audience member. The use of stock characters and military clichés compensates for this, but it isn't exactly a solution (hopefully, the additional material for the TV and DVD edits is more stuff like Coker's buddy, and less pew-pew shooting).
They obviously don't want to do a Battlestar Galactica retread, so they've been try to split out specific elements of the parent show for the spinoffs, rather than trying to do another high-tension action/drama epic. The trouble is that they've been going too far towards the extremes, and then need to hew back to the mixed approach of the original show (the whole "less dancing, more shooting" shift between Caprica's first and second halves).
The young Adama section of Razor was clearly treated as a prototype for this series, and it was a big pile of top-gun clichés and stupid action and everyone loved it. Adama's girlfriend who got fridge'd in the opening, Adama flying off against orders to chase the two Raiders down to the planet because he's The Young Hothead, the Point Break skydive fistfight, the Centurions which may or may not have been bleeding blood, the freaky biological experiments which both explain why Adama leapt to the conclusion that the first guy he met with the sniffles was a robot and make you wonder why no one else was expecting humanoid Cylon spies to start showing up. And don't forget Little Lucy Cain (her actual, credited name) and her dolly, a stock character that makes Coker the drunken short-timer look like Hamlet.
B&C is the Razor Flashbacks, but longer and with more money, which is exactly what was promised.
THANK YOU.
The Cylon snake was a weird design choice, but yet again I enjoyed the last two episodes. (Though it pains me to see some of the shoddy SFX work, particularly during the Raptor crash scene)
Battlestar is a big universe guys. It has room for the over the top action (B&C), long winded political dramas (Caprica), and a healthy near perfect mix (Galactica Proper). Personally, I thought The Plan (aka the writers desperately trying to save face for writing themselves into a corner) was 10000000X worse than this. I found it absolutely painful to sit through. But I look forward to B&C every week.
It's different. You guys can claim it doesn't deserve to be called Battlestar Galactica, but it is. And it is still better than 90% of the crap on TV. Perhaps one day I will tell you young'ns the fable of Stargate Universe. And how fans of the series cries of "This isn't Stargate! Where's the corny squad leader with the one liners? Boycott this show!" got a fantastic show (except for the first half of Season 1, Blehhhhhh) and the last of the good sci fi on TV cancelled.
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I don't particularly need to be told a history lesson on SGU by someone who is trying to make age assumptions over the internet.
Let me break it down.
Story wise B&C so far has been the perfect storm of over used tropes stacked one on top of the other with no reprieve. At this point TOS portrayed a far more realistic and believable depiction of war, in fact its leagues better than B&C in pretty much every category. This is a war for the very survival of humanity and instead its been composed of one completely ridiculous 80s cartoon gimmick after another, to the point I would not be surprised to see Cobra Commander in charge of a Basestar. The fact that Adama set a gods damn Raider on fire by dumping fuel and hitting his frakking burners directly followed by attack of the toasterconda pretty much says it all.
The art direction has been absolutely horrendous both from a technical and fluff perspective. Newman and LtC can point out a laundry list of purely CGI technical gaffs that have appeared so far. For me, however, the treatment of the fluff/mechanical side is the more unforgivable. Their slapdash retcon of Galactica physically isn't compatible with the show proper version. I'm not even sure the new Vipers are even capable of fitting into canon Viper tubes. They fly in the face of Adama being established as a MK II pilot and the MKII being depicted as the main Viper of the war. The Osiris is clearly depicted with box missile launchers in one episode which turn out to shoot flak like they are KEWs in the next. The Valk, which is pretty clearly established as a new top of the line warship in Season 3 actually appears in 1CW. At this point its hard to believe the crew on B&C even saw the RDM version let alone where heavily involved they've stomped on so much established canon and made so many painful errors in depicting the content.
If the Visual Effects depicted intelligent content but where poorly executed it would be totally acceptable. If the story occasionally threw in a cheeseburger action scene in an otherwise well handled plot then hey i can eat fast food once in a great while. Instead B&C is well and truly holistically awful, about the only thing it succeeds at is make Galactica 1980 look less terrible.
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It's different. You guys can claim it doesn't deserve to be called Battlestar Galactica, but it is. And it is still better than 90% of the crap on TV. Perhaps one day I will tell you young'ns the fable of Stargate Universe. And how fans of the series cries of "This isn't Stargate! Where's the corny squad leader with the one liners? Boycott this show!" got a fantastic show (except for the first half of Season 1, Blehhhhhh) and the last of the good sci fi on TV cancelled.
SGU was indeed a great show towards the end, you're right about that. But while BSG may be a big universe, quality is quality, and B&C lacks quality. It's not 'over the top action' so much as 'bad over the top action'.
Don't be a fan; don't defend this show because it has your brand attached. In a golden age of really good dramatic TV this feels like something out of the 90s.
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I liked Stargate: SG-1 for it's campy humor. I liked SGU, particularly towards the end, for other reasons completely. I'm perfectly capable of judging a product based on what it is, and not based on what it isn't compared to something else. Even so, B&C is horrendous.
So, it's basically pure action? Sure, let's judge it on those merits alone. In Razor, we saw a scene where Adama ejected over a planet, then had a mid-air fight with a Centurion as he was falling down, James Bond style. It was really a cheeseburger scene, but it was digestible because the rest was on the level. B&C is composed entirely of these types of cheeseburger scenes. You see, good action needs to have a quality that enables you to suspend your disbelief. Of course it's not realistic, but it needs to feel real enough while also providing the viewer with enough thrills and spectacle. It's a fine balance that BSG did well in my opinion. In B&C, the main characters perform stupid, totally unbelievable death-defying maneuvers every few minutes, and this shatters my suspension of disbelief. When this happens, I'm left with a bunch of bad CGI and horrible design decisions, because I know now the main characters have plot armor and the suspense gained for rooting for main characters is gone.
First of all, this is Adama, so he'll live. As for his co-pilot and the woman, they'll obviously live too, because every time they're in danger, Adama's going to pull off something so over the top it's boring at best, but just plain dumb most of the time. Please don't tell me that Adama evading giant plungers in a raptor, like in a 1990 video game, is good TV. Or dumping fuel + activating burners makes for an insta-flying flamethrower that shoots down the pursuing raider. It's not good action, it's dumb and boring. All it's missing so far is Jar-Jar and reflective ships and it'd be The Phantom Menace. Except it's already got reflective ships :P
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It'd be more interesting if he tried to pull off clever stunts, which don't work, and he has to improvise more. (or crash and deal with centurions on the ground coming after them, etc.)
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Man, I could not disagree with this paragraph more. The climactic action sequence of the Res Ship arc - including especially the shots that are entirely CGI porn - is inextricably tied up with the thematic and narrative course of the story and could not possibly be excised without dramatically lessening the whole.
And that's why most of it happens off-screen while Baltar and Gina have a heart to heart, and the rest of it happens off-screen while Lee succumbs to hypoxia. Meanwhile, the post-battle scene of Starbuck and Fisk preparing to carry out their final orders goes in one uninterrupted sequence, to show its relative unimportance and how it totally isn't the climax of the three-parter.
The reason everyone loves the battle in Res Ship 2 is that it is not the same as Hand of God or Daybreak pt 2; it's not mindless CGI filler to keep stupid viewers entertained. It's beautiful, purposeful visual art that is also an integral component of the narrative and thematic climax. The soundtrack, the score, the acting, every plot thread, they all come together right there, and the CGI acts in support.
So, in other words, the Resurrection Ship three parter is not an action story.
I also think you've badly misjudged the central problem of the Res Ship arc. It's certainly not 'Cain has arrived and will probably kill everyone'; it's precisely the opposite - Cain has arrived and her monstrosity might, horrifyingly, be what saves everybody. That's the danger: are her methods the only way to survive? Would we then still be worthy of survival?
For a while, I was utterly confused by this, wondering if you watched the same episodes I did. Nearly every scene she was in or talked about painted Cain as deluded, ineffective, or both. Her first statement after arriving in the fleet is, "Welcome back to the Colonial Fleet." Adama lost eighty people in the Cylon attack, while Cain lost ten times as many, in an ill-considered suicide mission which she carried out after murdering a fellow officer and close friend. Adama protected the civilian fleet through hundreds of Cylon attacks, while Cain, with twice the firepower and a quarter as many people to protect, got all her civilians killed in one day. Baltar got a full dossier on the Resurrection Ship from Gina in five minutes with a set of clean clothes and a sliced apple, while Cain ordered the torture of Sharon, undoing months of goodwill with no gain.
Cain refused to give Roslin or the Fleet the time of day, furnishing Galactica with supplies and ignoring the rest of the Fleet. Cain claimed to be on "detached service" when the President could literally see her out the window, demonstrating a contempt for the very rule of law from which she derived her authority. To paraphrase Lee, if Roslin isn't President, then Cain isn't an Admiral, Adama isn't a Commander, and no one has to listen to a damn thing Cain says.
Everything in the three-parter, and Razor, demonstrated Cain to be a danger to herself and others. Like the best dicators, she can only maintain her position through a combination of charisma and unflinching brutality.
Then I realized that you were talking about Adama and Roslin deciding the only way to solve the Cain problem was to shoot her in the head. Here's the problem with that, though. Stabbing Cain in the back, while certainly crossing a moral line, is nowhere near the equivalent of summarily executing an insubordinate officer (who, incidentally, was right), summarily executing dozens of innocent people and leaving thousands more to die, or condemning her own crew to a guaranteed suicide-by-Cylon. If Almighty God hadn't intervened to make sure Cain's chickens came home to roost at that exact moment, Adama would've just postponed the inevitable confrontation with Cain or, worse, ceded leadership of the Fleet to her, leaving him to join the silent, bullied mass of humanity that let her commit atrocity after atrocity while saying nothing (the most depressing thing about Razor is that aside from Belzen, no one ever stood up to her, even when they were dead meat either way. It kind of puts a damper on my argument that BSG is about the triumph of the human spirt over unimaginable adversity, and makes the flashbacks in the movie a fairly dry recitation of stuff we already knew with no surprises. Imagine if one of the civilian ships Cain was pirating went on a suicide run against the Pegasus, and Cain had it shot down. That would've been an addition which is both plausible, and plausibly wouldn't be mentioned by Fisk to Tigh).
Is Adama still worthy of survival when his act of mercy leads to Cain taking over the Fleet when Roslin dies a week later? When she starts wiring civilian ships to nukes and using them as traps or fireships? Saying murdering Cain to prevent her from committing atrocities is itself a vindication of those atrocities is nonsense, like a racist demanding that you tolerate his intolerance.
Luckily, when Adama actually did have to take a stand against a murderous despot taking over the fleet without God intervening to keep his hands clean, he didn't have another battlestar full of troops to fight against, and you know what happened? Adama won, and then he shot the bastards, because otherwise, they would've kept making people die needlessly. And it still wasn't a vindication of Cain's "If it doesn't make you want to vomit from its sheer depravity, it's not a difficult enough decision to be the correct one" philosophy.
Cain is absolutely the antagonist of Pegasus/Resurrection Ship. The question is not whether her methods are necessary, it's whether her methods will allow her to overwhelm our heroes, who live by a moral and ethical code, and tear down everything they've fought to preserve. In grand morality-play fashion, Cain doesn't, because her own decisions result in her being shot in the face without any help from Adama and Roslin.
In either case, though, the Resurrection Ship itself is not the antagonist of this non-action story, making it a poor comparison for a story where the military objective is the primary plot of the drama.
(Now wasn't that much more fun than just saying, "It sucks," "Yep, sure does," in an endless loop every friday? That's why I'd like to actually discuss B&C)
We saw the guy who ~had a baby~ sacrifice himself (as of course he inevitably would).
No, he didn't. He *****ed out and flew away. Why, there are any number of things that could happen now. He could have a crisis of conscience, return and then sacrifice himself in a later segment, making you right retroactively. He could defect to the Cylon side. He could survive the whole thing, at which time Coker and Adama have to decide if they'll tell the truth about him deserting them or cover for him.
See, B&C has already surprised you, and you didn't even notice.
The decision to turn the B&C pilot into webisodes and cancel the show even before the pilot was aired happened for a reason. And after watching the B&C webisodes, i'm glad they canned it.
It was originally intended to be a webseries, then aired on TV, then released on video. After seeing the script, SyFy decided to skip the web part, then after seeing how long it was taking to do 1,800 effects shots, they decided to go back to the original plan. Then they apparently assed around for a year until finding an on-line distribution partner with the infrastructure to hold up to a massive influx of traffic, and then put it on YouTube, just like any idiot could. I blame brain-spiders for that last part.
At this point TOS portrayed a far more realistic and believable depiction of war, in fact its leagues better than B&C in pretty much every category.
At this point in TOS, Apollo was dating a reporter he'd know for five minutes who had been widowed for six minutes (whom he'd marry in the next episode, with her widowing him immediately thereafter), and Jimmy Carter's President Adar's naiveté had mistaken a Soviet Cylon attack for a welcoming committee, which seems odd for someone raised in a society that's been at war for a thousand yahrens (same goes for Apollo, Starbuck, and Zac talking about the good old days before the war, when they were a Star Trek ripoff and not a Star Wars ripoff). Starbuck hadn't decided to go AWOL to manage a set of three-faced singers on their tour to the ruined husks of the twelve worlds yet, though, so you've got that going for you.
At this point its hard to believe the crew on B&C even saw the RDM version let alone where heavily involved they've stomped on so much established canon and made so many painful errors in depicting the content.
The problem is, I've been hearing variations on this comment since season two first aired. I probably would've heard it with "33," if "Litmus" hadn't been my first episode. At this point, I've become inured to cries of "They're ruining it! Let's all talk about how much it sucks now that they're ruining it!"
In B&C, the main characters perform stupid, totally unbelievable death-defying maneuvers every few minutes, and this shatters my suspension of disbelief.
I agree with your analysis. It's not the quality of the action, it's the quantity of the action. B&C's fatal flaw is the relentless pacing. I just don't care about that problem so much, and I recognize it as being inherent to the premise. Big epic war action and impossible set-pieces in stand-alone ten-minute chunks is pretty much the design brief for every "Halo" game (except they chunk into thirty seconds).
I've been spoiled on the fate of Beka, but I'm honestly not sure if Coker is going to be inspired by Adama's can-do spirit to re-up so he can be part of the future installments they had in mind, or if he's going to fall victim to retirony. I suppose it could be both. Anybody want to start a pool?
Except it's already got reflective ships :P
Note to self, don't tell newman if I start experimenting with linear color space. ;)
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That is an awful lot of words in defense of a really bad TV show. And boy I pray your reading of Res Ship is wrong, as I'd lose most of my respect for the show if it were right.
e: Part of why Razor was so bad was that it missed the most powerful part of the tension in Res Ship, the straightforward mimesis of the post-9/11 debate between deontology and utilitarian exigency. Cain is supposed to represent the exigent force, but if she appears incompetent or never gets any kind of results (even in the short term) the tension doesn't work. I - and hopefully most of the audience - want to see the deontological force win out, because we believe that 'evil' methods like torture create the very enemies we try to fight, but for the drama to be powerful the exigent force must have some claim. The very heart of BSG's interest as a theater for the examination of moral questions lies in the fact that it raises the stakes so high even very extreme exigent claims can be considered.
Most of what you wrote seems to be pretty orthogonal to what it's responding to, so I'm not sure if I should try to restate or just let it go.
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I agree with your analysis. It's not the quality of the action, it's the quantity of the action. B&C's fatal flaw is the relentless pacing. I just don't care about that problem so much, and I recognize it as being inherent to the premise. Big epic war action and impossible set-pieces in stand-alone ten-minute chunks is pretty much the design brief for every "Halo" game (except they chunk into thirty seconds).
I've got to say I'm tempted to agree to that. Had we seen those manoeuvres over the course of an entire series, they wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.
I think the issue here is the one you bring up, it was originally written as a series of webisodes and they wanted to have a big moment in each. Of course they missed the point that even the other BSG webisodes got, we don't need thrills and spills in every episode as long as there is some progression.
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Note to self, don't tell newman if I start experimenting with linear color space. ;)
You don't experiment with it you; you use it.
Carry on :)
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(Now wasn't that much more fun than just saying, "It sucks," "Yep, sure does," in an endless loop every friday? That's why I'd like to actually discuss B&C)
It certainly was and it was a good read, but there really hasn't been much to dissect in B&C. I know ***** ranting gets old, but so far B&C has had ore in common with one of those films like The Room or Resident Evil that you get together to rag on than discuss thought provoking content. If they simply took the foot off the gas it would be much more enjoyable and likely leave time for more interesting plot points to be worked in. Stock Galactica and regular IIs alone would have been much easier stomach then making changes to iconic parts of the show. If say Adama had destroyed the pursuing Raiders by touching off Acheron's exposed magazines instead of flying through giant cylinder heads it would have been still showy without being over the top. In Osiris' battle with the Baseship have her close to launch nukes only to have them jam in the silos and accidentally take out both ships rather than utilizing another ramming sequence. Heck use the missile batteries as missile batteries that are painfully ineffective in the face of Cylon ECM. The air to air battle could have been resolved in some fashion without resorting to fuel air flame thrower. Completely cut out the toasterconda and use some time to do some character building.
I suppose C&C isn't much better than saying it sucks but its the best I can muster. Are there actually discussion topics you have to chew on in regards to B&C?
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All these Stargate references have compelled me to get out my Stargate collection and watch them again to see how valid they are. So, let's examine one of its little-remembered action-heavy sequences: the combat sequence of the Daedalus Variations. (From Atlantis, because dogfights are thin on the ground in SG-1.)
It's not a particularly memorable episode. Nor is it a particularly memorable sequence, stacking Yet Another Failure For The Railgun Batteries To Do Anything with a reasonably long, but otherwise unmemorable, F-302 fight.
The team is trapped aboard a ship nearly out of power and the shields fail on the first pass from the enemy fighters; they come around for a second pass while the railguns Still Failing To Do Anything, creating some genuine tension; the Daedalus starts taking hits...
And then one of the alien fighters eats a missile. They turn into it and we get a nice shot of the merge as both sides fire on each other, mixing cannons from both sides and a couple 302's taking missile snapshots. We have a sequence of dogfight vignettes, first in open space, an alien chasing a 302 taking a missile shot from another; cannon fire from both sides mixed as both sides fighters fly through the frame. The 302s seem to be winning since none of them have been destroyed yet, but there's still a lot of alien fighters and they're still shooting. Then to remind of us of the stakes, we have alien fighters and 302s weaving around Daedalus' hull as both hunter and hunted in a couple sequences, finishing up with a 302 diving beneath Daedalus' cobra's hood being chased and shot at, breaking around Daedalus' stern as its pursuer is killed by cannons from another 302; by now the alien fighters are noticeably fewer in number and it's beyond dispute the 302s are winning. We get a final establishing shot of 302s swooping around the Daedalus and finishing off the last of the alien fighters. It ends with an off-boresight missile that the firing 302 doesn't even alter course to make, firmly establishing that the fight is in the bag, while other 302s form on Daedalus in the background.
It's total cheese. It's predictable. It's a purely feel-good asskicking. But it's a coherent narrative and it's got pacing you can follow and action you can believe really happened, so it works. (It's also about five minutes long, so don't tell me you can't do that in a 11 minute webisode.)
Blood and Chrome's combat sequences typically lack at least two, and sometimes all three of these positive attributes.
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i tried to give a chance to B&C...after this 2 episode i can say that's crap.
Is stupid, last action hero style and too much inconsistent with BSG.
In Diaspora development we all learned a big lession from BSG:
LESS IS BETTER.
Really a pity...seems that the BSG universe died with Razor (and the Plan,maybe)
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That is an awful lot of words in defense of a really bad TV show.
Most of it's about RS, and the rest involves acknowledgements of shoddy character development and terrible pacing. I don't think "It's not great, but it's hardly a Transformers movie," is much of a defense.
Part of why Razor was so bad was that it missed the most powerful part of the tension in Res Ship, the straightforward mimesis of the post-9/11 debate between deontology and utilitarian exigency. Cain is supposed to represent the exigent force, but if she appears incompetent or never gets any kind of results (even in the short term) the tension doesn't work.
That's actually one of the most shameful things about the post 9/11 mindset (it actually goes back further than that, with "soft on crime" rhetoric). The arguments against torture were always framed based on its effectiveness or lack thereof. The moral argument was ceded immediately, and it was purely a utilitarian case, because the anti-torture side feared that they would never get anywhere with the idea that moral purity was worth risking the lives of our people. That kind of I-can-be-run-through-without-blinking ideal was out of the question in those years. It's still out of the question now, at least as far as airport security is concerned.
Debates in fiction were limited to "works" versus "doesn't," as you acknowledge with the next line about torture creating more problems than it solves.
I - and hopefully most of the audience - want to see the deontological force win out, because we believe that 'evil' methods like torture create the very enemies we try to fight, but for the drama to be powerful the exigent force must have some claim. The very heart of BSG's interest as a theater for the examination of moral questions lies in the fact that it raises the stakes so high even very extreme exigent claims can be considered.
If you can cite something in the text that presents something Cain did as equally or more effective than Adama and Roslin's approach, I'd like to hear it. As I took it, Cain's "claim" came from her superior rank and greater military resources. She didn't require any kind of vindication to run roughshod over Adama and Roslin. Just as in the real world, "enhanced interrogation" was sanctioned from the very top, regardless of its actual efficacy.
Note to self, don't tell newman if I start experimenting with linear color space. ;)
You don't experiment with it you; you use it.
Carry on :)
If you saw how hit and miss my results had been so far, you'd know "experiment" is precisely the right word. :p
I suppose C&C isn't much better than saying it sucks but its the best I can muster. Are there actually discussion topics you have to chew on in regards to B&C?
Those were good points, and I think the show would've benefited from less of a "this one goes to eleven" approach like the one you outline.
I have some thoughts about the world-building. I'm curious about the propaganda slogans painted on bulkheads.
And who's winning the war, anyway? On the one hand, Captain Mustache and Commander G-Man seem to think things are going pretty bad, but whatever draft there is doesn't seem to be very comprehensive judging by the fact that Coker doesn't expect to be stop-lossed, and that Adama's peripheral connection to the underworld could've gotten him out of harms way, and the Colonies can afford to have a dozen-odd ships in a secret reserve unit.
And seriously, what's a guy named "Ramirez" supposed to look like on Caprica?
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Well up until the war the Twelve Colonies weren't united under a single banner right? If not all the Colonies are under the same perceived threat at the moment, their commitment might not be as steadfast. Personnel contributed to the war effort might not be under the same service contract depending on their homeworld.
I'd also wonder about the tactic of squirreling away warships being effective against the Toasters. I'd wager the Cylons keep a much more accurate tally of the Colonial Order of Battle in the face of the fog of war than humans are capable. I'd expect machines to not fall prey to the same human error that lead pilots throughout World War II to make incorrect claims about success and enemy losses. If at the end of the battle all the Raider jockeys report splashing a cutter and a few cruisers and the Colonials report losing a Battlestar of the Line it would lead to questions.
And seriously, what's a guy named "Ramirez" supposed to look like on Caprica?
I'll put down for Asian ethnicity and Prussian accent.
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And seriously, what's a guy named "Ramirez" supposed to look like on Caprica?
Well, we've had Singhs, Hoshis and Chus that looked nothing like Indians, Japanese or Chinese respectively so any non-Hispanic ethnicity would be about right.
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I'll put down for Asian ethnicity and Prussian accent.
Not everyone can be an Andermani, unfortunately. :P
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Hi all, I've seen the first four episodes now and, well, not enjoying them that much sadly.
I think at the heart of it is a problem that keeps plaguing science fiction franchises, and that problem is fanservice. The most egregious form of this is of course the Star Wars prequels, which loudly beat the drum by stating that it would all be about Anakin becoming Vader and the Clone Wars. Fans went nuts, without realising that backstory almost always should remain simply backstory, as the alternative is a terrible lack of tension and horrible, clumsy, forced foreshadowing.
(In a little aside I thought of way the whole Anakin becomes Vader thing could work, but it was way more Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy meets I Claudius meets Bladerunner meets Tianemmen Square with the Jedi as well-meaning but oppressive 'peacekeepers' who can't understand why the galaxy's young are revolting against them. Clue: It's because they're boring conceited pricks who run things behind the scenes.)
The more fleshed out a sci-fi series becomes the more rigid the straight-jacket of storytelling expectations becomes. We pretty much knew everything about the first Cylon war from vanilla BSG, and there was nowhere thematically or characterwise it could have gone that would have been interesting. So perhaps there was some wisdom in trying to make it Top Gun in space, but sadly since BSG's original style is entirely realist sci-fi this kind of ends up feeling like fan-fiction. And not terribly good fan-fiction at that. So the producers start scratching their heads and trying to figure out what WE want to see, and that's never a good way to tell a story. You should always tell a story that YOU want to tell. This is why we have so many "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if...?" which mainly consists of finding an unconventional way of blowing up a cylon.
Every single time.
This frankly is uninteresting. There's only one guy who ever made the science fictional 'blow stuff up' ten minute thing work and that was Genndy Tartakovsky and his Samurai Jack / Clone Wars hurrah inducing goodness. I think maybe they should have dumped a load of money on him and shown us the war through his mighty fine stylised animation. Hell, Adama could have been drawn as a young Toshiro Mifune, or something.
I saw you guys mentioned the Resurrection Ship Battle earlier. For me too it stands as the best sci-fi TV series space battle. The pure documentary feel. The stark simplicity of it all. The leisurely, creative framing. And the way it wraps character, plot and beauty and marries it perfectly with Bear's score. It's almost Kubrikian.
But there's so much action out there now in science fiction that it simply ceases to have appeal for me unless it is both unique and cleverly done. Throughout most of BSG the action was superb, I even enjoyed Lee's antics in Hand of God as it allowed his character to resolve a personal fear of inadequacy. Blood and Chrome just has stuff flying around and blowing up. It's not enough. There's a reason why the moment Baltar watches the unfolding attack on Caprica on the news in his villa is so much more chilling and memorable than seeing (the admittedly impressive) attack from the Cylon's orbital viewpoint in The Plan. We see a chair being knocked over and a bit of dust and wind and a guy shielding his eyes, and an adjoining screen go static. That's hellishly scary despite the effects costing only a few bucks. It makes us feel as vulnerable as Baltar, and the blast wave that rushes across the lake towards him is icing on the cake.
But we know Adama is going to overcome these toasters zipping about. And we know how the war pans out. So where's the interest?
And frankly, and I hate to say this, I just don't think it looks terribly good. Sure, there's the odd moment that looks fairly spectacular but I quickly realised that if the original show had all this film-flam it would have had a far worse a feel. The character work in the CiC between Adama, Roslin and Tigh would have been swallowed up by the glitzy CGI set. The old style hanger deck that Tyrol commanded allowed any number of dramatic scenes to be played out. I can't imagine the visual busy-work of Blood & Chrome's to have allowed any breathing space. (See Lucas's infinitely awful crime of adding element after element to a shot, disregarding rule 1 and 2 of photography - composition and the decisive moment.)
It stretches to the battle scenes. In my mind's eye I can remember the exact maneouvres in certain BSG scenes. They were simple and cool. The Zoic Battlestars looked terrifying, like giant gleaming prehistoric metal starfish drifting in space. All they needed to do was serenely drift there as Bear played and I was gripped. I also loved the less is more of Battlestar's design in BSG. Six main guns and that was the main armament sorted. They looked dwarfed on the ship but that added to the appeal. You knew each turret was as big as a very big house and that they fired car sized shells - and yet there they were comparatively tiny. It also added a strange imaginative realism. That with the speed and power of them that was all that could be carried on a Battlestar - and it was enough. It was enough to take on two baseships on a good day.
Compare with Blood & Chrome's designs - guns slapped on willy-nilly. It doesn't feel as real. It's distracting, it's gaudy, it's bloody fanservice.
The same stretches to the staging shots of the Colonial fleet. Masses of ships filling the screen. Sure, looks cool, but its like gorging on too many sweets. They become bland and tasteless. I loved the feeling of battles taking place all alone in infinite space in BSG. It was cold and dark and gripping. Even when there were nebula and such later on, it still worked as the story backed it up and the sense of emptiness was still there.
In Blood and Chrome you get the screen full of zipping about, lensflare, flak, pew-pew, nebula and reflections. It doesn't feel real.
I don't think the renders are anywhere near as good either. I haven't picked out mistakes or anything, but the way the ships move super-fast and jink around continously, the horrible smoke and flame everywhere, the cheesy neon glow on all things cylon and simply the roughly hewn look of the CGI... it's quantity rather than quality. And I know they're really trying, and I don't blame them for it personally, but it's flashy gimcrack work for the sake of it.
So, along with the folly of The Plan and the duff Cain bits of Razor, have they ruined BSG?
Don't be daft. Why feel that simply because something is created is canon, it must therefore exist and be muscling in on the beloved stuff you have in your headspace? For me, all four series of original BSG are great. True, the fourth falters a little - but I even very much liked and found fitting the ending. It's a great jewell of a sci-fi show and a fantastic story. I had been hoping for a nice desert (or, er, starter) in the form of Blood and Chrome, but disappointing as it is it hasn't spoilt the main.
Happily, the excellence of Diaspora means that I can get my graceful, stripped down, realist sci-fi battle fun when I want it. I fear I shall not be looking hard for it in future installments of Blood and Chrome.
Oh, final thing, finally: I really love your vision in Diaspora of how things look. The Sobek class is great, and about the upper ceiling of guns-per-tonnage I consider in a BSG universe. Please don't go all silly ala Blood and Chrome, and indeed feel free to 'refine' any design you take from it.
Thanks for reading me ramble, folks.
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thanks to you.
Glad you like our work and the vision we had of the BSG universe. :)
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Wisdom
Yes.
I agree with everything you said.
(Although personally I think one of main failings of the SW prequels was failing to make the fall of the jedi a tragedy - it very much like "oh ****, we've given the viewer absolutely no reason to care about these characters, in fact we've done the opposite by making the head of the council a bit of a git. Quick, bring on the sad music and child killing!". I'd debate that elsewhere though)
I've been trying to think what I'd do if I were attempting to do Blood and Chrome..
I think the concept of Blood and Chrome as top-gun in space isn't entirely a bad one. I wouldn't expect it to deal with the same themes as BSG. I'd be quite happy with a war series, with the occasional bit of gung-ho action in it (although quite frankly there is no reason a ten year and seemingly futile war can't have a similar-ish bleak tone). The action would be similar to the action we saw in BSG, and be better for it.
Of course we'd be able to have a few cool and different things as we're no longer dealing with the last humans in existence running from an overwhelming enemy and all the conundrums that entails. Like throwing in a few more battlestars. And blowing them up. Or showing them kicking arse.
We'd be able to have some more fun original series inspired designs. We'd have the iconic mark 2s. Arriving in the hangar or CIC wouldn't be "look at how we knocked down the walls with CGI", it'd be "Look, it's the hangar and the CIC. Welcome back! It's been a few years since we had scenes here!" There are basically NO recognisable elements in the CGI CIC (what an acronym). What should have been old friends are completely strangers now.
And I'm not sure I'd deal with Adama. Or the Galactica. Well perhaps the Galactica, but not Adama. New characters, who we're not sure will survive. Galactica is trickier as it would be nice seeing the bucket in the prime of her life (by which I mean slightly shinier and a little different. Not filled with CGI excess). Having both cameo (get the young Adama from Razor please) would probably be the best option. A new battlestar would let you have a bit more jeopardy. Why, rather like the Theseus!
Quite frankly Diaspora is a better expansion to the BSG universe than this show. It keeps the feel while introducing new elements, telling a new story which still gives you the opportunity of having cool action while still hitting the right thematic beats. Well done Diaspora team.
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tbh i don't know what the VFX team for B&C where thinking adding all those dam turrets to Galactica.
She had more than enough, if anything the only adition id be comfy with to her armament would be an adition 4 guns on the topside and on the bottom, set between the two sets of four already setup. not the mess we got.
as for her armor while im okay with the idea of extra armor im not okay with the amount that was added to her.
i always saw the extra armor on the galactica type ships to be unique to each ship. with galactica being one of the first ships built maybe getting less armor plating as materials where scarce at the start of the way with the cylons.
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If anything I would expect material scarcity to work the other way around, with it getting harder as the war went on.
The war ended because both sides were hurting after all, the Cylons wouldn't have put the Colonials to the ropes and let them sue for peace, and the Colonials wouldn't have let the Cylons start to lose and back out after the way the war started.
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I figured Galactica was newer than Columbia, and had a reduced amount of armor since the unprotected hull ended up being stronger than they expected, so they cut the over-plating down to places that really needed the extra protection (I'm sure it's a coincidence, but since it supports my argument, one of the most damaged parts of the Pegasus before her destruction was along the upper corner of the nose, one of the armored places on Galactica). That still fits with what we're seeing now. I don't think Galactica was stripped down to be cheaper, or because she was about to be decommissioned, but to be leaner. We saw two other battlestars that were identical to present-day Galactica in the present day, and both of them were apparently in service, so the idea that she looked like she did because she was on the edge of being decommissioned doesn't fit.
The all-over armor plating is found to be superfluous, so it's reduced, making the ship lighter and faster. New gun batteries are developed with a higher rate of fire (or greater reliability; anybody notice how everything keeps breaking in B&C?), allowing several emplacements to be removed while maintaining the same level of firepower (if the newer guns are remarkably better than the older ones, that might also contribute to the reduced armor plating, with a more robust flak wall picking up the defensive slack even with fewer batteries).
As for the Viper magazines, I imagine the Colonials eventually had a doctrinal shift to a quality-over-quantity approach (probably around the same time they started having battlestars ride around solo, making "Battlestar Group" a sad, confusing anachronism and retcon for a pre-production typo). It's possible that the Pegasus had elevated storage space for Vipers (the scenes on her hangar deck were mostly shot to obscure the fact that the layout didn't match the exterior launch tubes, so who knows what was hiding in the nooks and crannies), and the idea of the Viper hot-stack does give an alternative to the Valkryie carrying fewer Vipers than I have fingers, even if larger ships just used floor space.
I really do like the higher ceiling in the hangar deck. It always rubbed me the wrong way that Galactica couldn't fit one of those giant shuttlecraft into the hangar.
Anyway, all things being equal (meaning, no Vipers), I suspect that Adama's Galactica could beat Nash's, despite being less threatening in appearance. Of course, either of them could beat the Pegasus easily so long as they stayed above and to the front of it, but that's an exciting batch of fanwank for another day.
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To be honest the reworking of Galactica is personally probably one of the more Grrr Arrrgh things they did. Because BSG Galactica is without heavy plate we have a good idea where her transverse frames are, by slapping on turrets every which way they created a conflict with her framing. Those turrets are going to require massive barbettes and magazine space, literally where, as we know from BSG, her very skeleton is.
Besides nobody wants to talk about whether or not Toasters can be tricked by false ship losses? I think they are less susceptible to the kind of hubris that allows military forces to be fooled by such tricks. I'd consider it a pretty good master stroke if the show actually had that ploy fail.
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I think B&C so far is making SighFail look even dumber than I already knew they were.
They should have at least put it up on Hulu in better definition.
But I digress because Hulu has lots of restrictions on other countries.
Also, it lends to the better definition quality for later broadcasts and incentive to watch again.
I like it so far, it is different than the other series, and it is just developing.
I enjoy the action movement. For me it never gets dull.
Yeah similar plots as other series, hell we knew what the theme and history is supposed to be.
I still want to watch it all unfold.
I just don't want to see the sheer volume of advertising they are likely to ruin it with in broadcast.
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To be honest the reworking of Galactica is personally probably one of the more Grrr Arrrgh things they did. Because BSG Galactica is without heavy plate we have a good idea where her transverse frames are, by slapping on turrets every which way they created a conflict with her framing. Those turrets are going to require massive barbettes and magazine space, literally where, as we know from BSG, her very skeleton is.
I always assumed there was some functional reason for the ribbing to protrude outside of the hull (or even that they were exclusively outside of the hull, and not a major structural component). In any event, the ribs on the original design go right up to (http://www.modelermagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/kg_cg_ns_galactica-044.jpg) the turret mounts (http://www.modelermagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/kg_cg_ns_galactica-065.jpg) and are even just lowered slightly and not totally cut out to make room for the barrels (or machinery undernieth them), so if they were structural and went through the hull, they continued straight through the area around the gun mounts just as they would for the additional batteries. It doesn't seem like so much more of a major refit to patch up or install new framing to fill space previously blocked by weaponry, especially since they would've also installed an entirely new missile battery in place of one pair of guns, and who knows what else in the room freed up by the others. The continuous ribbing in places previously occupied by guns might only be skin deep.
Besides nobody wants to talk about whether or not Toasters can be tricked by false ship losses? I think they are less susceptible to the kind of hubris that allows military forces to be fooled by such tricks. I'd consider it a pretty good master stroke if the show actually had that ploy fail.
I'm not sure. The Cylons of this era may or may not have emotional responses that affect their reasoning (they were able to hate their human oppressors, after all, and to long for organic bodies), but punting that until the later segments when we get a better look at the Cylon base, I think they're as susceptible to bad intelligence as anyone. If they're last report from a battle before a basestar is destroyed is that the Valkyrie is adrift with fires spreading towards the magazines, and they stop seeing the Valkyrie show up in battles, it would be logical to assume it was unsalvageable. That also depends on the Cylon mindset, though. If they are more robotic in their thinking, they may not expect guile.
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Not to mention that unlike the skinjobs, Centurions don't download when they die. If they just report casualties from battles where they actually defeated the opposing force but claim to still have lost ships, then the secret is pretty safe.
They'd just need to make sure that the "survivors" are in the know.
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One thing I don't think we can assume is that the Cylons are "robotic" in their thinking in the standard sci-fi emotionless sense. Even the Centurions seem to be curious, have anger, etc.
If anything them having that type of hubris is more thematically consistent with BSG, but... well I expect the next webisode to have them be like Data just to prove me wrong :p
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I had considered that they could have been siphoning them off in victories, still that would have required multiple battles where the Colonials had annihilated the Toasters.
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I had considered that they could have been siphoning them off in victories, still that would have required multiple battles where the Colonials had annihilated the Toasters.
Not necessarily, electronic warfare, jamming and the like can be used to confuse things when ships are firing at each other from who knows how far away.
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One thing I don't think we can assume is that the Cylons are "robotic" in their thinking in the standard sci-fi emotionless sense. Even the Centurions seem to be curious, have anger, etc.
If anything them having that type of hubris is more thematically consistent with BSG, but... well I expect the next webisode to have them be like Data just to prove me wrong :p
This.
It seemed to me that the point of the Caprica series was that even the earliest Cylons had some bastardized form of emotion, which is what caused them to want to be human in the end, though I'm not sure how that works with the 13th colony plot-line, or centurions v2.0, or the (sigh) centuridiles.
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It could have been publicly listed as mostly wrecked and with 100% crew losses and fit only for the salvage yards when it was in fact repairable and with some crew remaining. That way the Cylons think they completely wrecked it even though it was actually salvageable. I don't think anyone from the Archeron survived yet enough of the hull is intact for the FTL to stay operational (as infeasible as working FTL in a destroyed ship is).
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I doubt the drive was anywhere near working, just that it was spun up when the ship was destroyed and kept moving on inertia for... minutes? Hours? High quality space-grease and nanometer alignments on an unobtanium spinner, who knows how long that thing might keeping moving, especially without whatever brakes might be applied to stop it in an intentional shutdown or abort.
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That's way in the category of thinking about it more than the authors. You've put on a valiant defence of the show, in any case - I just wish the target material was deserving of it.
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Been reading this thread and it made me register to post my opinions.
And who's winning the war, anyway? On the one hand, Captain Mustache and Commander G-Man seem to think things are going pretty bad, but whatever draft there is doesn't seem to be very comprehensive judging by the fact that Coker doesn't expect to be stop-lossed, and that Adama's peripheral connection to the underworld could've gotten him out of harms way, and the Colonies can afford to have a dozen-odd ships in a secret reserve unit.
Regarding stop-loss: back in WW2 allied bomber crews went home after 30 missions, and fighter crews after 25 missions. This was due to the high rate of casualties among these units. It's possible (probably?) that the Colonial military has a similar protocol.
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Regarding stop-loss: back in WW2 allied bomber crews went home after 30 missions, and fighter crews after 25 missions. This was due to the high rate of casualties among these units. It's possible (probably?) that the Colonial military has a similar protocol.
Unlikely, considering they were fighting a defensive war against the Cylons as far as I understand it, and definitely were not in a strategically favourable position.
When the US and British air forces started conducting daytime bombing raids over continental Europe, they were on the offensive and the Luftwaffe was defensive. Luftwaffe, by their policy as well as lack of other options, kept their most experienced pilots on the front lines flying mission after mission after mission; that's one of the main reasons the German aces scored such high kill counts. The Japanese did the same. And, unless I'm much mistaken, the Soviet VVS also didn't really let pilots out of service after certain amount of sorties.
The US and British air forces used a system where airmen flew their allocated sorties, and could then return to home if they so wanted. On the other hand, the commissioned officers were usually rotated off the frontlines after certain amount of combat sorties, and re-assigned to training duties.
This is also one of the reasons why the pilot quality in USAAF, USN, USMC, RAF and Fleet Air Arm increased substantially as the war progressed. While the Germans and Japanese burned through their excellent pilots from the pre-war time, the training of new pilots for them suffered as the veterans did not get to impart their experience on the new pilots; while in the US/UK air forces they did.
I'm sure the Colonials would have done the same as US/UK air forces, if they had the chance to do it. But we don't have enough information about the Cylon War to determine whether they could have feasibly had so much freedom in recycling their frontline flight crews like this.
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A lot also depends on what the goals of the war are. If the Cylons just wanted to be left alone, they could've gone off into deep space after stealing a bunch of ships in their initial revolt. If they wanted to exterminate humanity, they were in a much better position to do so before they began an armed rebellion. They probably more access then than their spies did 50 years later. Similarly, are the Colonials fighting a defensive war? They don't seem to be operating with a siege mentality, making sure the Cylons stay on their side of no-man's-land. What would either side have needed to be convinced they'd won?
My guess is that Cylon stereotypes about the Colonials (combined, perhaps, by a less than live-and-let-live response from the humans to the cylons blowing up a bunch of stuff then flying away) have the Cylons fighting to cripple the Colonial military, but not necessarily to finish off every last person as they later did. It doesn't seem to me that they'd care to actually conquer the Colonies and rule over the survivors. The Colonials may well be more interested in total destruction of the enemy, given the fact that both Colonial strikes we've seen during the war were attacks on ostensible Cylon weapons depots that were actually cybernetics research labs (I wonder its they're the same planet both times), and that later military leaders tried to gin up a war by having a Battlestar loiter around next to the Armistice Line on the least stealthy stealth mission ever.
I suppose in that case, it's possible both sides thought they were fighting defensively and losing, if neither had any strategic goals other than to prevent the other side from continuing to be able to fight the war. If the Final Five hadn't shown up, the war actually might've lasted a thousand yahrens.
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At the same time though we see ground actions on Tauron towards the end of the war in what is probably a civilian area? But yes if outright extermination was their goal they would have easily been able to do that...
It could easily be the case that the Cylons weren't willing to wipe out humanity despite having the chances to do so, but also didn't know how to stop the aggression on either side.
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At the same time though we see ground actions on Tauron towards the end of the war in what is probably a civilian area? But yes if outright extermination was their goal they would have easily been able to do that...
It could easily be the case that the Cylons weren't willing to wipe out humanity despite having the chances to do so, but also didn't know how to stop the aggression on either side.
Or it could just be that the Cylons want to take planets with their infrastructure intact, which orbital bombardment makes difficult. Kind of hard to simply up and go off into the vast emptiness of space with no means of resupply and no spare parts beyond what you can carry is a difficult proposition.
Hence, the armistice line - there's a good chance that the Cylons got to keep a couple of planets with natural resources and manufacturing facilities.
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(http://i362.photobucket.com/albums/oo68/danbickell/AdamaCylonWar.jpg)
You can't eviscerate human meatbags with a sword if you orbitally bombard.
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So far this one's almost good!
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Definitely my favourite so far, mainly because we actually get some decent character interaction and development!
I did feel there was a very obvious cut after "you're going to regret this" which left things a little too lightly implied, that's probably my only gripe.
Loved the piano playing.
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I still didn't like this one all in all, but it contained a lot of things I liked - particularly some semi-genuine character moments and the suggestion of believably superhuman accuracy and perception on the part of the Cylons. Of course, then we had one being beaten to death with a piece of rebar or a cleaver or whatever -- and as usual a science fiction show passed up the obvious truth that it would take about half a second for a machine in close combat with a human being to permanently disable and kill its opponent. (BSG was actually pretty good about this, since the Centurions had those claw-hands.)
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Unfortunately they had only the one tertiary character to work with and they burned through him pretty quickly so plot armour prevails this time, even if something closer to what happened at the start of Valley of Darkness would've been more believable.
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What did the art/design people think of those Cylon models? I kinda liked em
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I have no real gripes with these centurion models, provided they're additional subtypes and not a real retcon. Overall I thought this episode contained the least amount of fail, these character moments might have actually had some potential had they not butchered the whole thing into tiny segments. Agreed about beating a Centurion to death with a steel pipe (or whatever that was) was dumb. It's a bit like overpowering a forklift with boxing gloves - the thing was designed to be stronger than a human.
One thing I'm not sure about is Centurions feeling pain. Humanoid models, sure - but if you're a machine not feeling pain or hunger, not having to sleep and not ever feeling tired strike me as benefits, particularly if you happen to be a combat-oriented machine. Not really sure why would anyone build in pain. Sounds to me like Graystone got a case of feature creeps, though it is possible the Cylons actually modified themselves in some sort of an effort to make themselves more human like. Otherwise, in a combat model you're looking for what Kyle Reese said best: "It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." :)
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I like the non-terminator qualities of the individual cylons. It makes the whole "war that isn't over in a week" seem a lot more plausible if you think of them as 14 year old girls inside forklifts rather than perfect merciless killing machines. Maybe these models are zamboni drivers or something.
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Actually them feeling pain makes sense, they've bought into a monotheist ideology where they want to be human (thus the whole agreeing with the Five thing).
Of course, genocidal tantrums aside, it's why Cavil makes the most sense: why the hell do you want to be human instead of embracing what you are?
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Are these things really combat models? Besides the ones that shot the Toth, none of the Cylons inside the facility had guns. And given how the Cylon was more interested in scanning Beka's dog tag than anything. If they wanted to kill everyone, they could have. It seems that the reason Toth got shot was because he pointed a gun at another Cylon, and the Cylon's buddy saw that as a threat to his buddy. The one that got killed by Coker looked like it wanted to tell Coker that it's not aggressive, too.
I'm probably giving Syfy too much credit, but I enjoyed these two episodes too. The idea that Cylons feel pain is pretty neat. I'm getting a sense that the Colonials are the aggressors, and the Cylons just want to be at peace. Human fears, hatred, and irrationality is what seems to be escalating the war.
The bad: I don't know why Toth is even there. He is so pointless as a character. In this webisode format, he's unrelatable. The lensflares are annoying. Why is Adama alive?
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Of course, then we had one being beaten to death with a piece of rebar or a cleaver or whatever -- and as usual a science fiction show passed up the obvious truth that it would take about half a second for a machine in close combat with a human being to permanently disable and kill its opponent. (BSG was actually pretty good about this, since the Centurions had those claw-hands.)
To be fair, it had been shot at close range before the hand to hand started. But yeah, it should have still been able to kill Adama in a few seconds. They really should have shown it taking more damage from the first shot, the fight might have been more believable if half its head was missing.
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i've enjoyed blood & chrome so far. considering what seems to be the obvious inspiration for the artistic style (spartacus: blood and sand) i was expecting it to take more artistic license, as compared to the 'realism' offered by the BSG. And to be honest, I'm fine with that artistic choice.
besides, if you look previous shows, the 'realistic' shows suffered in ratings as they went on (bsg, stargate universe).
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besides, if you look previous shows, the 'realistic' shows suffered in ratings as they went on (bsg, stargate universe).
Yes, but linking that to the art style is.. questionable at best. 99% of comments about BSG when people were complaining were in the direction of the story getting into too much mythical BS after season 3. The fact that BSG's art direction also started to suffer after S2 (after the switch to Zoic) doesn't exactly validate your theory either, since BSG's ratings started dropping when they started making departures from "realism" in later seasons (not that I think this had a significant impact on the ratings - like I said, most people complained about the story, not the visuals).
Or in short, because a show with a realistic looking art style starts getting bad ratings, it doesn't necessarily follow that the art style is to blame. Especially if it had a realistic art style from the start and the ratings were fine.
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Almost every serialized show loses ratings as it goes.
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So far i like BaC. Even though i have to admit it wouldn't mind it could have more character development and less action scenes. But considering it's 10 short webisodes and not 3 hour long pilot, i think it's forgivable. I can imagine more of it in case it would become long running serie.
Story so far average and i think it would be great having 3 hours to develop a not being cut into 10 parts. Now it seems to me terribly rushed. What i can't stand is Doctor OneFacialExpression. Lense flare is little bit annonying and the scene after crashing raptor on planet looked terribly unrealistic, otherwise CGI is really good, at least for webseries.
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The CGI isn't really good, and this wasn't filmed as a web series, it was cut up into one after it was made.
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well i have heard otherwise, that initialy it should have been webseries, but than SyFy considered making it pilot for new show, but that didn't happend. But maybe i am wrong. But i stand by my opinion that the CGI (minus lense flare) i good.
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Almost every serialized show loses ratings as it goes.
Except when it's a show about nothing.
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I did feel there was a very obvious cut after "you're going to regret this" which left things a little too lightly implied, that's probably my only gripe.
After the shower scene in part 2, I was like, "That's going to be the unrated part on the DVD." After part 7, I went, "No, that's the unrated part." I saw "The Plan" and listened to the commentary for "Razor," I know how these people think.
I'm looking forward to seeing where the additional scenes go. Awkward pacing aside, there haven't been a lot of obvious holes for additional material. The only other one I can think of is Adama mentioning they blew up two Cylon SAM sites on their way to the fleet in addition to the three raiders at the wreck of the Archeron, and I'd really prefer it if the long version is filled out with more character stuff and less pew-pew action and macho posturing.
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Alternate ending:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LX_nCYyrx0
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And here are the final episodes: http://youtu.be/mH8EDRptVAQ
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Well, that tied together fairly well, if a little on-the-nose in the end. It was nice seeing what's behind one of those windows in the jaw. (http://www.modelermagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/kg_zoic-studio_screen-caps-011.jpg) The closing narration had the same uneven quality as the opening, but there was too much live-action in it for me to assume it was totally put together at the last minute like I did before.
Their reach exceeded their grasp with the cylon at the end (which I don't really see the point of, being Another Thing That Already Happened In Razor In A Way That Made More Sense), and I might've winced visibly at the entirely different war-era Galactica revamp. And I have no idea how the hangar deck and launch tubes are supposed to work now.
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The CGI work is a mess. It looks all crap. Frakkin amateurs can do a better job.
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Second that. The script too. That was cringe-inducingly bad, especially the final Adama monologue and VFX sequence. Awful television on every level.
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(http://i48.tinypic.com/a11htf.jpg)
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The CGI work is a mess. It looks all crap. Frakkin amateurs can do a better job.
Speaking as a professional... go ahead. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151131281741104&set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-snc6%2F704143_10151131281741104_143583727_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-prn1%2F65124_10151131281741104_143583727_n.jpg&size=1280%2C721) Thrill me. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151131290296104&set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-ash4%2F339844_10151131290296104_1487177074_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-ash3%2F559891_10151131290296104_1487177074_n.jpg&size=1281%2C1436)
Second that. The script too. That was cringe-inducingly bad, especially the final Adama monologue and VFX sequence. Awful television on every level.
You need to watch more TV if you seriously think this is awful on every level. Reality shows with poor people being tricked into being on TV to be made fun of are awful. Comedies that consist entirely of straight recreations of things from the 18-36 male demo's childhood are awful. Daniel Tosh is awful.
I have the same issue with the technical criticism. I've seen productions where the casting was so bad you wouldn't have been able to recognize which one was Coker and which was the Commander in the last scene. Where the mise-en-scène fails so completely that it's impossible to tell that the characters are supposed to be talking to each other, or are even in the same room. Where the dialogue and acting are both so atrocious that it makes you wonder if either the writer or the actor even spoke english.
You watch this actual, continuous scene from a 1980s direct-to-video action movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvni9KbZfoo) that real human beings made and thought was worth releasing to the public and then tell me with a straight face that Blood and Chrome is "awful on every level."
It's mediocre, at worst. It's okay to damn it with faint praise, even to rip every sub-par element to shreds, but you don't need to go all-out that Blood and Chrome was worse than cancer, and raped your childhood, and all that nonsense. It just wasn't that great. Too bad. Better luck next time. Maybe you'll like the Bryan Singer movie.
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Bloody hell that "I, Robot" with a Tricia Helfer voice Cylon at the end was horrible. And just in case there was any doubt that this is about as deep as a particularly shallow ashtray, the line in the end: "just because you're more enlightened than the rest of your species, do you think we hate you any less?"
Why introduce any interesting concepts about the Cylons, when they can be evil robots that need to be killed without remorse? The audiences are simple and wouldn't get a shades of gray war where no party is good or evil, after all. Makes one wonder how come the original BSG was a success, then..
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I have the same issue with the technical criticism. I've seen productions where the casting was so bad you wouldn't have been able to recognize which one was Coker and which was the Commander in the last scene. Where the mise-en-scène fails so completely that it's impossible to tell that the characters are supposed to be talking to each other, or are even in the same room. Where the dialogue and acting are both so atrocious that it makes you wonder if either the writer or the actor even spoke english.
You watch this actual, continuous scene from a 1980s direct-to-video action movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvni9KbZfoo) that real human beings made and thought was worth releasing to the public and then tell me with a straight face that Blood and Chrome is "awful on every level."
"Awful" is a relative term. Something can only be awful in reference to something else, and I for one see no reason to compare it to even worse stuff from the 1980's, taking it out of context in relation to the time period it was made in, or comparing it with the worst of the modern days (reality shows), when you can compare it to contemporary stuff of the same category; the most logical one to compare it with would be the 2004-2009 BSG re-imagined series. And compared to that, it is awful on every level. The fact that there were and are much, much worse things made for TV doesn't excuse it from being awful sci fi in general, or awful BSG spinoff in particular.
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Now that I've watched it all, I can honestly say that was... pretty underwhelming, and I watch of a lot mediocre stuff.
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Well SAAB set in BSG it wasn't, but you can't always get what you want.
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they add more turrets to galactica during the mission :S wtf
i agree with slayers pic. that's whats pretty much happening to the ship
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Bloody hell that "I, Robot" with a Tricia Helfer voice Cylon at the end was horrible. And just in case there was any doubt that this is about as deep as a particularly shallow ashtray, the line in the end: "just because you're more enlightened than the rest of your species, do you think we hate you any less?"
Why introduce any interesting concepts about the Cylons, when they can be evil robots that need to be killed without remorse? The audiences are simple and wouldn't get a shades of gray war where no party is good or evil, after all. Makes one wonder how come the original BSG was a success, then..
That was really weird. It was like it was written by someone who'd only seen the Miniseries. It fits a lot better with the baby neck-snapping, "You repaid God's love with sin and depravity and deserve to die to the last child" Cylons of the pilot than it does with the Cylons after... which episode was it with the Six saying the bombed-out city made her sad? It was an early one. On the other hand, it's not like Cylon-on-Human racism ever went away entirely, there was that deleted scene of Adama and Tigh talking about how brutal the Cylons were in hand-to-hand combat. (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Deleted_Scenes_-_Season_2_(RDM)#Noteworthy_Dialogue)
Tigh: I'd never seen a dead person before. First one was Duncan Raverti. Deckhand Dunc. I found him in the corridor. His ribs were split open like a pig. His guts were strewn around him on the floor. You know, at first...at first I couldn't figure out why the Cylons would bother doing something like that.
Adama: Spread fear. Panic.
Tigh: No. You had to look into that red eye slit. They hated us. They hated us so much, it wasn't enough to just kill us. You know that Centurions have a stink? It's like machine oil. To this day, I get a whiff of grease or oil... I almost lose my lunch.
Now that's an evil robot that needs killing!
I don't know. It's still a weird scene. I wouldn't have done it like that. They should do more stuff with Centurions. I saw Wall-E, I know you can make machines emote. And if you want more subtlety... well, I thought they were going somewhere in Caprica that would've allowed Centurions to be portrayed by human actors under certain circumstances, but who knows.
"Awful" is a relative term. Something can only be awful in reference to something else, and I for one see no reason to compare it to even worse stuff from the 1980's, taking it out of context in relation to the time period it was made in, or comparing it with the worst of the modern days (reality shows), when you can compare it to contemporary stuff of the same category; the most logical one to compare it with would be the 2004-2009 BSG re-imagined series.
I don't see how "awful on every level" means "awful on an extremely specific subset of levels." If you want to say it's the worst thing nuBSG every produced, that's supportable (though, seriously. "Black Market." How many times did we need to see Lee's never-before-seen, never-again-mentioned girlfriend running off in tears? Or the soap-opera twists of "The Passage"? Or the conveniently resolved murder mystery of "The Woman King"? The original outline for season 4.5? And I'm sure a lot of fair-to-middling episodes would lose some luster if they were watched in four ten-minute chunks). If you want to say the effects are worse than whichever SyFy original movie with monster VFX done in After Effects just came out, that's hyperbole. If you want to say it's the worst thing ever in the history of ever, an utter failure on every level, well, have a little perspective. At least admit the dialogue was recorded clearly (cough, cough, miniseries, cough. Such a shame that the worst sounding scene made it into the most pre-episode recaps).
It's not great, sure, but reading this topic, you'd think it was the lovechild of Terminator 3 and Plan 9 From Outer Space. And it puts me in the awkward position of sounding like a cheerleader for an episode that I'd give a C+, tops.
they add more turrets to galactica during the mission :S wtf
The strange part is that the extra turrets along the spine disappeared, leaving just the ones on the nose (and the new-new ones on the nose). It's like they had two different concepts for an up-armed Galactica and accidentally used both in different scenes.
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Ship engineer's report 1.2- With the Galactica and it's escorts lost, my engineers are now analyzing the subversion entity we have code named The Machinima.
The Machinima seems to infect vessels with some sort of particle beam that layers the target with techno-organic robots.
Once these entities make contact with a compatible surface, they begin to absorb material and reconstruct the target structure.
When they made contact with Galactica, they... used it's mass to form a network of turrets that... began to take over the ship!
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If you want to say it's the worst thing ever in the history of ever, an utter failure on every level, well, have a little perspective.
Except I was pretty clear that's not what I'm saying. There are worse things, sure - what I'm saying is that this thing is pretty bad as a sci-fi series and bloody terrible as a nBSG spinoff. In my opinion, even at it's worst, nBSG (or even Caprica) was way better than B&C. We can agree or disagree on that, but the bottom line is, you think it's passable, some of us think it's not, and I don't think we either can or should even try to convince each other of something that's subjective. In my personal opinion, after seeing the B&C pilot, I'm glad they axed it before it began because I'd much rather have the first Cylon War open to imagination than have this crap break continuity and introduce bad designs all over the place.
As for every level, weell..
Plot/writing: boring, cliche, mediocre at the best of times;
Characters: boring, cliche;
CGI: bad;
Art direction/designs: terrible.
Not sure how many other relevant levels are there, this is enough for me to label it as plain bad. It's not "Attack of the Clones" love story level of bad, but it's still bad :)
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I always read the baby neck snapping in the pilot as an act of inhuman mercy, the Six seemed pretty upset with it when she walked away.
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If you want to say it's the worst thing ever in the history of ever, an utter failure on every level
These are not equivalent things. Failing on every level does not automatically result in becoming the worst thing ever. I've watched a lot of things that fail on every level they set out to reach. It was one that actually succeeded in being everything it wanted to be which I'd consider the worst movie I've ever seen.
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Yeah being a failure on every level just means you made A Bad Show.
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Why does the Tricia Helfer robot look like she prematurely ejaculated while talking to Becca?
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It wasn't good but I don't think it was entirely bad. The premise wasn't all that awful but it was poorly executed and had terrible dialogue. I kind of liked the idea of the ghost fleet but in all seriousness I would have preferred a straight up militaristic show for the first cylon war not all this cloak and dagger bs. There was enough of that in the first series.
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Honestly I wouldn't have that much of a problem with it minus two things that irritate me:
First war Valks
UBERGUN GALACTICA (in two variants?)
Okay and not a huge fan of the exploded versions of the sets...
There are things that are more video-gamey than I like.
Even Not-Six at the end wasn't *that* bad since it's still something on the road to the hybrids and could be fanoned into Cylons that are like the glowy-domed IL ones from the original show. (a priest-leader caste of the even more humanoid Cylons)
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Even Not-Six at the end wasn't *that* bad since it's still something on the road to the hybrids and could be fanoned into Cylons that are like the glowy-domed IL ones from the original show.
The idea of a more humanoid robot as a sort of a missing
link is fine. The design and execution? Far from it.
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I agree that it looked more like something from a game...
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I looked a lot like a Novus from "Universe at War: Earth Assault".
And for me it doesn't make much sense. If they wanted to build a robot that looks like a Human on the outside, that's very easy to do. Even with today's technology it is possible, so why this half assed attempt to make something look Human?
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You can't say it failed on every level.....the music was pretty good.
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The Good-
Loved the return of Tricia Helfer as Six. I don't know if that was new or saved dialog, but I was very happy when I heard her voice.
Decent twist
FRAKING GALACTICA
The Bad-
I was entirely expecting Adama to be given a beaten down Viper Mk II. Not only would it not retcon established canon, but would be a GREAT parallel to his command of the old run down Galactica in the series proper.
Mk III's suck
Coker drawing a gun on Adama felt cliche'
I wanted it to end with a shot of Edward James Olmos telling this story to someone (Tigh, Lee) just before The Fall. We can all use more EJO in our lives.
There was potential for this series. Get a few more decent writers on staff, nudge Syfy for a slightly bigger SFX budget, and this show could have been a nice action spinoff. Gods damn it.
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Given the low quality over all and the lack of enthusiasm by syfi, it looks like this series will be no spinoff. Kind of a shame, but honestly, I got the feeling things were going to go badly as soon as I saw the Spamstar Gunlactica.
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I always read the baby neck snapping in the pilot as an act of inhuman mercy, the Six seemed pretty upset with it when she walked away.
I thought the same.
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More fun and useful behind-the-scenes info from Doug Drexler's Facebook:
On the Viper III (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151132553961104&set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=1&relevant_count=1)
Ok... Viper explanation! The Vipers featured in B&C are MkIII's. MkII's and MkIII's are used concurrently in this time line. Each plane has different flight characteristics, making each useful for different purposes. The III is a heavier Viper, and can take greater punishment. The MkII is a little more maneuverable, but with a lighter armament load. It's a bit more of a sports car. All of the squadrons in that part of the hangar bay in B&C fly MkIII's. At some point, Bill will fall in love with the MkII... if enough people watch the show, and we get another order for further adventures : )
Sounds like the Mark II/Mark III split is kind of similar to the Viper/Assault Viper split in Diaspora. One's more of a nimble dogfighter, and the other has armor and missile bays.
There's a list of stations in Galactica's (enlarged?) CIC, (https://www.facebook.com/doug.drexler.7/posts/10151131312251104) but that's not really worth quoting in full unless someone's trying reverse-engineer the new set.
There's also a breakdown of a battlestar group. (https://www.facebook.com/doug.drexler.7/posts/10151131589581104) Interestingly, it describes the Osiris (then called the Reliant) as a "stealth frigate."
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The CGI work is a mess. It looks all crap. Frakkin amateurs can do a better job.
Speaking as a professional... go ahead. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151131281741104&set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-snc6%2F704143_10151131281741104_143583727_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-prn1%2F65124_10151131281741104_143583727_n.jpg&size=1280%2C721) Thrill me. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151131290296104&set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-ash4%2F339844_10151131290296104_1487177074_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-ash3%2F559891_10151131290296104_1487177074_n.jpg&size=1281%2C1436)
Puh lease. It was barely better than Star Wreck. The colors were all wrong, the shots, the speed of the elements running the screen, the lighting. Bad bad bad bad bad bad
It's mediocre, at worst. It's okay to damn it with faint praise, even to rip every sub-par element to shreds, but you don't need to go all-out that Blood and Chrome was worse than cancer, and raped your childhood, and all that nonsense. It just wasn't that great. Too bad. Better luck next time. Maybe you'll like the Bryan Singer movie.
Sure, it is "mediocre, at worst", which is a crime in itself given we are speaking about a spinoff of one of the best sci fi series of all frakkin time.
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BnC feels more like Starship Troopers than BSG. I kind of liked the twist, but then the ending disappointed me again. It'd be deeper if the Cylons really do just want to be left alone. But it seems like they want a genocide from the very beginning. Adama, Coker, and the admiral all feel like cartoon characters.
This show would be better off being a television show set in the BSG universe just like what they did with the MechWarrior TV show.
BnC is not mediocre. It's bad. Mediocre should at least be enjoyable for the first time. Watching this show just gets me frustrated by the following:
Plot
Character
Lensflare
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The CGI work is a mess. It looks all crap. Frakkin amateurs can do a better job.
Speaking as a professional... go ahead. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151131281741104&set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-snc6%2F704143_10151131281741104_143583727_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-prn1%2F65124_10151131281741104_143583727_n.jpg&size=1280%2C721) Thrill me. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151131290296104&set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-ash4%2F339844_10151131290296104_1487177074_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-ash3%2F559891_10151131290296104_1487177074_n.jpg&size=1281%2C1436)
Puh lease. It was barely better than Star Wreck. The colors were all wrong, the shots, the speed of the elements running the screen, the lighting. Bad bad bad bad bad bad
I'm not seeing comp'ed CGI on production stills of greenscreen sets. Is my browser having an error, or are you just flinging unsupportable insults and the doubling down on them because this is the internet and vitriol is an acceptable substitute for cleverness?
I can take a whack at it, if you don't feel up to it. I'm not strictly an amateur anymore, but it might be fun. Heck, everybody can get in on it. Have a good old "Photoshop this!" thread.
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cgc, there's more to CGI art than having a set of green walls and neat toys around you. If you disagree with my assessment on the utter terribadness of this show's CGI, then I'd guess we disagree with core values of aesthetics, production, management, etc., which is neither bad or good, just the way it is.
There are some bits of the show which clearly show the makers didn't bother anymore such as the crash of the Raptor. Others it's annoyingly clear that the lens flares exist more to hide the awful CGI than as a matter of style preference. The color filters flooding the character faces are, time to time, just plain bad. The speed of the camera movements is uneven and the artificialness of it all is like a stench that tries to rape your eyes in every scene. And yes in the insulting this show I can go on and on.
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I have to agree with the above. Regardless of how the actors vs. greenscreen part turned out, the CGI here is plain bad in most places. And I'm being generous with "most".
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cgc, there's more to CGI art than having a set of green walls and neat toys around you. If you disagree with my assessment on the utter terribadness of this show's CGI, then I'd guess we disagree with core values of aesthetics, production, management, etc., which is neither bad or good, just the way it is.
So, just so we're clear, you can't, as an amateur, make something better than one single test frame from Blood and Chrome, despite what you said. You aren't even willing to try and risk failure.
See, I've got no problem with you criticizing it. I'm not one of those people who responds to every bad review by saying, "Oh yeah, so let's see how great your movie was. Oh, you don't have one?" My problem is you boasting that any idiot off the street could do better, which is both an insult to the production team and to my field of work as a whole (a common one, at that. "Let's just get the neighbor kid to make our commercial, rather than paying someone! It'll be just as good!"). That's when you opened yourself to the, "Oh, yeah, let's see your movie" response. And you supported it by bringing up "Star Wreak," of all things. I could write a dissertation the technical and aesthetic issues with Star Wreak, and I would've if I thought you were actually serious. And it'd involve stuff like locked-off greenscreen shots with camera angles that don't match, and blatantly unbalanced frames with no sense of scale making mile-long starships look like toys, and embarrassingly spliney camera animation, not "eye stench rape," which sounds like a side effect from one of Stephen Colbert's medical segments.
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What. Gcg, I am not a professional in making movies. My job, however, includes making renders for a frakkin living, I know the bits and bolts on what makes a goddamned image meh, good, pretty good and frakkin awesome. And B&C was awful, OK.
See, I've got no problem with you criticizing it. I'm not one of those people who responds to every bad review by saying, "Oh yeah, so let's see how great your movie was. Oh, you don't have one?" My problem is you boasting that any idiot off the street could do better
I said "barely better", which means that I obviously agree it is better than a movie made with zero budget. The fact that I'm even reminded to make the comparison is what is the problem here, memories of crappy CGI works should not enter my mind when dealing with a BSG franchise.
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Why do we need to spend 40% of this thread parsing exactly what 'bad' means, complete with historical contingencies dependent on BSG's past failures and attempts to position this badness vis a vis the badness of The Room/starving to death in the Sudan? When I sit down to watch something I want to see good art, period. Not art that falls within the top 10% of science fiction's good/bad distribution (skewed heavily bad), or art that's pretty good given the money and resources available, or art that is not as bad as the worst of its franchise. I just want something with a good script, a few challenging ideas, and a confident visual style that contributes to the storytelling - something that makes me think and feel. B&C didn't deliver.
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B&C didn't deliver.
And at the end of the day, this is pretty much what it all boils down to for me.
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And you supported it by bringing up "Star Wreak," of all things. I could write a dissertation the technical and aesthetic issues with Star Wreak, and I would've if I thought you were actually serious. And it'd involve stuff like locked-off greenscreen shots with camera angles that don't match, and blatantly unbalanced frames with no sense of scale making mile-long starships look like toys, and embarrassingly spliney camera animation, not "eye stench rape," which sounds like a side effect from one of Stephen Colbert's medical segments.
I would like to point out that Star Wreck's effects were made by one man with very limited computing power, not by a team with plenty of experience. Which makes comparing the two pointless.
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What. Gcg, I am not a professional in making movies. My job, however, includes making renders for a frakkin living, I know the bits and bolts on what makes a goddamned image meh, good, pretty good and frakkin awesome. And B&C was awful, OK.
Well, you must have to walk me through it, because apparently I'm wildly overpaid. Here, pick a screen cap (https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=1) and tell me precisely what's wrong with it, as if it we were doing weeklies and it's open floor for comments, criticisms, and revisions. I won't even complain if you pick a nonrepresentative but easy one, like the test render of the FTL engine or the basestar over the city.
Why do we need to spend 40% of this thread parsing exactly what 'bad' means, complete with historical contingencies dependent on BSG's past failures and attempts to position this badness vis a vis the badness of The Room/starving to death in the Sudan?
Because people say, "God this is horrible because" and then follow it up with the most asinine nitpicks or examples of things also done in the parent show (or, my favorite, asinine nitpicks of things also done in the parent show). And it never "weak" or "bad" or "Eh, 50/50." It's horrible, terrible, a failure on every level. Amateurs could do better (except, of course, when they didn't, but that's still damning, because this is a spin off of the greatest work of science fiction in history and the fact that the human brain can even comprehend a comparison between the two is a proof of a level of badness that Ed Wood could only dream of). Most of the effects (no, let's be unkind, all 1800 effects) were artistic and technical failures, not because of shoddy modeling, bad textures, bad lighting design, bad cinematography, sliding motion tracks, or green-screen artifacts, but because of bloom and color palette.
This is maddening. Actual problems are given perfunctory mentions, and then show is crucified on the basis of nitpicks that no one would've cared about in a better production (or occasionally, in a worse production). This board has had the most universally and stridently negative reaction to B&C I've seen, and it's wildly disproportionate to the actual deficiencies in the movie, and impossibly disproportionate to the cited deficiencies in the movie. You don't see why 40% of the topic is talking about how bad is bad? I don't see why 60% of this topic is railing about how this is the worst piece of crap ever produced when it's not even the worst piece of crap nuBSG ever produced.
I would like to point out that Star Wreck's effects were made by one man with very limited computing power, not by a team with plenty of experience. Which makes comparing the two pointless.
That's pretty much what I was getting at originally. Yeah, sure, B&C had a lot of bloom and occasionally dared to use the color blue, but was hardly at the point where "Frakkin amateurs can do a better job."
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That's pretty much what I was getting at originally. Yeah, sure, B&C had a lot of bloom and occasionally dared to use the color blue, but was hardly at the point where "Frakkin amateurs can do a better job."
No, but it was at a point where professionals with a budget should do a much, much better job. But shoddy CGI would be completely forgivable if the rest was on the level. Which it isn't.
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It thought is was better than Caprica.
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Sorry it's maddening, man. Unfortunately B&C was a failure on every level without the need for any particular external referent. It did not achieve anything it attempted to do, and it failed to attempt pretty much anything it needed to do.
This board has had the closest to a rational level-headed reaction to B&C I've seen, given that most other venues seem infested with SF/F genre fans who still believe Star Trek is a metric for watchable television and Starship Troopers an exemplar of passable writing. They'll eat anything they're given as long as it has a spaceship and some guns.
I did feel a spark of interest when Adama found out how callously he and everyone else had been used, but it just led him to reaffirm his belief in THE COLONIES, support are troops :911:
e: I should be fair in noting that his reaction was more fraternal than patriotic, but it was not a fresh or intelligent or interesting piece of writing that emerged from his experiences over the past hour of television.
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Lots of words
Okay, fine, we get it, you do not think that B&C was as bad as we do. That's fine, that's certainly an opinion one could have, but please remember that your opinion does not equate to being absolute truth (Neither does ours, I hasten to add).
Now, you asked for criticisms about some of the shots in that facebook album. Fine, I'll give it a shot. Bear in mind though that I do not have any sort of training in making actual CG things, or camerawork, or design, or art direction. I am just someone who appreciates fine pixels.
(https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/432343_10151131280896104_859705266_n.jpg)
This is one of the first shots we see. What came before was one of the most asinine things ever encoded into h264, for various conceptual reasons (Why would a flight simulator model damage from a handgun? It's something that was put in to show how cocky and talented our lead is, but still, there are better ways to do this!). What we see here is the sim "deconstructing". Now, my question is, why is there a giant screen behind the pilot showing the scorecard? Shouldn't it be somewhat smaller in front of the person being scored? Or, actually, somewhere for the instructor to see?
What we see here is the failed attempt to cram as much information into a scene as possible, without any regard to how things would actually look and work out. Compare this to the various briefing scenes we had in BSG, especially the stuff from Scar. Those scenes were quite simple in their setup, and immediately rang true to the audience because we've seen that before, in every WW2 flying aces movie ever.
(https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/577999_10151131280926104_472529249_n.jpg)
This shot is interesting. There are several things that even an untrained eye can detect. One, it basically looks as if we're looking at a miniature set. Two, there's a group of three people a bit right of the center which has been copied and pasted right next to each other. Four, it's incredibly cluttered. There are Vipers in every corner of the screen; is it really necessary for all of them to be there to get the point across that this ship's fighter complement is larger than nuBSGs Galactica, or that the flight deck is incredibly busy? Wouldn't it have been possible to convey the same feelings with a much more modest attempt at set extension?
(https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/380826_10151131281431104_1390528453_n.jpg)
And here, the foreground and background feel completely disconnected from each other. I am not entirely sure why that is, which little telltales are telling my brain this, but they are there.
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I've thought about it, I think the vitriol stems from a couple factors that combine into a lot of vehemence for folks. First and foremost NuBSG, at least the first two seasons, was very good and holds a warm fuzzy position in many viewers' hearts. Anything that's BSG related automatically is going to be running up against high expectations. I don't think you can easily disconnect those expectations. Secondly NuBSG for the most part stuck to presenting a "real" feeling universe in its effects content coupled with very well presented CGI, especially for season 1 and 2 (even when there where technical screwups like missing Pegasus struts and such they where not blatant logic errors but mistakes). The storylines and characters were typically very tight and interesting throughout the first two seasons. Even if we threw out NuBSG as a comparison, if you juxtaposed B&C with SAAB I still think you would find B&C wanting. SAAB actually probably would provide a good litmus test for B&C. They both ostensibly portray total warfare against an implacable foe. SAAB was a "war" show but built itself on a cadre of interesting characters, raised very interesting questions and presented quite a bit of depth. It also had a CGI shot with the USS Eisenhower which is one of my favorite scenes ever.
B&C presented a universe that didn't feel cohesive with what NuBSG built up. Instead of being NuBSG set against the grander scale of 1CW it instead presented a relentless string of well, cartoon like gimmicks. Shooting Raiders with sidearms, flying through a giant V8 engine, another Colonial ramming scene, Raptor flamethrower, Toasterconda. It really was way too much silliness stuffed into too short a space. Its especially vexing when contrasted against NuBSG which typically shied away from such antics. If they had simply cut most of that stuff out and took the foot of the pedal B&C would have been much stronger for it. I don't think its a coincidence that the episode that received the most praise had the least shenanigans. Story wise it didn't really do anything new or interesting, and the charters were not as engaging as those from BSG.
For me personally, the special effects weren't as irksome because of how they where presented but what they presented. As I mentioned before all the cartoon scenes where not in keeping with what I've come to expect from BSG. Then couple that with a mess of what I can only describe as logic/engineering errors. That hangar space is far larger than what is available in Galacitica's Pods. The MK III probably doesn't fit the established Viper tube. The Osiris was shown at the end of one episode to have box missile launchers which in the very next acted like KEWs. The Valk, which was arguably a post 1CW ship is in the ghost fleet. Galactica showing up with one crazy overgunned retcon after another. I wouldn't care if the CGI wasn't as strong technically if they had presented something that was interesting and realistic and not riddled with fridge logic. Again less would have been way more in B&C's case. Standard MK IIs and interior and exterior Galactica would have removed many of the technical gripes right off the bat.
So is B&C the worst thing ever? No, certainly not. Does it deserve to be derided as much as it does here? Well that's more of a personal opinion. I will say its facing the high expectations set by NuBSG and it really fell short for me at least. Even if we removed all the hemming and hawing about the quality or lack there of is there really much left to discuss about the show? I remember back in BTRL days we filled page after page with constructive posts discussing each episode, it was a lot of fun, I can't say the same for B&C.
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Let's look at it this way, if they did to the Enterprise (no Abrams Trek snarky responses please) what they did to the Galactica there would be murder.
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^ They did. Read some of the 70s fanzines reactions to the Probert redesign sometime. Klingon warp engines! Low-tech push-buttons! It's all horrible now!
No, but it was at a point where professionals with a budget should do a much, much better job. But shoddy CGI would be completely forgivable if the rest was on the level. Which it isn't.
I can't agree with that assessment. Two million dollars and twenty-six people sounds like a lot (especially when you're used to a budget of zero and a staff made up entirely of love), but it really isn't. Luckily, history provides us with a guide of what a $2 million spin-off of a popular science fiction franchise with no stock sets or assets except for a couple of props and costumes looks like: Babylon 5's "Lost Tales." It's the most direct comparison available to B&C, and while it made a different (though similar) set of compromises with its limitations, those limitations were still very apparent in the final product, what with it taking place is a series of black or grey featureless rooms, short hallways, one full virtual set, or in front of two and a half digital matte paintings, and very small number of speaking roles and extras.
Sorry it's maddening, man. Unfortunately B&C was a failure on every level without the need for any particular external referent.
I see we still have incompatible definitions of "failure" and "every." This conversation has clearly been a failure on every level of communication. :p
Okay, fine, we get it, you do not think that B&C was as bad as we do. That's fine, that's certainly an opinion one could have, but please remember that your opinion does not equate to being absolute truth (Neither does ours, I hasten to add).
Actually, I don't think anything could be as bad as you guys think B&C is, which is why I'm being such a pain in the ass about it. ;) But fair enough.
This is one of the first shots we see. What came before was one of the most asinine things ever encoded into h264, for various conceptual reasons (Why would a flight simulator model damage from a handgun? It's something that was put in to show how cocky and talented our lead is, but still, there are better ways to do this!).
Well, it is a flight sim programmed in an engine that can model human sacrifice and freaky sex. What we see here is the sim "deconstructing". Now, my question is, why is there a giant screen behind the pilot showing the scorecard? Shouldn't it be somewhat smaller in front of the person being scored? Or, actually, somewhere for the instructor to see?
That's more of a film theory question. From that perspective, we shouldn't have been able to see any of it, aside from the couple of shots from Adama's PoV. It applies to any VR or dream sequence, or even Doctor Who's Weeping Angels (thought it does give me an interesting idea of how to shoot one that takes the problem into account. I have a nagging feeling it's been done before, though). I can't provide a diegetic explanation for why the scorecard is there, because there's no diegetic way for the sequence to exist at all. I had a similar issue with the displays in Dead Space, which were present diegetically, but were calibrated to be read by someone about four feet behind and above the user's right shoulder for some strange reason.
"Excessive cleverness" is essentially how I would sum up all of my issues with B&C's effects. I'd bet a coke that those people had this exact conversation, came up with some in-universe justification for the sequence (it was a spectator view for instructors, for instance), and then moved on with their lives, satisfied that since they could justify it to themselves, it would magically communicate to the audience, as well. Same for the Rube Goldberg launch tubes and lack of Mark II Vipers, even in the background. Same thing happened in a short I was working on, and we were so wrapped up in it we forgot what it would look like to anyone seeing the movie without the benefit of being around for all of our script revisions. The result was unpleasant, and not just because I thought the earlier drafts were better. But that's neither here nor there.
This shot is interesting. There are several things that even an untrained eye can detect. One, it basically looks as if we're looking at a miniature set. Two, there's a group of three people a bit right of the center which has been copied and pasted right next to each other. Four, it's incredibly cluttered. There are Vipers in every corner of the screen; is it really necessary for all of them to be there to get the point across that this ship's fighter complement is larger than nuBSGs Galactica, or that the flight deck is incredibly busy? Wouldn't it have been possible to convey the same feelings with a much more modest attempt at set extension?
I actually hadn't noticed the duplicated crowd plate. That's pretty sloppy. I think the impression of the small size comes from the large amount of depth of field separation, which is a constant theme in B&C. It might've been a trick to reduce render times (if the background is going to be blurred anyway, you can render it quicker with less detail), or it might've been intended to reduce the flattening effect greenscreen can have by giving the virtual set an overabundance of depth cues (which you'd normally only get photographing something very small very close, or with a specialized lens). I'd guess the clutter is to help play with sense of space, looking more claustrophobic and then opening up to reveal that there are stacks of Vipers going back hundreds of feet, not just this one right in front of you. It may just be that they went overboard with the idea of "bustling hangar deck," though.
And here, the foreground and background feel completely disconnected from each other. I am not entirely sure why that is, which little telltales are telling my brain this, but they are there.
Probably the focus again. That's also a really chancy composition. You generally want to avoid that kind of flat, edge-on shot unless your name is Wes Anderson and you can actually pull it off. It's very hard to get an effective sense of space and depth without everything either looking flat, or everything looking like a series of cardboard cutouts arranged in a row. The long pull-in on Adama in compounds the issue. It's the kind of shot that looks good in a comic, painting, or storyboard, but doesn't usually work in film. I wouldn't have done it like that (I think I would've echoed the shot of Adama being shown his Viper from the beginning of the miniseries, come to think of it), and I'm pretty sure it would've looked weird if they did the shot on the hangar set with the physical Viper and no CG at all when the show was in production.
Thank you for the comments, though. When I'm talking about outrageously bad CGI, I was thinking more about some specific glitches from nuBSG that I can't find on Google Image Search at the moment. I'll grab some screen caps later on off the DVDs. It might make a good blog post.
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There was that one shot in S4 with a literally untextured civilian ship in plain view, that cracked me up.
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JJ made a good job regarding Trek.
Well, you must have to walk me through it, because apparently I'm wildly overpaid. Here, pick a screen cap (https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151131280806104.440205.570346103&type=1) and tell me precisely what's wrong with it, as if it we were doing weeklies and it's open floor for comments, criticisms, and revisions. I won't even complain if you pick a nonrepresentative but easy one, like the test render of the FTL engine or the basestar over the city.
You wanna go down discussing the dirt with me? Well why not.
(https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/558973_10151131281011104_1202899880_n.jpg)
Why is all blurred in this image (discounting the obvious movement)? The answer is simple. The "antialiasing" of the contours of the people in the set is constantly being repaired by the CGI crewmen, usually by color bleeding and lighting effects (lens flares in all kinds, from blatantly in your face to very very subtle hints). This problem pervades all the CGI shots, specially in the hangar sets and the "elevators", thus making it plainly obvious to the viewer we are watching a virtual set, not a real one.
Note that it is not a "problem" if someone realises there's CGI working, the problem is when the CGI gets in front of you and instead of helping you to see, it blocks your vision, unclarifies everything and you have to semi-close your eyes to make sure you understand what the hell you are watching. It is always there, irritating your eyes, annoying you on every single level.
(http://sphotos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/401713_10151131281056104_985607512_n.jpg)
Here, same problem. Notice how the CGI crew valiantly tried to hide the difference in lighting that usually pervades these kinds of shots with lens flares, blurs and color bleedings.
(http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/558982_10151131281236104_723409273_n.jpg)
The exterior shots were okay. There are no fiddling humans there to distract the CGI people doing their jobs.
(http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/66071_10151131281996104_137631197_n.jpg)
Everything blurred in the background, everything fazed, dessaturated, without contrast, no single hair will ever be shown correctly (nor can it, due to the green back set behind the hair).
(http://sphotos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/205180_10151132553961104_2006866371_n.jpg)
The CGI guy commanding the lighting, bloom, lens flares, etc. was probably smoking too much marijuana here. Or always.
Anyways, as I've said earlier, it's not that there's no huge "Work" involved here. Clearly, lots of people had a hard time making those CGI models, texture them, polish them, all the management involved, the design, etc., etc. However, those people were betrayed by sheer lack of quality on the final product due to every problem that has been listed in this thread. Look at Babylon 5's CGI. It made me chuckle at the time. However, there was no lens flare, blurrs or blooms hiding the characters behind them, the people were crisp and clear, the shots were well executed and simple. And so, despite the sheer difference in terms of "polygons" and "green walls" and everything you seem to fancy so much, the end product was an amazing series that showed exactly what it wanted to show and how it wanted to show. This show has nothing of the sort. This is the kind of thing you *should* avoid to end up doing if you want to get on this type of work.
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I can't agree with that assessment. Two million dollars and twenty-six people sounds like a lot (especially when you're used to a budget of zero and a staff made up entirely of love), but it really isn't. Luckily, history provides us with a guide of what a $2 million spin-off of a popular science fiction franchise with no stock sets or assets except for a couple of props and costumes looks like: Babylon 5's "Lost Tales." It's the most direct comparison available to B&C, and while it made a different (though similar) set of compromises with its limitations, those limitations were still very apparent in the final product, what with it taking place is a series of black or grey featureless rooms, short hallways, one full virtual set, or in front of two and a half digital matte paintings, and very small number of speaking roles and extras.
Comparing modern CGI with something as old as B5 is problematic at best, and confusing the issue at worst. Technology has come a long way since, to a point where nowadays a single talented fan with one mid range system can do stuff that would have been nearly impossible, or extremely expensive back then.
Even so, a lower budget and no sets cannot justify the horrible, tasteless art direction and designs that take a radical deparure from what was establishes. Comparing this to The Lost Tales doesn't make much sense to me, as the time elapsed between the two make any CGI / budget comparisons meaningless.
What I find most perplexing, however, is the amount of energy you invested in defending something so poor. I'd have like to have seen that energy invested into something a bit more deserving. This flying around in circles, finding new and creative ways of saying the same things over and over is starting to feel like it's own purpose.
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The Lost Tales had a couple really excellent CGI shots. I would even say there are quite a few original B5 CGI shots that are better than Blood and Chrome, because the viewer can accept them as natural rather than as artifice. While they're clearly technically inferior, they do their jobs better because they feel contiguous and whole with themselves, windows onto things actually happening rather than overwrought presentations.
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I have a theory about (part of) the Galactica redesign. Obviously the real reason is that they simply wanted the ship in its prime to be more impressive looking and didn't really think it through enough, but allow me to indulge in some fan wankery.
One of the obvious issues that others have pointed out with all the new guns they copy-pasted all over her is that the known structure of the ship doesn't allow for much ammo storage for most of them. Maybe that's intentional. Perhaps the plethora of guns are intended to put out a ton of fire in a very short period of time at the start of battle, hopefully decisively, gradually falling silent as a fight drags on, ultimately leaving only a core of well supplied weapons active. This would also explain the outer layer of retconned armor; it's there partly to minimize the danger of all that ammo exploding, a danger that goes down as the battle drags on and the ammo is used up. We see that Galactica operates as part of a group, with what are presumably support ships and escorts. Later on they changed their tactical thinking, reducing the number of guns (and possibly replacing them with better ones) and armor which had became superfluous, in the process making the ship leaner. This was possibly part of a general shift away from battlegroups and towards more self-sufficient battlestars.
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And so, despite the sheer difference in terms of "polygons" and "green walls" and everything you seem to fancy so much, the end product was an amazing series that showed exactly what it wanted to show and how it wanted to show. This show has nothing of the sort. This is the kind of thing you *should* avoid to end up doing if you want to get on this type of work.
Right. Avoid feathering live-action mattes in my 3D work and don't view JJ Abrams as a trendsetter. To think, I wasted all that time in those photography classes, and agonizing over polyflow and UV maps, when I could've substituted knowledge of composition, lighting, and modeling with the three noes: No matte feathering, no bloom, and no compositing tricks from after 1998. I can feel my work in the parts of the pipeline I'm not involved with becoming better already.
I love, absolutely love that your detailed complaints about the CGI have absolutely nothing to do with the CGI. Look development and compositing, but not CGI. And then you mock me for foolishly thinking you were judging quality of the CGI by the quality of the CGI.
Jeeze. This is like if you were complaining about the acting, and when I finally pinned you down, you said it was bad because the costumes weren't well tailored and the loose fit distracted you from concentrating on the lines. It's disappointing, honestly.
Comparing modern CGI with something as old as B5 is problematic at best, and confusing the issue at worst. Technology has come a long way since, to a point where nowadays a single talented fan with one mid range system can do stuff that would have been nearly impossible, or extremely expensive back then.
The Lost Tales was 2007. That's only four years older than B&C (remember, it was completed a year ago). And I wasn't arguing the quality of B&C's VFX was better than TLT (In fact, I'd say TLT was better in some ways, in part because they chose to sacrifice scope to concentrate on fewer set pieces). As for the comparison, well, TLT also had a massively redesigned docking bay (though it was originally going to be lit in the dark grays of the series docking bay so it would've superficially matched, JMS was so thrilled with it he had them crank up the lighting to show it off).
Alec McCylmont has some HD screen caps in his portfolio (http://www.alecm.com/gallery.htm) if you'd like to compare. Luis Dias will be impressed by the sharp matte work and lack of bloom in the wide shot of the docking bay where Lochley and the Centauri Prince don't have feet.
What I find most perplexing, however, is the amount of energy you invested in defending something so poor. I'd have like to have seen that energy invested into something a bit more deserving. This flying around in circles, finding new and creative ways of saying the same things over and over is starting to feel like it's own purpose.
I enjoy fiction. Reading, watching it, making it in my own small ways, and discussing it with others. The creative act thrills me, and being in the audience is a form of that act. So is the discussing, speculating on, fanwanking, and debating that comes afterward. Even a bad installment can give something of worth to riff off of. For instance, it could establish the existence a civilian colonial ship with a large, conspicuous docking bay.
So it's just a little irritating when the most lively discussion about B&C is a half-dozen people running around in circles finding ever more inane reasons to say it's the suckiest piece of suck that ever sucked. Each treated equally, as unforgivable sins against drama. And it's the people you'd think would be the first ones to see a lackluster story as an opportunity, not a burden.
This isn't a defense. This is a (vain, apparently) attempt to discuss anything other than how much fun it is to bully the movie, deserving target though it may be. So, yeah, it is kind of it's own end, in that if talking about talking about B&C actually promotes a genuine discussion on any subject, it's a win for me. It's not the fun I wanted, but it's the tiniest bit of the ancillary amusement that should come with any new story. And maybe I'm taking it a little hard that the thread seems to have developed a life of it's own dedicated to raining on my parade.
Also, I've been doing a lot of troubleshooting on lengthy renders, which is giving me long stretches of downtime to read, share my thoughts on what counts as CGI, and not do much else.
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Whoops, didn't hit post. Well, here's a selection of my favorite BSG bad CG.
The infamous miniseries jump shot with the open flight pods. (http://www.frak-that.com/miniseries/images/bsgmini_cap1360.jpg) Also, with no shadows, which is a bit more of an issue for me. A corrected version appeared in a later episode (http://www.frak-that.com/201/images/201_cap098.jpg).
A shadowless version (http://www.frak-that.com/106/images/106_cap110.jpg) of my favorite stock shot of the Galactica. (http://www.frak-that.com/miniseries/images/bsgmini_cap0995.jpg) It must've been someone else's, too, since it's the only one they rerendered precisely with the battle damage from season 3, and then against in season 4.
The crowd-pleasing entrance of the Pegaus in Exodus Part II, which is missing the smoke effects. (http://www.frak-that.com/304/images/304_cap205.jpg) Those shells look a lot less cool when they're just glowing cones. Also, it's got that extra turret, but the Pegasus was always a ship-of-the-week at heart. It grew all sorts of extra parts on a week-to-week basis that hadn't been anticipated when it was modeled. The smoke's the big problem with the shot. It was probably a render time thing, since it was an effects-heavy episode. The other two are the ones that have no apparent excuse.
And, a special bonus, an actual case of bad compositing from B&C (https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/270134_10151288403824925_187494316_n.png) (as opposed to "compositing I disagree with creatively"). Fie and shame on whoever let that slip through.
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I cannot immediately think of a single worthwhile thing in Blood and Chrome. Not even one line of dialogue or story beat springs to mind.
e: I am open to being convinced though!
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I can think of one thing of Blood & Chrome: they don't mix.
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One of the shots that David_cgc got my attention was the museum window located at the forward starboard flight pod. . . did it survived (intact) throughout the whole 4 seasons? :)
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No, IIRC a Heavy Raider crashed through it and decompressed the flight pod that was being converted into a museum. I think they eventually returned it back into service and got the viper launch tubes operational again, but again, this is if I remember correctly.
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That was the back window.
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David, can we please, please, with a cherry on the top and for the love of all things holy, get rid of the logic that because other shows made mistakes here and there that gives B&C carte blanche to make them all over the place and still remain at least passable?
As several people said numerous times here, yes nuBSG made mistakes too, but on the whole, it was a very good show for the most of us. It would have some CGI errors but wasn't made of them. It didn't put so much crap in every shot your eye couldn't find a fixed point. It sometimes retconned stuff but didn't do it on the B&C scale with fat greebled vipers now called mk3's, the beloved mk2 nowhere to be seen, the so much overgunned it looks like bad fanon Galactica, the Valkyrie, etc etc. BSG had one really silly action scene in Razor, B&C has one every 10-15 minutes. BSG had interesting characters and plot, B&C doesn't.
Most of all, BSG felt the part. The space scenes felt like they happened in space. The overall mood followed the setting. B&C feels like Michael Bay making a transfomers spinoff on a tight budget.
In the end, a lot of us here love BSG to a point where we were willing to work for free for 4 years on a game dedicated to it. I for one wanted to like B&C but for me, it failed to deliver on every level. Sorry if that rains on your parade, it certainly rained on mine - but no amount of forum arguments and stretched comparisons are going to make me enjoy this tacky looking, clumsy storytelling excuse for a show - not sure if you think you'll convert us into liking it by some well aimed comment but that won't be happening. If you like this show, good for you - some of us don't and forum posts aren't likely to change that. To quote the young non-Adama (this kid doesn't look, act or sound the part) - deal with it :)
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Right. Avoid feathering live-action mattes in my 3D work and don't view JJ Abrams as a trendsetter. To think, I wasted all that time in those photography classes, and agonizing over polyflow and UV maps, when I could've substituted knowledge of composition, lighting, and modeling with the three noes: No matte feathering, no bloom, and no compositing tricks from after 1998. I can feel my work in the parts of the pipeline I'm not involved with becoming better already.
I love, absolutely love that your detailed complaints about the CGI have absolutely nothing to do with the CGI. Look development and compositing, but not CGI. And then you mock me for foolishly thinking you were judging quality of the CGI by the quality of the CGI.
You'd do so much better without the sarcasm it's not even funny. Look, it's not my fault if the people in command of the compositing, the look, the every bit and bolt that makes the final picture has botched your "CGI" work (to me CGI is more broad than UV Mapping but hey) and turn it into a pile of plastic looking garbage. To complain that this was a "JJ trendsetting" makes it even worse, since JJ's CGI team (was it light and magic? I think so) actually executed it masterfully and without any single mistake of B&C. The lens flares of Star Trek are annoying as hell but you never feel they exist to hide the problems of glueing CGI with filmed characters.
There's a difference between a style and a hack.
So it's just a little irritating when the most lively discussion about B&C is a half-dozen people running around in circles finding ever more inane reasons to say it's the suckiest piece of suck that ever sucked. Each treated equally, as unforgivable sins against drama. And it's the people you'd think would be the first ones to see a lackluster story as an opportunity, not a burden.
It's a burden, it's a piece of trash television that might as well never have existed in the first place. Now, you might say that some people might have enjoyed it and so on, but such facts are irrelevant to me and I dare say to many people here.
This isn't a defense. This is a (vain, apparently) attempt to discuss anything other than how much fun it is to bully the movie, deserving target though it may be.
You don't seem to stand other people having opinions different than yours.
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No, he's just saying that the constant slagging off of B&C for the same things every week is getting a bit old.
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Whatever one's opinion on B&C is, this thread is needlessly spiraling into something not nice. It's *just* a tv series, getting worked up about it like a bunch of 12 year olds is silly. If you liked it, fine. If you didn't like it, also fine. Both sides gave ample arguments for their positions, so maybe it's time to give it a rest without getting personal.
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No, he's just saying that the constant slagging off of B&C for the same things every week is getting a bit old.
Thank you.
In a sentence, I'm as disappointed in the thread as most of the people in it are in the movie.
And I'm unmoved by the notion that this, suddenly, this place is where the rubicon was crossed. I've been hearing that this is the place where Battlestar Galactica became unwatchable trash, without one single redeeming line or moment, all the way back to the first report Starbuck was going to be a woman in the remake. I'm not really interested in going back to dig up every contemporary negative review (which was just as well-supported and sincere as the opinions in this thread) saying that the second Battlestar Galactica became terrible because Starbuck was a woman, or because of gratuitous sex, or because the production design wasn't futuristic, or because they switched from 13 episode seasons to 20, or because of the stand-alone episodes in season 2, or because it just became a bunch of liberal Iraq War whining on New Caprica, or because it spent too much time on the Cylons, or because of the love polygon, or because Athena could go around murdering people and no one cared, or...
I'm sure we all remember people with those reactions over the last eight or nine years. Vehement reactions. Heartfelt reactions. To this day you can't mention "Daybreak" without people who didn't even watch the show knowing about how it was such a betrayal, an utter failure that tainted everything that went before. Except not everybody thought that, but the ones who did were kind of loud.
B&C was weak, but a lot of these reactions are way beyond appropriate. You'll have to do better than being Languatron 2012 (http://www.kethinov.com/languatron.php) to get a response that comes down to more than "Would it kill you to have a little perspective?" out of me.
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Right. On one hand, saying B&C sucked and listing the same reasons over and over is getting old. On the other, so is drawing comparisons to other stuff to somehow justify it. Comparisons that are stretched beyond belief (comparing with people whining about Starbuck being a woman before the show was aired isn't analogous to people who spent years analyzing ever bit of BSG being disappointed in B&C after it was aired and they've seen it. But, back to the point..) So we have a situation where some people say it sucks a lot, others say it sucks a hell of a lot more, and yet others who want to nitpick about ones or others having missed the mark in the levels of suck. It is tiresome and pointless.
Kara can unlock this if he wants to, but given that everyone insists on finding new and creative ways of saying the same damn thing over and over and no side seems to be giving signs of giving up, I'm locking this thing.