Text 16440, 132 rader
Skriven 2007-08-01 00:54:42 av goateebloke@hotmail.com (2913.babylon5)
  Kommentar till text 16406 av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated (2879.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Lost Tales: My Review (SPOILERS, obviously!)
========================================================
On Aug 1, 3:11 am, cmad...@hiwaay.net (Chris Adams) wrote:
> Once upon a time, goateebl...@hotmail.com <goateebl...@hotmail.com> said:>So
I received the R1 DVD from Play.com *yesterday* (Monday) against
> >all precedent and have just finished watching the whole thing, extras
> >included. For anyone who might be interested, here are my thoughts.
>
> <<end of transmission>>
>
> Wow.  I'm speechless!
> --
> Chris Adams <cmad...@hiwaay.net>
> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
> I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.

Hahah! What the hell? Google completely dumped the spoiler space and
everything that came afterwards. Brilliant! Repost-a-roo, this time
with spoiler space removed:

So I received the R1 DVD from Play.com *yesterday* (Monday) against
all precedent and have just finished watching the whole thing, extras
included. For anyone who might be interested, here are my thoughts.

Well, if ever there was a good time for a cliche, it's now: Lost Tales
is a DVD of two halves. It's a shame that the lesser of the two is the
first one on the disk, but there we are. Lochley's episode, revolving
around the truth - or not - of an apparent demonic possession on board
the station is a somewhat flat piece of theatre hugely over-burdened
with masses of dialogue.

This is not to say the script is poor - far from it, actually - but
the half-an-hour or so given over to the story just isn't enough time
to explore the kinds of themes JMS so obviously wants to. Within about
60 seconds of the opening credits we're dropped right into a lengthy
discussion of God's place amongst space-faring humanity which, while
interesting enough, is completely inappropriate for the first act of
the first episode of real Babylon-5 for 8 years or whatever it is.
Unfortunately it sets the tempo for a slow, overly-indulgent story
which has been shoe-horned into too-tight a space, despite the
impressive efforts of all the actors involved to make the best of it.

The second episode is much, much better. It's a longer, more action-
packed and character-focused morality tale which feels completely at
home on a Babylon-5 DVD. Galen and Sheridan fire brilliantly off
eachother, but however good Peter Woodward and the other guest actors
are - and they are *very* good - they are outclassed by Bruce
Boxleitner here, who absolutely dominates the screen for the entire
show. The story itself is a pleasing mystery with a satisfying
conclusion (but just what is Galen's agenda, we wonder?), touching on
many aspects of B5 and hinting at things to come, and filled to the
brim with snappy dialogue, really excellent effects (the 360 pan
around the Starfury with Sheridan sitting right there at the controls
is just awesome, one of the few 'Wow!' moments), and good directorial
touches. A winner.

Stories aside, the Lost Tales project seems to be a mixed bag. At
times it can seem almost painfully low-budget. The opening zoom past
B5 before the credits, and the credits themselves, honestly look as if
they were knocked up by a B5 fan with just enough expertise on Maya to
make a *really* good hash of it (thankfully the B5 beauty shots,
particularly the one from inside the presidential cruiser that you can
see in the trailers, are awesome... the old place has never looked so
good, from the outside at least). The destruction of New York is
pretty good although not as mindblowing as I'd hoped, the dream-
sequence battle between B5 and the Centauri fleet is excellent... and
then you switch to the interior docking bay of the station which is
just this god-awful, static CGI that looks as bad as the very worst
matte shots from the original series.

The sets themselves are extremely thin on the ground. Where they are
not staged to look spartan (thankfully Minbari aesthetics come to the
rescue in the second episode), they look terribly cheap and two-
dimensional, with the camera locked off and never daring to pan too
far past the actors, perhaps in case the stage crew scroll into view.
You never ever get the impression of the station behind the corridors
either: there are way too few extras, and the interior shots are
devoid of the kind of background atmospherics that are needed to
convince us we're in a space-station. This is all really odd since the
original show did a really good job on that score. You can't help but
sense, almost from the very first shot, just how much of a shoestring
budget this must have been put together on. Doubtless, if we knew
exactly *how* little money JMS had to spend, we'd be amazed at what he
managed to do with it, but that doesn't assuage the disappointment
that B5 just seems so *small* in Lochley's story.

JMS as a director seems at least as much of a mixed bag as the
effects. On the one hand he executes some really nice moments,
especially in Sheridan's episode which could easily have been put
together by one of the show's more well-known directors, but in
Lochley's episode there are some commensurately bad moments. Long
pauses between lines of dialog are left untrimmed, lending a slightly
amateurish feel to the performances (which they're not), and when the
camera isn't lurching from side to side in a hugely over-used attempt
to lend some mystique to yet another monologue, it seems practically
super-glued to the floor. There's no movement on camera, no props for
the actors to work with, practically no set for them to walk through,
little or no background action, no view-screens, no BabCom. Again,
these problems probably arise from the impossibility of getting all of
that script into half-an-hour (there are only so many ways of shooting
two people in a room talking) or from the budgetary limitations of the
sets themselves. Whatever the reasons, some of these problems just
kill whatever potential the episode ever really had and reduce B5
practically to a theatre set.

Finally there are the extras, which are excellent for a DVD like this.
All of the episodes from the Lost Tales web site are on there, plus
several more insights into the creation of the show and its effects,
extra interviews with Bruce Boxleitner, Peter Woodward, and Tracey
Scoggins, a 'fireside chat' with JMS in which he tells us what we
already know from the script book intro's :), and finally a couple of
tributes to Andreas Katsulas and Rick Biggs, both of which bring a
lump to the throat. A hint or two about future stories wouldn't have
gone amiss, but there's probably an Easter Egg I missed. :)

Overall, the quality of Sheridan's episode, which obviously saw the
most money and doesn't suffer from some of the more irksome issues
that Lochley's episode does, along with the excellent extras, make the
Lost Tales a successful experiment, and a good template for future
DVD's. Personally I wish all of the cash had been spent on Sheridan's
episode and we had gotten 60 minutes of unequivocal B5 quality, and I
shudder to think what the DVD would have been like if JMS had gone
forward with his original plan to shoot three different episodes per
release (perhaps the sock puppets would have been called on... and
somehow I'm beginning to see those as an in-joke regarding the paucity
of budget), but hopefully the uptake of the first DVD will be
sufficient for Warners to prise open their wallets a bit and give JMS
a bit more money to play with when he finally gets around to showing
us a few more of Londo's intervening years, which is the Lost Tale I'm
*really* waiting for.

7.5/10
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32
 * Origin: Time Warp of the Future BBS - Home of League 10 (1:14/400)