“Touching on the ‘reality’ in Battlestar Galactica”

When “Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries” hit the Sci-Fi channel, I hadn’t even heard of the original series. However, as an old-time fan of such Sci-Fi movies as Star Wars, I was delighted to hear about another galaxy I could lose myself in. So I watched this first three and a half hour span of television with very little expectations. What I got was an intense feeling that I’d just watched a show where, finally, the directors “got it” and knew how to capture a “real” (and I use “real” loosely when speaking of a Sci-Fi film) setting with real people.

While I absolutely love space-combat and starfighters and all that high-tech space opera pizzazz, what I really enjoyed was the human interaction. Missing from movies like Episode I and II was that human connection. Everyone in those two movies felt like cardboard pieces with pre-recorded voice tracks. Unlike the original Star Wars movies, they were mostly shot on serene blue screens which I feel kills the actors’ ability to mesh and meld.

This was not so on the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. The sets were beautiful and real, huge and to scale. I believe only the space-combat scenes were truly blue screened. The result of such an endeavor was incredibly real, powerful scenes and touching human interaction. The strangling tension between Apollo and Starbuck was nearly tangible, and it set the stage for nearly every other interaction between them. While I’ve only attended about two years worth of film classes, I think the way it those types of scenes were done was beautiful, if only from a purely cinematic point of view.

What do you have here, then? In just one short scene you can tell several things. Apollo and Starbuck are at odds over something. Starbuck apparently is fairly “macho” and likes throw her self-confidence around as much as she can. Despite these two glaring, obvious things, there’s also a hint of something more. Directly from that simple scene I believe you can also tell that there’s a deeper Starbuck, something beyond that hotshot-hero gig she has going on. Apollo came across as an untouchable at the beginning, but when he let this under-ranking female lieutenant bring him down, there was a hint that there’s more to this guy as well.

Moving away from the personal interaction between those two, I would like to touch on the feel of the show. Desperation with a slight chance at hope seems to be the order of the day for Battlestar Galactica. The gritty, dark, under-gunned mentality you get from the show adds a dimension of reality I don’t believe most Sci-Fi shows have. A lot of the shows you see are far out there with a hundred thousand different types of rarely-discussed aliens who all just so happened to walk and talk just like us. That seems to be their big selling point, aliens. I feel they tend to forget about the real reason we watch television: the story. Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape and the like all seemed to rely heavily on throwing the most attractive or hideous aliens at you with no regard for the ‘how’, ‘who’, or ‘why.’ Battlestar Galactica does not even attempt to do that. Instead they show us that humanity developed a new sentience and that sentience turned on us. Thus far the religious mythos that comes from Number Six seems to point towards an ultimate destiny this war is serving. Now that’s interesting, that’s entertainment. Show me a story and make me want to know where it’s going. Thrill me. I am the audience. That is what you’re doing this for.

In regards to the reality of the show, I was really impressed with the dialogue. I didn’t notice too many tacky, cheesy one-liners that made me want to roll my eyes and smirk. The dialogue between characters felt natural, and in some cases, unrehearsed. Gaius Baltar’s nervous, schizophrenic mannerisms come close to the outrageous but they’re believable. How would you act if you had a supermodel attached to your brain that only you could see?

In closing I would like to take a moment to review what really touched me about this show. The dialogue and human interaction is the most attractive to me, and the story itself is so compelling it can’t help but make you wonder what you would do in that situation. Whether this effect has anything to do with the quality of acting or the writer’s ability to understand human dialogue through the script, Battlestar Galactica seems to make you believe this could happen instead of just assuming you won’t care.

Mike Kern