The End of the World: The New Battlestar Galactica (Spoilers Allowed)

LV-426?

That's an "Alien" franchise reference.



I smell shenanigans.

 

Well, Larson did create the original 1978-79 series, and Singer was attached to Larson's re-make as early as 2000, well before the Moore series, so... why the heck not? It'll be fun to see the original BSG writ large on the silver screen, with Starbuck as a man ("Buck" does mean "male"), Cylons as pure robotic evil (as opposed to organic, human-looking evil, which is a Terminator thing), and, of course, Muffit the cyborg dog.

[image=http://media.battlestarwiki.org/images/7/71/Muffit.jpg]

Here's lookin' at you, Muffitt.

 

More than likely it's simply an early, impromptu placeholder-reference for "Desolate, Mysterious World Upon Which Boxey Discovers Giant-Ass Talking Muffit/Borg Queen Hybrid-Thing."

You see stuff like this all the time in pre-production art before a final screenplay gets locked down. Typically, all of the fluctuating names and locations get set in stone at a much later date.

 

Dangit, they nixed my daggit.

Here's the same pic from a different source:

[image=http://i213.photobucket.com/albums/cc23/DoorQPictures/Muffit.jpg]

 

BSG: The Plan TV broadcast to be delayed until 2010.

But the Blu-Ray/DVD release is still set for October 27.

 

Wow...Dynamite's new Galactica 1980 series looks pretty damn frakking dark.

RDM's influence continues to spill over. Think I'll be checking this one out.

 

The Digital Bits has posted a review of The Plan Blu-Ray up at their website. Some rather spoiler-y stuff in the review, so be warned. But it sounds like another winner as a standalone movie, although a different sort of breed than Razor was.

 

The Plan was really good, its IMHO definitely one of the better BSG tales. It doesn?t work as a standalone product at all though, its definitely meant to be watched right after the s2 finale(even though it spoils many s4 secrets) for it to work properly. It mainly focuses on Cavil and Anders, giving both more weight as important characters in the BSG universe. I personally thought it was better than Razor(many people will probably disagree), even though it is a much more fragmented story.

 

Yeah, I skimmed that a couple weeks ago- was like "oh, neat- they're trying to get a good take on 1980, that could be cool and0 holy crap!". Talk about your alternate takes on things. I have a feeling the human-form of KITT won't be guest-starring in an issue of THIS series.

 

Total agreement.

The Plan looked, and felt, like a clipshow, with only a few strands of plot to tie it together. It felt a bit like a deleted scene reel, interesting for fans who can remember all the details, but not for new viewers. I was a bit disappointed overall, though. I was hoping that the plan was actually going to be some great and fantastic plan that would provide new insight into the series and explore more of the cylon psyche. Turns out that we new all the secrets of the plan all along, we just didn't know how desperate, divided, and incompetent the cylons really were. The amount of money they put into the visual effects was nice, but some of the stock footage they played was pretty jarring, and only added to the disconnected clipshow feel. The missing characters were jarring in their absence, too.

Despite its weaknesses, I don't regret the two hours I gave it, though.

 

I thought The Plan was excellent.

I do agree with the clipshow thing though. It felt more like a recap of the first couple of seasons (or, well, a recap of what happened up until the point where they spaced the Cavils) than a standalone movie. Definitely more of a movie for fans than anything else.

Not sure which I liked better, this one or Razor. Razor had a better story (but was not entirely necessary) while this was more like a fill-in-the-blanks-from-the-Cavil-side sort of deal, and in that light the Cylons' attack all make a lot more sense.

 

So, does anyone yet know what the Cylons plan actually was?

No? Nevermind.

 

Still waiting for Amazon to ship my copy, but in the meantime, Blu-Ray.com has posted a pretty damn lengthy and spoiler-intensive review of the film and the special features.

It basically says that "[this is] Stockwell's film through and through." A serious Cavil character-study. Which is music to my ears.

Only a few more days now.

 

I really liked it and thought it was a nifty little epilogue to the entire show, but I could feel, while watching it, that there were gonna be lots of people who wouldn't care for it.

I especially appreciated how it completely expects that you know the show very well and has no time for any viewers who are unfamiliar with the franchise.

And Dean Stockwell is awesome.

 

"I really liked it and thought it was a nifty little epilogue to the entire show, but I could feel, while watching it, that there were gonna be lots of people who wouldn't care for it"

Sure, but the hate trolling that is taking place on other boards is just ridiculous. People "screaming" that this is just a bunch of deleted scenes and that there is nothing new is just plain wrong. I have seen the movie twice now and 95% is completely new material. We aren?t necessarily given that much "new info", but besides expanding Cavils role in the series heavily, we are shown a lot of things we have never seen before.

All the cylon activity in s1 seemed random, but here we are shown that they actually were organized. This makes them seem like a much bigger threat in s1 than I originally felt.

We had never seen what actually happened each time Boomer went into "evil cylon mode". I always assumed she became just "a mindless terminator" robot each time she did it, but instead she just got her real memories back each time, and she actually chose to do those things to her human friends. Suddenly Boomer wasn?t really that poor innocent girl I remembered from s1, she was a much darker character. This made her seemingly different character in s3 and 4 finally make sense.

Simon the most underused Cylon in the series was shown to not be a "line" of purely evil tools for Cavil(like Doral).
Here we were finally shown the "origin" of the Caprica resistance, a football team using tactics they saw in movies. I always thought that was an interesting idea, and I have always wanted to see that story.
Anders got IMHO the great send-off as a character in BSG he was denied in s4.5. His only "real" episode there was "No Exit" were he was pretty much Mr. Exposition, the rest of the time he was just used as a "helpful" gizmo. Instead this movie portrays him as a very heroic, yet human character. His confession to Cavil was great, and again showed the great potential the character was shown to have in ?Faith?.

Another thing that is being thrown around is that this movie has no action. That really surprises me, because except for ?Razor,? ?Daybreak? and ?Exodus?, I don?t think any two episodes of BSG has had more(time wise) action than the ?Plan?.

Its completely okay if people don?t like the movie, but a lot of the criticism seems unfair and outright wrong.

 

Does it explain Episode 33, and what happened to the ship?

 

Nope. I don?t really see anything that needs to be explained though, it seemed pretty straightforward.

 

It's just another desperate, half-baked scheme that was riding more on hope than proper planning, like every other plan in the Plan.

 

I think the fact that Cavil turned to alcohol in the later half of the movie said pretty much all that was needed to be said about "The Great Triumphant Cylon War Machine"

 

Apparently lots of folks out there are catching this thing early, due to pirated bootleg downloads, etc. The Battlestar Wiki just put a big bitchslap policy in place against anyone who updates The Plan's info-page there prior to tomorrow's street date.

Me, I'm waiting for my copy to arrive so I can watch it legitimately.

 

Holy Gratuitous Nudity Batman! The topless bartenders and a "Starship Troopers"-style shower scene (that goes below the equator !) in The Plan really surprised me.

 

To be fair it wasn't a bad dong.

 

I downloaded it on itunes last night and watched the first 15-20 minutes on the train this morning. Pretty good so far, especially the nuclear impact footage segment.

 

The only real downside to the whole thing is it makes the cylons almost comically incompetent and pretty much admits that the much-vaunted "plan" of the opening sequence either never existed in the minds of the showrunners, or was abandoned at some point ("This is all improv, isn't it?").

That's certainly the biggest negative of The Plan imo - to me it makes clear that the show's creators and writers wanted there to be a plan in the first few seasons of the show, but never actually had one in mind, and eventually dropped the idea.

Other than that, I rather liked The Plan, accepting it for what it is and, maybe more importantly, for what it is not. It certainly isn't a full fledged story like Razor. To a degree, I guess, it's a retcon of some holes in the first few seasons, but a very good one, showing the development of the 2 Cavils, as well as Anders.

One weird thing when I was watching it was that I momentarily forgot that only the Cavils knew the identities of the Final 5 -- until I was jarringly knocked out of my stupidity by the "Resistence" Simon's question to Caprica Cavil as to what was so special about Anders.