Review of Battlestar Galactica: The Movie

Introduction

Bleeargh!!!

Oh, that`s nasty. Really nasty. A non-anamorphic 1.85:1 presentation with Dolby 1.1 (yes, you heard right 1.1) sound and tons of print and neg debris. Unless, of course, Universal are keeping up Battlestar Galactica`s tradition of homaging the hell out of George Lucas, and decided to deliver BSG in the same sorry state that Lucasfilm apparently is favouring fans of the original Star Wars trilogy with. If that`s the case (but I doubt it), then cute joke Universal UK. However, I think it`s more likely they were too cheap to spring for a decent transfer and decided to port across an NTSC/PAL conversion of Side A of the Region One edition. I`ve checked both the R1 and R2 discs side by side and it`s definitely the same transfer as there`s an identical lump of neg crud on the "Galactica" credit of the main title.

If you have the Classic BSG box set, then really you shouldn`t bother with this. The content is pretty much identical (except for a few revised scenes) with the first three episodes of the show, and the box set has the full 4:3 image shot that is masked down to 1.85:1 on the movie. (There`s also far less neg crud and a tinny but still bolder DD5.1 soundtrack).

In 1978, maestro of the televisual clone Glen A Larson launched his identikit version of Star Wars on an unsuspecting tv audience. Battlestar Galactica was the biggest budgeted show on US television at the time, with much of the budget blown on Star Wars style dogfights produced by former ILM supremo John Dykstra. Producer/Creator Larson was forced by threat of serious legal action to tone down some of the less subtle similarities between his opus and George Lucas`s. Where Lucas`s single (at the time) movie had been a tale of rebels and resistance, Larson`s tale was an epic of mass extermination and refugees fleeing the iron boot of an enemy out to kill every last one of them.

I have a soft spot for BSG. As blatant a cash-in on the Star Wars craze as it was, it had enough style and charm of its own to gain its own fanbase. Predating the return of Star Trek by nearly ten years, it gave tv viewers fresher hokum than the hundred-and-somethingth re-run of Jim Kirk kicking the Gorn`s ass.

The star of the show was always Dirk Benedict as Starbuck. Sod Richard Hatch as Apollo. Nice boy, but Starbuck had that bad-boy vibe like Han Solo. With craggy old Lorne Greene commanding the Galactica, you could have been forgiven for wondering where Hoss was.

BSG only ran to a single season before its crippling budget and its equally expensive studiomate Buck Rogers precipitated a radical redesign into Galactica 1980 which sent Dick Van Dyke`s son Barry on ahead to pave the way for us Earthpeople to welcome hordes of refugee spacepeople with open arms.

Ahead of the show`s international launch, bright sparks at Universal had an idea for maximising the impact and the potential revenue of the show by pulling an old stunt that the Studios had employed during the 1960s - they would theatrically release the extended pilot episode. Battlestar Galactica - The Movie was a compilation of the three initial episodes of the series, Saga Of A Star World Pts 1-3. Coming in at a hefty 125 minutes, the movie benefitted from the application for its theatrical run of Universal`s pet gimmick Sensurround.

Sensurround involved the use of transonic frequencies belted out through huge subwoofers and driven by 1000 watt amplifiers, all installed specially in theatres and cued by signals on the film itself. Battlestar Galactica was deafening. Easily as noisy as Rollercoaster or Battle Of Midway, but not quite as effective as the classic Earthquake which had launched Sensurround.

Stop me if you`ve heard this one before, but I saw BSG at the local (now closed) Princess Cinema with the family. I spent most of the picture with my fingers in my ears because unlike Earthquake, which had been a marvellous thundering rumble, BSG was full of kick-up-the-arse impact noises. My Mum went to the loo in the last quarter of the pic, just around the time the Cylon suicide squad whacks its craft into one of the Galactica`s launch bays. The resultant kaboom sucked the toilet doors open and convinced everybody outside the auditorium that a bus had crashed in the foyer of the theatre.

It just doesn`t sound the same on the disc.

Video

Ew. 1.85:1 non-anamorphic. That`s a 4:3 image with about an inch blacked out top and bottom. Not a pretty sight unless you still haven`t bought a new widescreen telly. If that`s the case, then put the price of this disc towards something sexy and HD-ready, you cheapskate.

Audio

Double ew. Dolby Digital 1.1. That`s mono with an LFE chaser, and still not enough grunt to flex a subwoofer properly. In a double whammy for me (in sad anorak mode), the movie opens with a silent 1970s Universal logo (after the current 5.1 studio logo). On the R1 version, the 1970s logo has that doom-laden orchestral sting - you can`t call it a fanfare - that used to precede pictures like BSG and Earthquake. In the UK it was accompanied by the animated CIC logo rather than the Universal logo, but I hear the sound and I`m transported back to my early teens.

Features

A handful of texty bits and pieces. Dirk Benedict`s filomography doesn`t even mention the A-Team, but it does reveal he`d only just recovered from Prostate cancer when he made BSG, so that makes his appearance on that recent Five programme about the A-Team all that bit more special.

There are subtitles, which we should be thankful for.

Conclusion

A honking great disappointment. If you really love BSG, you`d be much better putting the cash to the box-set of the complete original series that Universal put out a year or so ago. As far as I know it hasn`t gone out of print and the presentation is head and shoulders above this.

A classic piece of tv hokum otherwise and a hell of a lot more fun than that `orrible redux of the show they did recently. Magnificently po-faced in the greatest tradition of classical Flash Gordon style sci-fi, and with a gloriously bombastic score by Stu Philips, this has to be seen to be believed, but this is not the disc to see it on.