Look, I love Babylon 5.
I mean really, deeply, truly, absolutely adore it. I watched every single episode and TV movie as they first came out, from that first TV movie which debuted a year before the series launched, through the sequel series Crusade and even that last spin-off, The Legend of the Rangers: To Live and Die in Starlight and the direct to video attempt to revive the series, The Lost Tales.
So you’d think, after sixteen years of silence I would be happy to see a new installment in the classic series.
And, I’ll point out, one written by J. Michael Straczynski himself.
Sigh.
I feel old.
No, more than just old, after reading all the gushing reviews telling us how B5 is back and as good as ever, I feel like I’ve turned into the old guy yelling at the neighborhood kids and telling them to get off his lawn.
It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just…
There.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just that so many of our favorite actors from the show have died, maybe it’s because the animation never catches the spirit of the actors, not even the ones who are still around to voice their parts, maybe it’s because the main cast, most of whom probably haven’t done much voice work before, don’t seem to be bringing that extra something into their performances that they needed to make up for the rather inexpressive character animation.
Or maybe it’s simply that we’re all sick and tired of multiverses.
I suppose it doesn’t help that we start with an odd sort of riff on the classic opening narration. It varied a bit from season to season, with different characters providing that narration (which was always tweaked a bit to match their personality), but all ending with the final line, “…and I was there.”
This time it starts with John Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) only he starts out by saying “I was there.”
And then other characters say “I was there,” before that ends with someone declaring “we were there,” then launching into the intro.
Not a great start.
What follows is a familiar moment, as John Sheridan leaves Babylon 5, perhaps for the last time, to take up residence on Minbar in his new role as President of the Interstellar Alliance. But he experiences some strange incidents, as if he was hearing echoes of what is happening around him.
But, he finally understands what is happening when he ceremonially opens a new Minbari power plant a few months later and the tachyon field it generates tears him loose from his time and space and sends him spinning wildly through the past, present, and even what prove to be alternate worlds…
To be fair, Bruce Boxleitner’s voice is still strong and compelling after thirty years. And his animated version does look more or less like him.
But Claudia Christian, who was always one of my favorites, seems to be sleepwalking through the role at times. I suppose Ivanova always did have a great deal of self-control, but it doesn’t help that the animated Ivanova doesn’t look much like her. Nor is it particularly expressive.
Although I will admit that the scene where she and Londo drink their way through the apocalypse together has a lot of the black humor we expect from Ivanova.
It’s almost shocking to see how many of the main cast have actually died: Mira Furlan (Delenn), the incredible Andreas Katsulas (G’Kar), Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi), Michael O’Hare (Commander Sinclair), and Richard Biggs, (Dr. Franklin) — and of those whose characters aren‘t in this story, Jeff Connaway (Zack Allen) and Stephen Furst (Vir).
Which is quite an impressive list, and you can add two important bit players (who both play a major part in this movie), Rance Howard who played Sheridan’s Father and was one of those underrated character actors who deserved to be far better known (who only rarely got a major role like the Sheriff in Sasquatch Mountain) and Tim Choate, who played Zathras.
Let’s face it, this version of Delenn isn’t too bad, even though I still miss Mira Furlan. And Samurai Jack himself, Phil LaMarr, stands in for Richard Biggs and does just fine. But Jerry Doyle is a huge loss, as he brought a lot to Garibaldi that is missing here.
The biggest loss, though, is Andreas Katsulas, who did an incredible job of playing G’Kar through overwhelming layers of makeup and prosthetics. And yet he effortlessly brought so much to one of the most complex and sympathetic characters in the entire series.
Instead, this version of G’Kar lacks any personality at all. It seems very generic, as if they merely tried to create a standard Narn and forgot that they were trying to create a specific character. The voice just doesn’t sound right, and his face is all wrong. I suppose I should be happy he doesn’t have much to do, but this was a tremendous wasted opportunity.
This version of Zathras is almost as bad. He wasn’t a major character in the original series and only made a few appearances throughout its run. But he was also one of the funniest characters and it always livened things up when he made an appearance. Unfortunately, whoever is voicing him this time around does not have Tim Choate’s comedic gifts and most of the jokes fall flat. I also find the very obvious fourth wall jokes he makes towards the end rather strange: they seem completely out of place, even if the Great Machine does somehow allow all the Zathras’ to see the past, present and future — and even alternate dimensions.
Including, apparently, one where Babylon 5 and Lost in Space are both TV series.
Which leads us to Jeffrey Sinclair. Unlike many Babylon 5 fans, I particularly liked Michael O’Hare, and regretted his departure from the show. While many of the character designs here reflect some of the obvious details of how those characters appeared on the show, Sinclair doesn’t look anything at all like Michael, nor is the voice much like his.
Oh, and don’t forget that Sheridan’s father doesn’t look at all like Rance Howard, either.
Not at all.
I know, matching voices is very hard, and the animation isn’t detailed enough to bring a human face to life, but perhaps that’s the real problem here. I have to wonder if a looser, more cartoony style, something like that in Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Kingdom, something perhaps closer to a caricature, would have worked better.
Although that would have required a far more expensive production.
The living actors don’t fare that much better. Bill Mumy (Lenneir) and Peter Jurasik (Londo Mollari) look more or less right, and give fairly good performances, but neither one is given a lot to do. On the other hand, both Tracy Scoggins (Captain Elizabeth Lochley) and Patricia Tallman (former Psy Corps member, Lyta Alexander) got meatier parts, but Tracy’s animated avatar looks remarkably bland and unrecognizable, while Patricia Tallman gets more to do but her animated self only scores higher because it has her red hair. Neither one makes much of an impression.
It is, of course, great to see the world of Babylon 5 brought to life again, with a lot of the familiar hardware — Star Furies, a White Star, Shadow vessels, and even a few Vorlon ships — and you can tell the animators were having a lot of fun in the opening, showing a flight of Star Furies flying along parts of the station we never saw close up in the original series. And I will give the animators at Warner Brothers a bit of credit, as it all looks quite good, with a lot of color and a low-res digital animation style used to create the hardware which almost matches the character animation.
It bothers me a bit, though, that the Shadows are apparently solid, bug-shaped aliens now, and not extremely evolved creatures who can phase in and out of hyperspace at will.
Yeah, I know that’s more implied than ever stated directly in the original show. But it still doesn‘t look right.
I find the visuals of the rim utterly absurd — it was always supposed to be the outer rim of the Galaxy, with only intergalactic space beyond. And no wall. Period.
It is typical of Babylon 5 that Sheridan has a very portentous conversation with someone who appears to him in the form of someone he knows (although not his father this time). I find this a very odd moment altogether and can’t help but think that this should either have been Kosh (who is sadly missing here) or perhaps the First One, Lorien, either of whom could have given him the needed hints without dragging the Universe into things.
Hardcore fans will, of course, recognize the story’s connections to the episodes Babylon Squared and War Without End, both of which involved time travel and the great machine — and we even get one alternate timeline which just happens to match one of the future flashes in Babylon Squared which never came to pass. But somehow that’s one of the things which bugs me. Those two episodes had a certain completeness to them, with the broken time line of the first brought full circle two years later.
And that’s the real problem. While Straczynski made an effort to fix a hole in Babylon Squared which was caused by Sinclair’s abrupt departure from the show, we really never needed that hole fixed. Otherwise I suspect it was just what it feels like: a big bowlful of memberberries. We get to revisit various points in the series history, get reacquainted with old characters, touch base on the deserted planet of Epsilon III, fill in a previously unexplained moment. It feels as if someone said, what would make the fans happy? and then tried to cram it all into the script.
It just feels like it’s all nostalgia bait and as a result the seemingly universe-ending consequences of Sheridan getting unstuck in time (like Billy Pilgrim) just don’t seem that big a deal. We never really get the feeling that anyone is in real danger, even if in some of these flash sideways we see various characters getting killed off, the station destroyed — or the Shadows winning the war.
That has always been a problem for a series revival, particularly one where we already know the future history of many of the main characters: how can we make any story we want to tell consequential? How can we believe that there are real stakes if we already know how it all comes out?
Perhaps Crusade had the best idea, spinning off a new set of characters on a new set of adventures, with the main cast only making an occasional cameo.
Oh, well.
It’s really not that bad. It’s basically sort of okay. And it is nice to see all our old friends again.
It just feels tired and old and unnecessary, as if JMS should have done something riskier and more daring, setting another story in his universe, one which didn’t depend on the Shadow War to create the stakes.
And, I’ll admit it, I’m more than a little worried that the version of Babylon 5 we see at the end of the movie — an alternate version of the timeline which Sheridan might have brought into existence by observing it, where the life of the station proceeded smoothly without the expedition to Z’ha’dum waking up the Shadows — might be the lead-in to the proposed series Straczynski has been working on, which is supposedly a reboot of the series.
One, I will point out, which would allow them to re-stage the entire Shadow War in the new series.
Or, in other words, Babylon 5’s own Kelvin timeline.
That’s it, I’m definitely turning into a grumpy old man who thinks everything is being spoiled these days.
Now if those darn Warner Brothers Animation Studio kids would just get off my lawn…
rivets on the poster 