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May 21, 2009

Trek Review: Spoiler Version

(Jimmy Akin)

Okay, here we go for the spoiler-enriched version of my reaction to Star Trek.

Total spoilage will be in effect, so caveat lector.

Continued below the fold.

Here are some general comments on the movie, grouped by category.

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May 20, 2009

The Curse Is Broken . . . Maybe

(Jimmy Akin)

Well, I finally got around to seeing the new Star Trek film--the first film I've seen in theaters in I don't know how long.

I'll put spoilers in a forthcoming post and just have a few non-spoiler comments in this one.

The good news is that I basically liked the film. 

It was fun.

It met my expectations, which were as follows: (1) I wanted it to be fun, (2) I wanted it to be a viable relaunch of the franchise, and (3) I wanted it to be fundamentally though not scrupulously faithful to the original.

I thought it substantially met those goals, so I liked it.

This is not to say that I hadn't been concerned. Some of the stuff seen in trailers had me worried. For example, the Kirk-Spock conflict depicted in the photo. That had me concerned. The film could have mindlessly ramped up the characters' emotions without providing a good reason for Spock's outburst. (Not unlike many episodes of the rebooted BSG, which over-milked the pathos factor). 

Fortunately, there is a good reason Spock is blowing his stack in this picture. The conflict isn't overdone, and it works in context.

I understand that the film may not be to the taste of some die-hard fans of the original series. And that would be true no matter what for the simple reason that no movie is to everyone's tastes.

Personally, while I have a soft spot for TOS, I don't regard it--or any Trek series--as an artistic masterpiece. All of the series have some real stinkburgers as episodes (e.g., just to name one from each, TOS: Spock's Brain, TAS: The Terratin Incident, TNG: Skin of Evil, DS9: Sons of Mogh, VOY: Threshold, ENT: A Night In Sickbay). Some of them have many stinkburgers.

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April 22, 2009

Caprica Pilot

(Jimmy Akin)

Even that, though, doesn't convey the full sense of difference. The scale of the show is just different. In Galactica the story--right from the pilot of that show--was about the death and survival of civilization. The stakes were always HUGE on Galactica. They're not in Caprica. This is a much smaller, more intimate story. Yes, we the viewers know where the early robotics experiments we see are going to lead, but there is nothing in the pilot that indicates that. The story isn't about Cylons and what they'll do in the future.

Yes, that's not a typo. Adamses. Not Adamas.

On a conceptual level, it's about memory and identity and what you might do if you could kinda-sorta bring back lost loved ones through technological means.

There are thus a lot of echoes of Galactica on the thematic level. We see something that is kinda like Cylon resurrection--but isn't. We see echoes of Gaius Baltar in the character Daniel Greystone--though he is way more together as a human being and not nearly the scoundrel that Baltar was. (Greystone is actually likable, even if you don't agree with him.) We also see echoes of Bill Adama in his father, Joseph Adams. And we get to see the future Admiral Adama himself as an eleven year-old boy, who is an important character in the pilot and who promises also to be important in the series.

Okay, so what's the deal with this Adams/Adama business?

Every spinoff needs to go beyond its original--to extend and go deeper--and this is one of the ways Caprica does that. It significantly expands and deepens what we know about the Adama family.

Which is where some *minor* spoilers come in.

For a start, they weren't originally from Caprica but another colony: Tauron. 

Tauron, apparently, was something of a backward, agricultural world and was looked down upon by the urbanites of Caprica, who are openly bigoted against Taurons. They comment about the way they smell and--apparently because of their farming background--refer to them as "dirt eaters."

Like a lot of downtrodden immigrants coming to a new land, Joseph Adama tried to fit in to the new society by changing his name to make it sound more Caprican. Hence "Adams" rather than "Adama."

It's a nice character touch that reflects what happens in the real world.

That's not the only new and unexpected but plausible aspects to the family, though. In BSG we only heard about the elder Joseph Adama, and we had a somewhat lionized portrait of him as a crusading civil rights attourney--one of the principled, idealistic good guys.

But the guys running Caprica decided to start him somewhere else in his career for, as one of the put it on the DVD commentary (paraphrase from memory), "So he's a hero. Where do you go from there?"

They therefore decided to show us a time in Joseph Adama's life when he hadn't yet become a crusading civil rights goodguy lawyer. He is a lawyer . . . but not that kind.

Y'see . . . those downtrodden immigrant communities? They understandably stick together. They circle the wagons for reasons of self-protection. And sometimes they do things that aren't, y'know, exactly legal. Sometimes they get a little carried away in that and you have an immigrant community that's infected by what's known as organized crime.

In a fallen world, those things happen. And not to just one community of migrants but to any of them, in any part of the world.

It's certainly true of the Tauron immigrants to Caprica, who have a culture that is clearly inspired by Italian/Sicilian precedents, meaning that Joseph Adams . . . 

. . . is a mob attourney when we meet him.

But hey, it makes him more interesting, and it gives him room to grow as a character, and of that the stuff of drama is made.

I'm cool with that.

They naturally form the primary nexus of the pilot, and to avoid spoilers I won't say too much more about them.

I will give you a content advisory, not unlike those you see over at Decentfilms.Com. Like BSG, and especially the BSG pilot, this pilot episode does have some sexual content in it that I wish wasn't there or wasn't as explicit as it is. (The DVD box should also carry a warning label it doesn't have, so buyer be warned.)

The good news is that they are few and brief and that they will probably be edited out of the televised version, but they are there.

It's a computer-generated space in which teenagers have covert, underground rave parties and act out their fantasies. The slogan of the V-Club is "No limits."

That actually, on a narrative level, makes the existence of this material more tolerable, because it isn't presented to the viewer as a way of conjuring an alluring nightclub atmosphere. Quite the opposite. We are meant to see--and the main characters who go to the V-Club comment on--how disgusting everything is.

There is one sequence in which a girl leads Daniel Greystone through the club, pointing out different horrors in the degradation to which the youth in the club have sunk. Some areas are for group sex and drug use. Then there is the fight area, where by the magic of virtual imagery you can beat the snot out of anyone you want . . . your ex-boyfriend, that annoying kid in math class, your parents, anybody! That not enough? Then you can blow them away in the shooting gallery with an automatic pistol. And the central area? . . . Ritual Human Sacrifice.

GAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

That's the only sane human reaction to this stuff, and it's the reaction that we the viewers are meant to have.

And after the school girl explains these horrors to Greystone she tells him that there is a right and a wrong in the world and that God--the One True God--knows the difference.

And thus we have monotheism vs. polytheism as a recurrent theme, just like in Galactica.

The monotheists are by no means the unambiguous good guys in this pilot--far from it. But neither is monotheism presented as unambiguously bad--especially compared with what pagan society does in a V-Club. Instead, the situation is ambiguous, like on Galactica, with religion played as a very important element but without particular religious positions being portrayed as clearly good or clearly bad.

We also see a vivid depiction of what our society may one day face with realistic virtual environments.

Some years ago I was listening to an audiobook version of The Physics of Star Trek by physicist Lawrence Krauss, and he commented on the many Next Generation shows that focused on the holodeck. In particular he commented on the episode "Hollow Pursuits," which focused on Lt. Barclay (in his first appearance) and his problem with holodeck addiction.

Krauss commented that he thought this episode was way too optimistic and that he thought that if holodecks really existed then they would be a HUGE societal problem, with holodeck abuse and addiction being major blights on humanity. 

Scary stuff.

That's not to say that Caprica doesn't have flaws or unbelievable points. It does. (Greystone . . . you ever heard of backing up your data? Nuff' said.)

So there is stuff there to explore.

Exploration begins in 2010.

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April 20, 2009

Yeah, I Can't . . .

(Jimmy Akin)

. . . tell you how many times I've been in exactly this situation with Mark Shea.

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March 18, 2009

In Valen's Name?

(Jimmy Akin)

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Jimmy--I'm only a casual fan of B5, and haven't shelled out for the script books, so I won't ask you to go into detail about how the Sinclair version differs, but one speculation that's been bugging me for years:

Would the original series have ended with the end of "World Without End" (the Sinclair/Valen reveal)?

So here's the deal:

According to Joe Straczynski's story arc memo (written between the pilot movie and the first season and published in vol. 15 of the B5 script books), the saga of B5 would have been significantly the same and significantly different than it was eventually filmed. Partly this is because (as everyone expected), Sinclair was supposed to be the main character all the way through; partly it's for other reasons.

A few things I found eye-opening:

1) The shadow war isn't over by the end of season 5. Not by a longshot. There is no Interstellar Alliance, and Sinclair is not the head of it. Instead . . .

2) Y'know that shot we saw via prophecy of a long shuttle escaping B5 just as it explodes? Well, originally that wasn't the final shut-down crew of B5 leaving just as the station was being blown up to keep it from being an interstellar hazard (picked clean or otherwise used by pirates, e.g.). Instead, the station was destroyed by an assault of the Minbari and escaping on the shuttle were Sinclair, Delenn, and . . . (wait for it) . . . 

3) Their newborn baby, who would have been conceived around the end of season 4 and born at the end of season 5 (unlike Sheridan and Delenn's baby, who wasn't born till much later), just in time for B5 to do the big firework.

4) Sinclair, Delenn, and baby are now on the run from everyone in the universe (except the decimated Narns), having been framed for all sorts of bad stuff, including killing a chunk of the vorlon population.

So . . . station blown up. Main characters on the run.

HERE ENDS THE STORY OF BABYLON 5

But wait! That's a cliffhanger! What would have happened next???

HERE BEGINS THE STORY OF BABYLON PRIME

(should the show be successful enough to get a spinoff)

1) Y'know how Babylon 4 was stolen to go back in time to the previous shadow war? Well, it wasn't. It was, as everybody thought the first time around, stolen by Sinclair and pulled forwards in time to serve as a base in a future war. That was was raging when Babylon 5 was destroyed.

2) Unlike Babylon 5, Babylon 4 could move like a spaceship, and so Sinclair, Delenn, and crew (including Garibaldi) rename it Babylon Prime and go on the road to clear their names, defeat the shadows and other bad guys, and so forth. In the process . . . 

3) The trip through time messes up Sinclair and Delenn's aging processes, and they both lose chunks of their lives before they can get it stabilized. It also . . . (and I really cringe at this one, because I hate this science fiction cliche) . . . 

4) Causes their son to grow abnormally rapidly, resulting in him becoming physically an adult before they can stop it. They are then able to give him the intellectual knowledge an adult would have, but not the life experience, so he's naive and innocent and all that stuff, which makes him . . . 

5) A religious figure, and the victim of frequent assassination attempts. He also becomes . . .

6) The leader of the Interstellar Alliance when they finally end the war and get around to starting the alliance.

7) Delenn goes back to the Grey Council, leading to the final scene of the whole series, which JMS said caused his co-producers to look at him as if he'd sprouted two heads when they told him what it was, which would have been (assuming he wasn't speaking of the shuttle escape scene) a shot of Sinclair, on the beach, on an uninhabited planet, fishing.

THE END.

For more details, see vol. 15 of the script books.

But wait! You haven't told us about the Valen business! What were the Minbari trying to do with Sinclair if it wasn't that? 

When Sinclair was captured--along with other pilots--at the Battle of the Line, one of the Grey Council (doesn't say who) had a revelation that he was a prophesied figure that was suppose to either rejuvenate or destroy the Minbari race, depending on how you interpret the prophecy. Rather than rush into seeing him as the new Messiah figure, not knowing whether he'd turn out to be a Christ or an anti-Christ or just a big nobody, they Minbari decided to wipe his memory, cut him loose, and watch him. To keep him close, they arranged for him to be the commander of B5, and Delenn was assigned to keep tabs on him, with instructions to kill him if he started going in the wrong direction (there was a scene in the first season where she was told that, and she agreed, which would hardly make sense if they were trying to turn him into Valen).

He thus ends up rejuvenating the Minbari race by hybridizing it with humans (via Delenn and their son) and by the Interstellar Alliance thingie and stuff like that. Or something.

So no. Sinclair would not have been Valen, or even president of the Interstellar Alliance. But he would have cleared his name and gotten to go fishing.

And now, all of a sudden, lots of little clues and snippets from the first season of B5 and War Without End that JMS had to re-work after WB demanded the exist of Sinclair suddenly make a whole lot more sense.

Ahhhhh . . . . 

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March 14, 2009

The End of Galactica

(Jimmy Akin)

The first part of the Battlestar Galactica finale (Daybreak, Part I) has now aired, and next Friday will have the two-hour conclusion of the story.

First, I like the fact that they've resolved a lot of the questions that have been floating around for some time, specifically:

• Who is the final cylon?
• What about the #7 cylon, since Ron Moore had previously said that the Final Five don't have numbers, but there was a gap between #6 (blond lady) and #8 (Sharon/Athena/Boomer)?
• What's the connection between the Final Five and Earth?
• How were the Final Five created? 
• What's the relationship between them and the Significant Seven? 
• Why don't the Final Five originally know their identities?
• Why don't the Significant Seven discuss the Final Five?
• Why do the cylons destroy human civilization?

I would have gone a different direction in answering some of these questions--particularly the identity of the final cylon--I would have had it be Adama for reasons previously spelled out, but I'm satisfied with them having made it Ellen, given the way they've developed the story. (I'm also glad that I correctly guessed that Ellen is a cylon, though I thought she was a #6 instead of her own model.)

There are still some outstanding questions that hopefully will be answered next week:

• Exactly what is Starbuck?
• What are the angelic/virtual/head beings (Head Six, Head Baltar, etc.)?
• What's the deal with Hera and the Opera House?
• What's the deal with Hera and the future of the two races? 
• What's manipulating the destiny of the two races? 
• What happens to all these people in the end?   

I can see different ways they could tie all these up, but at this point I'll just wait and see.

I will offer a few thoughts on the series as a whole and the last few episodes in particular, though.

First, while much of Galactica has been an interesting show (excepting the odious and morally problematic parts), my suspicion is that it won't age overly well. Future audiences may find it enjoyable to watch, but I suspect that they won't find it as enjoyable as the original, current audience.

There can be shows that, while they are groundbreaking and a dynamite experience when they are first on the air, just don't hold up that well on subsequent viewings.

A few years ago I discovered that, for me, this was the case for Babylon 5. When it first aired, Babylon 5 was really unique in two respects:

(1) It was much more realistic than Star Trek; it had characters that could have actual flaws and were willing to break rules in order to achieve goals. A scene that was iconic of this was the one in which Sheridan and Garibaldi put a black bag over the head of a Centauri telepath who has a piece of vital information and then Lyta is whisked into the room to yank the information out of his mind in a form of telepathic rape. This could never happen in any Star Trek series as of that date. Heroes in Star Trek are all too goody-two-shoes and would always find a different, legal, and ethical way of achieving their goals.

(2) Babylon 5 told a single, connected story that was substantively plotted in advance. (Though, Joe Straczynski's denials notwithstanding, it did change very significantly before the end. If you read volume 15 of his script books there is an original treatment of the series, with Sinclair in place the whole time, and it diverges dramatically from the filmed series, though it ends in kinda the same place.) This advance plotting allowed the series to have a much more layered, rich, and complex storyline than any of the Star Trek series (DS9 coming the closest).

After a few years of not seeing the series, I went back and watched B5 again and found that it wasn't as good the second time through. While it was true that it was more realistic than Star Trek, other series--like Battlestar Galactica--had pushed the realism envelope much further, and by comparison the B5 characters were still much closer to the cartoon hero end of the spectrum.

This, ironically, is one of the reasons I don't think BSG will hold up that well: In the effort to make the characters realistic and flawed, it's gone too far. 

I think in future viewings, a couple of years from now when the immediacy of the first run has worn off, the characters will too often come across as cartoons of the gritty, profoundly flawed hero type (like Wolverine became in the comics). It won't be possible to take them seriously because they are so over-the-top flawed and are constantly being put in situations designed to milk the maximum amount of emotion out of a situation, no matter how implausible the results.

This problem is epitomized in Lee Adama's speech from the trial of Baltar. You know the one. His "We have become a gang" speech, in which he rattles off all of the major career-destroying actions that had been (repeatedly) committed by the main characters of the show (to that point) which nevertheless were forgiven and put out of sight in order to keep the main cast of the show together.

I understand that if your civilization has fallen and you're on the run from evil robots, everyone may get a pass on one or two things that ordinarily would be career-destroying, but at some point the implausibility is just too much, particularly if you are trying to portray the core cast as fundamentally good rather than fundamentally evil.

It would be one thing if Admiral Adama was a drug lord who ran the fleet as an actual gang--not caring how many crimes were committed by his underlings as long as they served him. But that's not the way the show portrays him or any of the other core characters (with the possible exception of Gaius Baltar). They are all, despite their grave flaws, fundamentally on the side of good.

So I think that when the series is all out on video and you can watch it from front to back without having to wait between each episode, the implausibility of all this will leap out at the viewer, and they'll see that this aspect of the show just doesn't hang together. The characters are too flawed and they behave in an over-the-top manner with too few consequences and lots of implausible decisions getting made designed to keep them from being written out of the show.

I heard a podcast by Ron Moore a while ago in which he was wondering what the parody of BSG could be. It's easy to parody the different Star Trek shows or medical shows or police procedure shows, but how do you parody BSG?

Lots of hyperdramatic situations with massively flawed characters doing career-ending things that manage to not end their careers.

That's the parody.

There is also another reason I think BSG won't age that well, and this one is based on its similarity to Star Trek rather than its differences.

Ron Moore was a veteran of Star Trek and, in particular, one of the producers and writers of DS9.

At Star Trek they have a writing technique known as "breaking the story." What they do is take an initial story idea from one writer and then sit around a table with a bunch of writers and make suggestions and brainstorm what the story ought to be. The final version of the story may bear little resemblance to what it was originally pictured as. (This is also one reason why so many Star Trek episodes have multiple writers listed.)

Joe Straczynski has been very critical of this writing technique, arguing that it dilutes the original vision for the story as all of the writers try to get their fingerprints on the result. It also results in horse-designed-by-committee type stories.

Moore, however, has carried over the technique from ST to BSG, along with another Star Trek writing convention: making it up as you go.

While Moore and company had general ideas about where they were going on certain things a year or two or even three in advance, the overall shape of the BSG story is something that they invented as they went--unlike B5's pre-plotted (though changeable) story arc.

It's clear from listening to his podcasts that Moore took a lot of ideas, or proposed a lot of ideas, in the "breaking the story" sessions that he just thought were neat at the time, even though he didn't know where they were going with them.

Examples of these things include the visions in the Opera House, Caprica Six's pregnancy, the role of "All Along the Watchtower" in the show, and bunches of other key things.

They were just things that came up during the course of the show. Moore thought they were neat and included them, intending to figure out what they meant later on.

The result?

The patchwork nature of the plotting shows. I suspect it will be even more obvious on repeat viewings, but it is particularly evident in the last ten episodes of the program, where the writers are pushing to tie up all the major loose ends.

For example: Hera is obviously key to the future survival of both races, and she is a uniquely valuable MacGuffin as the only human-cylon child. She's what's driving the show toward its finale, with the attempt to rescue her from #1 and his cohorts.

But we had a problem--or rather a couple of them--until just a few episodes ago: There were two other cylon children--Chief Tyrol's apparently human-cylon son and Tigh's unborn son that he and Caprica Six conceived. With them in the picture the uniqueness of Hera, and thus the dramatic fulcrum of the series' finale, wasn't there.

The solution?

Wipe out both rival cylon kids at the last minute. So it turns out that Tyrol's son wasn't his son after all and Caprica Six's baby "spontaneously" aborts just as Ellen shows up and starts confusing Tigh's affections.

Those are reasonable plot fixes to get Hera's uniqueness back (although I very much did not like the heavy handed and sudden way Caprica Six's baby miscarried; there were better ways to set that up), but why did they need to do this in the first place?

Because they were making it up as they went along.

They'd already given Chief Tyrol a wife and a baby before they decided he was a cylon, so they had to get the baby out of the picture as a human-cylon hybrid in time for the finale.

Same thing with Caprica Six: Moore just liked the idea of her getting pregnant by Tigh and didn't know where to go with it. When he realized he wanted Hera to be the fulcrum of the finale, he had to get rid of Caprica's child, too.

None of this would have happened--or at least it would have happened in a better manner than it did--if Moore pre-plotted more and took a less "fly by the seat of your pants" attitude toward writing the show.

I felt particularly bad for writer Jane Espenson a few weeks ago when her final episode of the series--Deadlock--aired. This was the episode in which Ellen came back to Galactica and Caprica Six's baby died. On fan surveys and among reviewers, this episode did markedly worse than the preceding episodes, and I don't think it was because of Espenson's writing talents. I think it was because she was handed a dog of a story document that required her to do way too much and in too awkward a manner.

And the whole get-rid-of-the-other-two-cylon-kids problem is just one of the writing issues hitting the fan now. There are multiple other ones, caused in large part by the writers frantically trying to tie up too many loose ends in a short space of time.

Could Galactica and the Fleet come to incorporate allied cylons and their basestar? Sure. But not as quickly as they showed it all to us. The two-episode mutiny story arc was a gesture in the direction of realism, but in reality it would have taken a lot longer to forge the kind of integrated human-cylon alliance that we now see functioning.

Could Baltar and his groupies become a major political force in the fleet even after the debacle of his previous presidency and trial? Sure. But not as quickly as they showed it. It came basically out of nowhere.

Some episodes are so rushed that they are leaving scenes on the cutting room floor that provide crucial background, with the result that the aired ep can seem unintelligible at points. (E.g., Adama's giving guns to Baltar and his group. What on earth would motivate that? At least a little bit of light would be shed on the situation if they'd included the deleted scene where Adama and Roslyn discuss the fact that the security situation on Galactica has become so dire that their only alternative may be using cylon centurions as the ship's security force.)

So, like the Galactica itself, I think the storytelling is becoming rattled and the seams are showing as it hurtles toward its end.

This is not to say that there isn't still a lot of interesting stuff happening or that I won't conclude that I enjoyed the finale.

It is to say that, while Galactica has been a groundbreaking show in the history of televised science fiction, it does have flaws--some of which may approach those possessed by its characters.

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January 11, 2009

And the Final Cylon Is . . .

(Jimmy Akin)

The final ten episodes of Battlestar Galactica start airing this Friday, and the producers plan to answer a bunch of questions, some of which have been around since the beginning of the show and some of which were only recently introduced: What happened to Earth? What are the Virtual "Head" beings (e.g., Head Six, Head Baltar) that only some people see? Can Human and Cylon live together? Who lives and who dies? And, of course, who is the final Cylon?

I'm going to tell you.

Or at least I'm going to tell you who I think it is.

I've made a significant number of BSG predictions before and gotten more than my share right, so I'm going to put my cards on the table here and tell you who I think the clues point to.

If I can shift from a cards metaphor to a dice metaphor, sometimes you have to roll the hard six, so here goes.

Continued below the fold for those who don't want to read this speculation.

First let me say the fundamental thing that the producers of the show need to do with revealing the final Cylon: They need to impress us. After peeling away the masks of eleven Cylon models one at a time (or four at a time, in one case), they've created a sense of expectancy. By having the fourth season opening credits declare "TWELVE CYLON MODELS . . . SEVEN ARE KNOWN . . . FOUR LIVE IN SECRET . . . ONE WILL BE REVEALED" they are promising the viewers a dramatic revelation. If it's a letdown, if it's anticlimactic, then they haven't done their job.

This has implications for who the final Cylon can and can't be.

1) It can't be a new character. We won't have any dramatic investment in a new character, meaning any such revelation would be a letdown.

2) It can't be a minor character. There just would be a collective "So what?" reaction if it turned out that the final Cylon was Hotdog or Racetrack or Helo or Mr. Gaeta or Tom Zarek. The final Cylon must be an established, major character.

3) It won't be someone who has been recently pointed at by the producers as a possible Cylon. This means it can't be Baltar, who was desperate to be a Cylon just one season ago. It would be very anti-climactic if the producers said "Guess what! After all that Baltar-is-a-Cylon speculation, it turns out he's a Cylon after all!"

For the same reason it can't be Kara Thrace--the current character being given the "Is she a Cylon?" routine. They've been working the "Is Kara a Cylon?" theme heavily since she first got back from Earth--which is why President Roslin tried to shoot her dead and why she spent all that time screaming in the brig and why her crew on the Demetrius mutinied against her. Every character on the show--including Kara herself in a weak moment or two--has wondered if she's a Cylon, so it can't be her.

Smart money, though, would be for them to make it look more like she's a Cylon before turning around and revealing that she's not (possibly by the revelation of the final Cylon's identity).

4) If you take the list of established major characters and cross off the ones eliminated above (or already established as Cylons) then you get a very small number of possible candidates, so at this point I'll just go ahead and tell you who the final Cylon is . . .

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(EXTRA SPOILER SPACE)

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(LAST CHANCE!)

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"Adama's a Cylon."

We were told it in the very first season, by Leoben, the Cylon with mystical insights, who was also right that Kara would lead the fleet to Earth. I'm not saying that Leoben consciously knew that Admiral (then Commander) Adama was a Cylon. But for some mystical or subconscious reason, he spoke the truth.

Before I present reasons why Adama is a Cylon, think about who the remaining candidates would be--what other major characters are left that could play this role?

1) Adama's son, Lee. He's a major character, but he's also a major snoozefest. Which is the bigger dramatic revelation? That Admiral Adama, who has been leading the fleet all this time, is a Cylon or that his easily-manipulated puppydog politician son is?

2) Head Six. Baltar's inner vision of a Six, who may or may not take other virtual forms, is a major character and hasn't been shown to be one of the twelve Cylon models. She could be one, but since she's taken the form of a Cylon for either all or almost all of the series, it would just be weird--not stunning--to reveal that the final Cylon is nonphysical. She's also much more interesting as a character if she is, as she claims "an angel" of the Cylon God.

3) President Roslin. This is the only other dramatically sound contender for the part of final Cylon. Through all four seasons the fleet has been led by Roslin and Adama--sometimes with them at odds with each other--and you get the most dramatic oomph if the final Cylon turns out to be one of humanity's two greatest protectors.

And there would be oomph to revealing that it's Roslin. At this point, I'd be more shocked for it to be her than for it to be Adama.

That's for two reasons: (a) It would interfere with her whole cancer/dying leader mojo and (b) they haven't set her up to be the final Cylon the way they have Adama. There won't be that moment of seeing how all the clues connect if it turned out to be her.

The logical thing to do would be to have Roslin's cancer plotline progress (possibly resulting in her death, possibly not) and reveal Adama as the final Cylon.

What clues are there that Adama is a Cylon?

Starting with on-screen clues, I've already mentioned one: We were told he was one, by the one Cylon with the mystical chops to speak the truth even without realizing it consciously.

In terms of dramatic structure, that's a really big clue. It harks back all the way to the first season, and that means it brings a large amount of "closure payload" with it.

Another possible on-screen clue is that at the very end of the original mini-series, Adama found a slip of paper in his quarters that said "There are twelve Cylon models." They've never explained that. Who wrote it? How did it get there? My guess is that Adama himself wrote the paper under the influence of subconscious Cylon programming, the way Boomer found herself doing strange things back in those days.

That's a very minor thing, but here is a larger one: When four of the Final Five had their "All Along the Watchtower" moment and realized who they were, it was preceded by them hearing snatches of the song and thinking it was coming from within the ship. Colonel Tigh even went to Adama and angrily demanded an investigation of the frustrating music he was hearing.

Adama didn't bat an eyelash and promised him one. Then nothing happened with that thread.

This is a dog-that-didn't-bark situation.

Instead of expressing incredulity at the existence of mysterious music his XO was claiming to hear, Adama just accepted the idea. He could have done this just to humor his unhinged friend, but he also could have done it because he was hearing the music too.

And then there's this: Once Lucy Lawless gets "unboxed," she promises to reveal the Final Five to Laura Roslin and then as soon as Adama shows up on the Cylon basestar where they're at, Lucy suddenly announces--for no apparent reason--that only four of the Final Five are with the fleet. Why? Because the fifth has just joined them on the basestar.

Also, when Lucy Lawless first got her vision of the Final Five, she recognized the central one of them and said, "I'm sorry. I had no idea." The other four--Tigh, Tori, Tyrol, and Sam--are less likely to be characters that she would say this to. But she'd be quite likely to recognize the Admiral of the Fleet and apologize to him if she was suddenly aware that the fleet was being led by one of the Final Five.

When Tigh finally tells Adama that he (Tigh) is a Cylon, Adama TOTALLY LOOSES IT. He gets violent, raging drunk, becomes self-destructive, and can't pull it together AT ALL. He ends up as a collapsed, sobbing heap on his cabin floor, and his son--puppydog Lee--has to conduct the next stage of life-and-death negotiations with the Cylons.

His reaction is far disproportionate to what would be believable of a man as strong as Adama learning that his XO was a Cylon. Even though the two had known each other for 40 years, Adama had been living in a paranoid, "Anyone can be a Cylon" environment for years, and the reaction he had just struck me as over-the-top for the revelation that a friend and comrade turned out to be Cylon (especially a friendly Cylon).

But it struck me as entirely proportionate to the reaction that he should have if Tigh's revelation forced Adama to confront the fact that he, too, is a Cylon. Maybe when he heard the music in the nebula, Adama got a glimpse into his true nature but, like Boomer, was able to deny it for a long time. Then, when Tigh says (loose paraphrase), "That music I heard back in the nebula made me realize I'm a Cylon," suddenly Adama's worst fears concerning himself are confirmed and he looses it. This is the moment he truly had to accept what he was.

And it's at this point his attitude changes, and he's willing to go to Earth with the Cylons and to try to make peace with them.

There are more possible clues I could point to (his seeming ability to "project" the image of his dead wife, his hearing visions/voices when on the Cylon ship 40 years ago at the end of the first Cylon war, etc.), and I may record some more as they occur to me, but let me leave you with two off-screen clues:

1) Although the details are not yet known, the general premise of the prequel series Caprica is known, and Adama's family was right there at the beginning of human-appearing Cylons. In fact, SPOILER SWIPE: One of Adama's siblings had a Cylon based off of her after she died tragically young. Maybe the same thing happened to Adama himself.

2) After the series finishes they're doing another TV-movie, like Razor. This one is called "The Plan," and it involves the original plan that the Cylons had for the destruction of the colonies and what they meant to happen next. Various actors have been hired to reprise their roles as Cylons, both from the Significant Seven and the Final Five, for this movie.

But you know who's directing it? Edward James Olmos (Adama).

So the best candidate for the final Cylon is directing the Cylon-centric movie. Why would they do that?

Here's a bit of science fiction history: When they were making Star Trek III, the Search for Spock, they needed a way for Leonard Nimoy to be involved with the project (they didn't figure they could keep that secret) while maintaining a kind of semi-plausible deniability regarding his role in the project (they didn't just want to say, "He's playing Spock, meaning that Spock comes back from the dead in this movie"). So what did they do? They let him direct.

We might be looking at something here, with Olmos getting to direct as partial cover for the fact he's also playing a key Cylon role in the Cylon-centric film.

That's all as may be, but either way, Adama is my bet for the final Cylon.

We'll see if I'm right.

P.S. One more thing . . . that promotional photo-thingie the producers had done for Entertainment Weekly. Although some cast members have disputed it, Ron Moore says that the photo contains what can be read as clues to the fourth season (e.g., Lee wearing civilian clothes, indicating he's not returning to flight status, Tyrol contemplating the knife, reflecting his self-destructive turn this season, etc.). Here's the photo (click to enlarge or GO HERE to view in interactive detail):

 

The picture is consciously modeled off of Leonardo DaVinci's The Last Supper, which records the moment the Jesus declared "One of you will betray me," and the disciples react in shock.

We have a similarly dramatic moment in this picture, and the relevant revelation would seem to be either "Head Six exists" or "You are the Final Cylon," with it being misdirection that the Natalie Six is pointing toward (but not at) Head Six. (Ron Moore would never simply give away the big revelation in a promotional photo; expect misdirection.)

But follow the path that Natalie's finger is pointing past the shocked-looking Head Six. Who is she really fingering? Adama. who doesn't want to acknowledge what is going on. Lee's looking like he doesn't want to acknowledge it, either. Baltar may be looking at Head Six for confirmation of the announcement. Tigh's (potentially) watching Adama (or Lee) for a reaction, and Roslin is looking at Adama coolly (icily?). Helo is looking at Natalie intensely, taking in what she's saying, and Sharon is looking at Natalie while tentatively pointing as Adama, as if to ask "You mean it's him?"

There's nothing here that can't be read another way, which is Moore's intention, but it looks to me that the real dramatic focus of the picture is Adama, not Head Six, and that the revelation being made concerns him.

Posted by Jimmy Akin in Film and TV | Permalink | Comments (39)

December 19, 2008

Decent Films doings: A good year for family films, part 2

(SDG)

SDG here with a follow-up to my June post on family films of 2008.

As the year draws to a close, it looks like my sense of 2008 as a good year for family films was on the money. In fact, the premise of my June post became a full-fledged article which appeared first in the December issue of Catholic World Report and is now available in an abridged version at Decent Films:

Family Films Move Forward in 2008

Unfortunately, many of the films that, in June, I was looking forward to hopefully didn't pan out. I knew some of them wouldn't pan out, but I was hoping for more than we got.

The one spectacular exception, of course, was Wall-E, the crown jewel of the year's family films, as I hoped it would be.

And today, a worthwhile film opens that wasn't even on my radar in June: The Tale of Despereaux.

At least one other film, Bolt turned out to be better than I expected. OTOH, City of Ember turned out to be a visually stylish disappointment, kind of cool but not very good. Journey to the Center of the Earth was a little more fun, but also not exactly good.

Fly Me to the Moon was barely a flyweight contribution (and the buzz I heard on Armstrong's involvement was wrong -- it was Buzz Aldrin who voiced himself, which makes a lot more sense on multiple levels). And The Half-Blood Prince didn't even arrive -- it was postponed until next year.

Still, between Wall-E, Horton Hears a Who, Kung Fu Panda, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Prince Caspian and The Tale of Despereaux, plus a raft of tol'able also-rans… not to mention, for families with older kids, The Express and Son of Rambow… definitely a good year, all in all.

The Tale of Despereaux review | Family films article

Posted by SDG in Film and TV | Permalink | Comments (11)

November 06, 2008

Name-checked by Ebert — again!

(SDG)

SDG here with a non-election related post on some non-election coolness. (Pre-election coolness, actually, but I wanted to wait till now to blog about it.)

Incidentally, if you read the NCRegister.com blog, which I've cited in a number of recent posts, you may already be aware of this.

First, though, I just have to geek out a bit. Like many film critics writing today, I grew up watching Roger Ebert discuss movies with Gene Siskel on "At the Movies." I remember watching them discuss certain movies in the early 1980s (e.g., Raiders, Superman II, Return of the Jedi).

I have the idea that the paper I delivered as a paperboy carried Ebert's written reviews, and that I was reading them sometime in the early to mid-1980s. I may have I bought book editions of his reviews in college in the late 1980s; certainly by the time I had Internet access in the mid-1990s I was reading him every week, along with a few other favorites.

As an inveterate reader of all sorts of writing and an aspiring writer myself, I quickly came to appreciate Ebert's literary skill and engaging voice as well as his critical insights. In many cases I enjoyed his reviews more than the movies he wrote about. In 2000, when I began writing faith-informed reviews and posting them on the earliest incarnation of Decent Films, Ebert was one of the touchstones I looked to in finding a voice of my own.

He was, and is, simply The Man.

One early piece I wrote that first year of writing film criticism was an essay on Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. It seemed to me an obvious test case of the style of writing I wanted to do — that is, to do film writing that was equally intelligible to my target religious audience and also to non-religious readers. (My model here was a writer even more profoundly influential on me than Ebert, C. S. Lewis.)

Few movies seemed as deeply polarizing to the two groups of readers than Last Temptation, so if I could make myself intelligible to these two groups of readers on this film, I could probably do it on any film.

I'm sure I read Ebert's original review of Last Temptation, in which he argues that the film is not blasphemous, in preparation for writing my own. I didn't quote it, although I did cite another review he wrote in 2000, for Spike Lee's Bamboozled.

I never expected my Last Temptation essay to get much attention. I naively thought the controversy over that film was a closed chapter, and my essay was fundamentally written to satisfy myself that it could be done, and for the sake of a few readers who might care to look at it.

Much to my surprise, it has over the years consistently been among the most widely read essays at Decent Films. Feedback from readers has been fairly regular and all over the map (as I discussed a bit in a recent Decent Films reader mail column).

More recently, I've learned that my essay has been cited in more than one essay in a recent book on Last Temptation, Scandalizing Jesus. (One of the essays citing me was written by my friend and fellow critic Peter Chattaway; another, "Imaging the Divine," is by Lloyd Baugh, whom I've never met.)

Anyway, last week I learned that my Last Temptation essay had been cited by Ebert himself in a new essay on Last Temptation that appeared both in his online "Great Films" series and also in Ebert's new book Scorsese by Ebert.

As it happens, this isn't the first time I've been name-checked by Ebert. He first quoted me in his review of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, regarding Gibson's portrayal of the Jewish leaders. Just think, if controversial Jesus movies were a Hollywood staple, I might have gotten a guest spot on Ebert's show.

What's more, this time around Ebert credits my essay with persuading him that, in spite of his arguments to the contrary nearly two decades ago, Last Temptation is in fact "technically blasphemous." He adds that he no longer thinks this matters, but still it's a startling confirmation that I succeeded at least partly in what I set out to do in that essay. Here's what he wrote:

The film is indeed technically blasphemous. I have been persuaded of this by a thoughtful essay by Steven D. Greydanus of the National Catholic Register, a mainstream writer who simply and concisely explains why. I mention this only to argue that a film can be blasphemous, or anything else that the director desires, and we should only hope that it be as good as the filmmaker can make it, and convincing in its interior purpose. Certainly useful things can be said about Jesus Christ by presenting him in a non-orthodox way. There is a long tradition of such revisionism, including the foolishness of The Da Vinci Code. The story by Kazantzakis, Scorsese and Schrader grapples with the central mystery of Jesus, that he was both God and man, and uses the freedom of fiction to explore the implications of such a paradox.

Now, I think that Ebert's new essay offers a lot of insight into the film. For what it's worth, I don't think that it is right to say that it uses "the freedom of fiction to explore the central mystery of Jesus." I think that Last Temptation uses the central mystery of Jesus as a metaphor, and that what the film is really exploring is the human experience of duality. Screenwriter Paul Shrader acknowledges this in an interesting 2002 interview at AVClub.com in which he acknowledges the film's blasphemy:

Actually, the whole issue of blasphemy is interesting, because technically, the film is blasphemous, but not in the way people think. The film uses Jesus Christ as a metaphor for spirituality. And, under a technical definition of blasphemy, if Jesus is regarded as something other than holy God incarnate, you're being blasphemous. And so the film takes the character of Jesus and uses Him as a metaphor for our spiritual feelings and says, "What if this happened, what if He yielded to temptation?"

I think Ebert makes essentially the same point when he says, "What makes 'The Last Temptation of Christ' one of his great films is not that it is true about Jesus but that it is true about Scorsese." Be that as it may, where I differ from Ebert and other fans of the film is that, for me, my ability to enter the filmmaker's world simply encounters an immovable obstacle when it comes to a Jesus movie that, however true it may be about the filmmaker, is so radically untrue about Jesus. I am just unable to go with Jesus as metaphor, for precisely the reason that Shrader indicates. I appreciate Ebert's lament that "the direction, the writing, the acting, the images or Peter Gabriel's harsh, mournful music" have been ignored by many writers — but for me that's all beside the point. As I wrote in my essay:

Past a certain point, objectionability obliterates all hope or desire of approaching a work as art or entertainment. No level of production values or technically proficient filmmaking could make it worthwhile to watch a movie that indulged in child pornography, or that relentlessly celebrated the Holocaust, or that overtly romanticized the degradation and abasement of women. Cross a certain line, and message overwhelms medium, substance overwhelms style, what you have to say drowns out how you might be saying it.

Anyway, that's how I saw it eight years ago. That this essay — one of my oldest pieces, an essay I wrote when I was first beginning to feel my way into the world of writing about film and faith — would receive such attention at this late date is both gratifying and humbling. I can't even imagine how I would have felt back in 2000 writing the piece if you had told me that Ebert, whom I quoted in that piece, would one day be citing me in turn.

That the piece appears in Ebert's Scorsese book is even more gratifying. As Nick Alexander suggested over at ArtsAndFaith.com, it seems likely that Scorsese has read Ebert's book, so maybe he now knows that the movie is blasphemous, too.

Ebert's new Last Temptation essay

Ebert's Passion of the Christ essay

My Last Temptation essay

NCRegister.com blog post

Posted by SDG in Film and TV | Permalink | Comments (16)

August 09, 2008

At Long Last

(SDG)

For all of you who may have wondered… and wondered… and wondered…

“…Just what does SDG think of The Wicker Man…?”

…now, at last, the truth can be told.

Review of the 1973 original by Robin Hardy

Review of the 2006 remake by Neil LaBute

Also, for all of you who wondered, “Why does SDG keep The Wicker Man in ‘Other Coming Adds’ for months on end, into years?“…

…well, this is the best answer I can give.

With apologies to all who watched that space for so long, wondering what on earth was wrong with me … and to those who, reading the reviews now, may still wonder.

Posted by SDG in Film and TV | Permalink | Comments (20)