io9 
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San Francisco, 3:36 PM
Thu Dec 10
27 posts in the last 24 hours
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07:40 AM
12/09/09
That show was lame. I hate shows that kill the most interesting character in the first episode. I want to watch a space travel drama to see them travel through space. Not to fight the Civil War in virtual reality, with a dead guy.
12/09/09
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12/09/09
The most griping seems to come from doctrinaire atheists upset with the fact that a show with spiritual themes running through its entirety decided to highlight them for its wrap-up.
Had Ron Moore replaced "God" with "Multi-Dimensional Self-Aware Hyperspacial Super-Computer" I suspect there would have been fewer complaints.
12/09/09
Like others, I do have problems with the finale: I would have preferred if Kara was better explained (I think if her Father was the 7th model Daniel and she was the first hybrid it would have been better), if Adama hadn't left forever (I prefer to think he went off for a few months than rejoined his son), and if the last five minutes didn't exist (roombas!), but otherwise I think it was a moving, satisfying end to what I think is one of the greatest shows of all time.
Can anyone name a GOOD conclusion to a science-fiction show? At 28, most of the shows I have loved fizzled out long before the end. I'm glad Lost has also chosen its end date but I have a feeling it too will end up being considered a disappointment. If so, I'll just have to remind myself again that it's about the journey and not the destination. I can watch Battlestar and Lost over and over again because I love the characters, not the secrets.
12/09/09
Nevertheless I will say that no it was not simply the fact of the god element since the door was left open to interpret it as some sort of ancient alien life form, ascended being etc ("...God..." "You know it doesn't like to be called that) if one so chose to do so.
The "spiritual themes running thought its entirety" started out as some throwaway line of "God is love" that Ron Moore has Six make without any real meaning (clearly he was listening to Deepak Chopra audio tapes that day) then some suit at NBC/SciFi, oh excuse me, SyFy liked it and told him to do more with it and so the cylons got a religion that didn't really mean a hell of a lot because Ron Moore wasn't sure where he was going with it and decided to put that off and figure it out later.
The Opera House visions (another thing they added because they though the Orpheum theater in Vancouver was cool though they had no idea what it meant or where they were going with it) turned out to be all of carrying a little girl 20 feet to a command room.
Starbuck went poof without really going into who or what they hell she was.
The rest of them abandoned all their technology and science (if you had an illness that need to be treated too bad!) and apparently everything they ever invented, thought and learned has been completely lost since they are our ancestors yet we know nothing of them.
Oh yeah, according to Ron all of their knowledge exists in the collective unconsciousness to be re-discovered again and again. Must have been listening to Deepak Chopra again that day.
And last but not least the entire show, the characters loves, hopes, losses and dreams and in fact our own entire existence amounts to the machinations and manipulations of some ancient non-coporeal magical robot angels who flippantly make bets over the rise and fall of entire civilizations while billions of lives hang in the balance.
Then cut to the ominous robot ending to leave the whole show on a Me play gods! Me go too far! note.
Of course these problems I and many others had with a show that was literally completely made up as it went along and major plot points which change the direction of the show were added without knowing where they were going because someone thought they were cool are entirely because we are ignorant uneducated and media unaware.
Surely if we had more learning such as yourself and listened to CNN then we would learn to love the show such as you.
12/09/09
And I like how you insinuated that gigshaft’s opinion about a piece of entertainment is linked to his/her intelligence and cable news preference. Very astute. I wonder if you’d like to share the data modeling that led you to such a conclusion. I’m sure the Brookings Institute would be interested in your methodology.
And the collective unconscious!? I agree. How silly. C.G. Jung was a know-nothing hack. I eagerly await your treatise on the appearance of nearly identical mythological and psychological motifs in the human psyche. I’m especially interested in your explication of how some of these motifs have been shown to appear concurrently in disparate cultures on opposite sides of the globe. Should be a fascinating read.
12/09/09
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion obviously. Gigshaft has his/hers and I have mine and that's fine. It was the part that Gigshaft added about the educatedness and media savvy that set me off. Who cares? It has nothing to do with it.
I wasn't shitting on his/her opinion but rather the conceit that his/her opinion and that of Gigshaft's friends was somehow more valid because they were "educated" and "media savvy".
I am not sure why you selectively singled out that part of my REPLY while ignoring those references in the ORIGINAL POST, but I did not bring those subjects up.
Personally I could care less about someone's education in reference to their opinions. There's all sorts of educations, intelligence and learning and one does not need to have a PhD to write a review of a television show, movie or book, nor would a review of a person with a PhD carry more weight.
I'm not even sure what "media savvy" means since there are all sorts of media outlets, some of which vary greatly in what they choose to present, and further I fail to see the relevance of that on interpreting the quality of a story.
12/09/09
12/09/09
And (s)he only "shat on" gigshaft because gigshaft's "media savvy friends" line was completely pretentious. The rest of his post was a well done explanation of why he and many others thought the end was disappointing. You resorted to way more personal attacks than (s)he did.
12/09/09
That for me is symptomatic of what went wrong with the show. They would find these concepts and ideas they thought sounded cool and insert them with only the most cursory understanding of them then force the whole framework of the show to work around them rather than developing the story naturally and resolving already existing story elements.
12/09/09
I think the main problem with the finale is that a lot of people seem to think it's amazing because they think that Moore wanted to deliberately create an ambiguous, you-work-it-all-out-for-yourself ending as an expression of artistic integrity. This, of course, is pure drivel.
What really happened is that the writers of the show never planned ahead. They never came up with an answer when asking the question (something that would fail any basic Writing 101 course in the world). So 'All Along the Watchtower' is in the show because Moore wanted to use it in a TV show no matter what, and when he was refused permission to use it on ROSWELL he worked it into BSG instead, ignoring the fact it didn't make any sense or that he didn't have an answer for why that piece of music existed in the BSG universe (whilst of course pretending he did).
Similarly, they picked the Penultimate Four Cylons based on what would be cool or what would shock the audience, rather than what made sense. The original idea (from some early Season 3 scripts) was that the Final Five would be ultra-mysterious individuals handing orders down to the other models. They weren't originally supposed to be familiar characters until Moore decided that them ALL being familiar characters would be cool, no matter how nonsensical it was. Tyrol as a Cylon? Makes sense. Tigh? No, utter nonsense included for shock value alone.
The ending of BSG does not make sense. It does not track with the Temple of Athena/Arrow of Apollo revelations. You know, the story that spanned nine episodes at the end of Season 1 and the start of Season 2? It's okay, Moore and the other writer-producers completely forgot about that story as well. They only included, by RDM's own admission on the episode commentary, the Opera House stuff because they suddenly realised they could fit it in into the finale in the hallway scene, otherwise it would also have gone completely unmentioned.
Listening to the BSG commentaries and podcasts for the whole show, Moore spends the whole series going, "Well, that seemed like a good idea at the time, although I have no idea what it means or how it makes sense, but it appeals on an emotional level", which is no basis for writing a mythology-heavy, mystery-based TV show. You'd have thought that more TV writers would have learned from the example of THE X-FILES what happens when you try to make this stuff up as you go along.
Every single TV writer and executive producer who is even thinking about writing a serialised, arc-based TV show should be made to sit down and watch THE WIRE and BABYLON 5 in their entirety to see how you do it properly. You can have ambiguity, you can have spiritualism, you can have unanswered questions, but you cannot use "We wanted the audience to make their own mind up," to cover your own writing and planning ineptness.
12/09/09
12/09/09
i found the special edition 'updated' star wars to be horrific, and i felt strongly that ep 1-3 should have been filmed using only technology that was available in the late 70s, to preserve the look and feel. and that means models. they just look better.
12/09/09
As far as the new trilogy goes, I was fine with them using modern technology. As a huge Star Wars nerd, I was pretty estatic to see lightsaber fights that actually looked like they were being fought by Jedi.
The CGI was way overused in those films, too, though. An even balance (CGI lightsabers and forcelightning, puppet Yoda and Gungans, etc) would have been much better.
12/09/09
we can't even get non-vhs/laserdisk editions of the unaltered trilogy. It's a crime.
12/09/09
One of my favorite, nostalgic scenes of the original trilogy is the very end of Return of the Jedi, where the Ewoks and Rebels are partying on Endor. The song the Ewoks play and sing is awesome. In the new version, however, that scene has been done over with a montage of scenes from around the Empire - which is actually a really awesome montage, don't get me wrong. The problem is, they took out the freaking song! They put in some other song over it, so now when I watch Return of the Jedi, I don't get my "aww, I remember this from when I was 10" moment, and that makes me a sad Star Wars nerd.
12/09/09
One of the dvd sets touts having the "Original unaltered exactly as in theaters" regular editions of the films in special features.
Which is a lie, because they are skewed low quality laser disc rips.
I would pay quite a bit for blu ray unaltered editions of the original trilogy. And DVD versions.
12/09/09
I liked this article. It was a good critical commentary and I liked the specificness of it. For instance, calling out the BSG *finale* but not the show. I just wish more of the site's readers would pay closer attention to detail like that.
12/09/09
if the tiny innacuracies or inconsistancies are what you like about films and pop-music then i suggest you catch some live theater or a concert.
12/09/09
But I think all that is necessary to fully understand the new technology and find a proper place for it amongst all the other tools that artists have available to them. If you don't go kinda overboard with it then you can't really find where the limits are or what works and what doesn't.
People will get tired of style-over-substance CGI extravaganzas eventually, and when filmmakers realize they can't rest an entire movie's success on CGI special effects alone it will become just another filmmaking tool.
12/09/09
A new shiny tool can often put the user in a mode of "look at all the neat things I can do" rather than what they SHOULD do (I'd even point to the "special editions" of E.T. and Star Wars as examples of that). A lot of directors have been guilty of that with CG, which is probably, in part, what Graeme's push back is about.
That said, Cameron has generally used his shiny new toys to good effect so I'm betting that's the case with Avatar as well.
12/09/09
It's also what allows to see who can sing and who can't. Hearing to a ton of marketing before you actually hear the artist in question helps.
12/09/09
12/09/09
I don't like watching a movie and thinking, "There's the CGI" like all through Phantom Menace or I am legend.
12/09/09
12/09/09
My point is simply that CGI is nothing new in cinema, in the sense that cinema has always been about incorporating the latest and greatest technology in the service of wowing the audience. CGI is another step in that evolution -- but the key word here is "evolution." When you say, "it will always lack the element of chaos, the potential for mistakes, that makes it something we can believe (and lose ourselves) in," I suspect that's one of those quotes someone will dig up in 10 or 15 years, when movies with photorealistic CG actors are the norm, to illustrate how wrongheaded some critics were, back in the 00's.
I think you make wrong assumptions about what filmmakers who use CGI are trying to do. They aren't striving for the kind of sterile perfection described in your Wolk quote. They are fully aware that the "element of chaos" you mention is the gap (or uncanny valley, if you will) between the current state of the art and true realism. They are closing that gap a little more every year.
CGI is still a topic of discussion because we're presently still in that uncanny valley where true realism has yet to be achieved. But I think it's also because we as viewers -- at least the older of us -- haven't yet become fully acclimated to what CGI brings us. What I mean is, when you and I see some fantastic, eye-popping CGI sequence, we automatically disbelieve it, not because the effects aren't realistic, but, I would argue, because they are. When I'm watching fifteen kajilion orcs rampaging across a battlefield the size of Kansas, part of me is taken out of the movie. Not because the effects look fake, but because they don't -- the scene looks pretty real to me, and that in itself disrupts my suspension of disbelief, because I know it's not real. In a weird way, in some of these movies I'd actually be more comfortable with unrealistic old school effects, because that's a world I understand. CGI, with its ability to create visions and worlds that would be impossible or impractical to realistically portray without computers, can, in my opinion, actually disrupt the normal functioning of the human imagination. But if that's true, it's not CGI's fault, just the fact that we haven't yet grown into the technology.
Just to make this comment a bit more longwinded, I haven't seen any mention here about Firefly or Battlestar Galactica. I think the CGI in these series is worth mentioning, because they're groovy examples of deliberately inserting imperfections (shaky cam, blurring, lens flares, etc.) into visual effects in order to enhance realism. I do wonder though if that's the future of CGI realism or just a stopgap. As we continue our voyage into a world where consumer video cameras have motion stabilization and all kinds of image enhancing gizmos, maybe the sterile perfection we detest is actually on its way to becoming the new normal. Future generations will have no idea of what we mean by the "chaos" of real life. Do you think that Wolk rant will mean anything to the average teenager of 2025?
12/09/09
Introducing sound to films fundamentally changed the way a film was presented, shot, acted, and written. It changed how they were distributed as well. No longer could a film made in French be presented to a Spanish speaking audience and still have them understand it. It separated countries in terms of story telling and film making because of the language barrier and cultural differences inherit to language. Many critics were vocal on that front. They liked the universal appeal of the silent films. They liked that film was a completely different medium than stage with it's lack of sound. (Never mind that silents were rarely silent... but that's another topic.)
It allowed for much different stories to be told on an astronomical scale.
Many movies made with CG today still could have been made 30 years ago with that existing technology and been done just as well.
This argument is more of an aesthetic one more than anything else.
12/08/09
Are you joking? Virtuality was Defying Gravity without the inappropriately quirky music and lame flashbacks.
12/08/09
Superman Returns lacked a good story, a menacing Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey's Lex was anything but), and a superman with presence. On the plus side, Clark Kent was spot-on: the actor couldn't make him any more of a wimp than he (the actor) already appears in real life.
12/08/09
12/09/09
You're joking, right? Who'd dismiss *any* show after 15 minutes?
12/09/09
I actually watched Serenity (the movie) first, which was a great intro for me, but completely spoils what will happen to the characters.
12/09/09
/my 2 cents
12/09/09
12/09/09
"The pilot sucked. You need to watch more of the show, it'll hook you."
That's possible, but I'm also not into westerns, be in on Earth or in space.
12/09/09
I, personally, don't care at all for zombies and don't much like vampires, but aliens and wormholes are fair game in sci-fi. Light-speed travel is an exaggeration, I agree, but we've all come to live with it.
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12/09/09
And that's just one example. There are preciously few shows you only need to watch the first 15 minutes of - unless you've got additional negative feedback and reviews to base an opinion on.
Your opinion is your opinion, of course. But you're really missing out, that's all I'm saying.
12/09/09
The Fox Network?
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12/09/09
Here's the thing, though. I'm a TV junkie. I watch a ton of shows and, over the years, I've developed a strong sense of what I'll like and what I won't like. Also, I can't watch everything, so I have to be selective.
I'm sure it's not perfect, but usually I can tell from the pilot whether or not I'll be interested enough to continue watching.
12/09/09
12/09/09