I’ve always wanted to do reviews of stories on this blog, but I never got around to it, either because I was so behind anyone else’s reviews or because I didn’t think anyone would read it.
I still don’t really expect anyone to read it, particularly since I haven’t posted here for a while. And I am still behind everyone else, but give me a break, I don’t have the money to get new stuff, so I am stuck reviewing what I watch.
I’ve been something of a fan of the Stargate series of TV shows ever since I found the 3rd season of Stargate SG-1 for $20 bucks at a used video and music store some 6 or so years ago. That was about the point that I realized that used television series were a much better deal in a money-to-time-entertained ratio and started to cultivate an understanding of the genre–by which I mean watching a lot of television. What I liked about Stargate SG-1 was that it didn’t really take itself seriously, it had engaging characters with entertaining quirks and lots of witty one-liners. It was entertaining, light science fiction fun. Not particularly great story, not all that deep, but fun. I managed to collect all 10 seasons on DVD (mostly for quite reasonable prices). Stargate Atlantis followed in much the same vein, if possibly taking itself more seriously and re-using tropes from the SG-1, but I still enjoyed it and watched it all.
So one would think that when Stargate Universe came out I would have been all over it. But it was in the middle of a busy time in my last semester and after initially watching part of the first episode of I put the show down as an attempt to imitate Battlestar Galactica (the new one) without actually having the depth and quality that made Battlestar Galactica transcendently awesome (I admit to being a bit of a BSG fanboy). So I belittled it and didn’t watch it.
Well, I recently revisited the show and I have changed my opinion. It is indeed trying to be Battlestar Galactica, but it looks like it could actually be pretty good. It doesn’t have the same sense of fun that Stargate SG-1 has, and it doesn’t have the depth and quality that BSG has, but it does have a pretty good sense of tension and from the first 3 episodes looks like it could have deeper and more motivated characters than the other Stargates though I am a little concerned that the lack of cohesive cinematographic direction and the attempt to force character depth may cause the show to fall apart as it continues.
The characterization was somewhat heavy-handed in the first episode, there isn’t much nuance to the characters and acting at the beginning, which is usually to be expected. The writers managed to force (somewhat over-wrought) back-stories for the main characters into the narrative, which showed an attempt to get at the more realistic complicated characters that made BSG so good, but wasn’t executed quite as well in the first episodes at least.
The camera knew that it was trying to have odd angles and be shaky at times like Battlestar Galactica but it didn’t seem to know why and broke the documentary style quite frequently, and even when it did keep the documentary hand-camera style it often placed itself in places that people could not logically be, such as behind staircases, around corners and on cliff-faces above the action. In conventional cinema generally you want to keep viewers from thinking about the camera (though the trend nowadays has been to break that) BSG uses the camera to film the unreal (the spaceships and robots and space drama) as if there was actually someone there filming them, drawing attention to the camera and making it feel more real. Stargate Universe uses the camera to frame shots you generally wouldn’t think about, and call attention to the camera. . . and make it feel like they are trying to be BSG (or that there is a camera crew hiding on the spaceship filming the crew as some kind of prank reality TV setup).
The writing wasn’t bad. And I love the premise of getting stranded on a huge spaceship that you can’t control. While the pilot wasn’t enough to show me that this is an awesome show, it at least gave me hope that it could go in an interesting direction. I don’t know if it is going to be any good (particularly since I just spent most of this review pointing out its flaws). But I’m going to see where it goes.