Text 16515, 166 rader
Skriven 2007-08-01 19:40:53 av Josh Hill (2991.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: Lost Tales: My Review (SPOILERS, obviously!)
========================================================
On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:54:42 -0700, "goateebloke@hotmail.com"
<goateebloke@hotmail.com> wrote:

>On Aug 1, 3:11 am, cmad...@hiwaay.net (Chris Adams) wrote:

>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.

Hmmm -- I thought it was fairly spectacular . . .

>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)

I thought that two office chairs against a black background were
pretty lame, myself. You know you're in trouble when characters have
to make excuses for the budget.

>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.

They simply must find a way to get a few more sets and some extras in
the follow-ups: the complaints are well-nigh universal, and some of
the customer reviews I saw on IMDB are so vociferous they lead me to
believe that they'll cost sales. I don't think it would take very
much. Perhaps the problem will be mitigated in future releases as sets
and props accumulate.

>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.

The Sheridan ep needed only the small scale Abraham/Isaac story (and
the talent of the actors) to create drama, but the Lochley episode
needed something more than the test of idealism, faith, and cleverness
it shared with its Sheridan counterpart. A threat to the station would
have done the trick (I'm assuming that JMS didn't want to rehash the
Linda Blair thing). Merely showing it surrounded with flames wasn't
enough to impart that threat -- it needed some people reacting in C&C,
what have you.

The Sheridan episode was at its best wonderfully strong. I can't help
but wonder what would have happened had the already
thematically-related Sheridan and Lochley stories been interweaved as
A and B plots. The pooling of acting talent -- and I think there was a
lot of that on display -- and the alternation of scenes would I think
have done much to mitigate the presumably budget-driven paucity of
actors and sets. Dramatic tension of course would have been increased,
at least in the Lochley plot. More could have been done to involve
Lochley in her own story -- as it is, she seems almost superfluous.
The voiceovers wouldn't have overwhelmed the mini-eps. And the show
would have gained some of the sense of scale that some of the
reviewers miss from the original series, without losing its focus on
the main characters.

-- 
Josh

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