Frackin' Great

Something bothered me throughout the mini series of BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA: THE MINISERIES (Universal, 2003, $27.95, Tuesday, December 28, 2004) and the subsequent first season of the Sci-Fi Channel's BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA: SEASON ONE (Universal, 2004, $59.95, Tuesday, September 20, 2005), which I have just consumed in a mad, delighted rush. [The first part of season two is due out on December 20th.]

As everyone else probably knows, but I didn't until I'd seen the whole thing, the Cylons, the machine-based product of human endeavor who split off from the human beings thanks to a war but which are now back to exterminate them, have evolved to a point wherein some of them now resemble the hated human beings. They can pass for human, speak, interact, fuck, even bear children, like people, and they have infiltrated the fleet of airships fleeing the Cylon armada, which has already annihilated some billions of people spread across 12 planets, leaving only about 50, 000 human beings.

The most famous Cylon synthetic human being is No. 6, played by the ravishing Tricia Helfer (although her beauty is of a kind particularly indigenous to TV kind, which I find difficult to explain, except to say Loni Anderson, Jaclyn Smith, and Jeri Ryan as opposed to Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie). The Cylon can make near-humans, but only of limited models. Thus there are numerous No. 6xes. Toward the end of the miniseries, we see some of the other synthetics: the one who looks like Kevin Spacey, the one named Leoben, No. 6 herself, and, in one of the miniseries's many great surprises, Boomer, AKA Sharon Valerii (the huggable Grace Park).

So here, laboriously, is my point. If there is a No. 6, that suggests that there are five others. But we have only seen Spacey, Leoben, and Boomer. Does this mean that there are two prototypes whom we haven't seen yet? Two Cylon replicants somewhere on board the Gallactica, perhaps even major characters in the story? Sleeper cells like Boomer, who don't even know that they are Cylons? Is this something that's been developed in the second season (which I haven't seen)? If it hasn't been introduced, will creators Ronald Moore and David Eick buy it from me so I can get out of my day job?

I watched BSG the way I did THE SHIELD, ALIAS, 24, and a few other shows: that is, in a marathon sit down that rainbowed over two days. I've found this to be the best way for me to watch TV show sets; if I'd seen BSG in weekly form, piecemeal, I would not only have forgotten or missed key things, but I would have been driven mad by the suspense.

Though never a fan of the pathetic first version of BSG, I can see the virtue of the remake. We can all agree that the first BATTLESTAR was a terrible show, right? With bad special effects, lame thievery from STAR WARS, and flat and ugly '70s Universal photography and staging? Instead of dismissing it as a total failure, however, the Sci Fi channel and Moore and Eick determined that there was a good idea at the core of BSG that merited a revival.

That's the way to do it. Why remake something successful and iconic, as many of we film buffs have often asked ourselves and others? Instead, remake something that sort of didn't come off quite right the first time, that wasn't fully thought out the first time around, or was made during primitive filmmaker eras, or was badly cast. That's what Moore and Eick have done, to admirable success.

I'd always known that there was something dark and depressing at the center of the first BSG; the notion that in the show humanity was close to extinction depressed the hell out of me and made it difficult to really get into the program (that, and the execrable effects). It was a reminder of our own Earth-bound fragility, and the ultimate transience of all Earthly things. Moore and Eick get that, and have fashioned a show that is a true space opera, that is, as in most daytime soaps, about mostly bad things happening to good people. The Cylons are a mostly invincible foe, and even when the human beings wrest some small victory from them, the mood is immediately diminished, for the viewer at least, by the knowledge that the Cylons in a way knew that that victory was coming, and that it was all part of their or God's plan anyway.

Yes, there is a religious component, or at least a subplot, to the show. Some readers may recall the theories circulating about the first BSG, that it was a Mormon allegory, another tale of a disenfranchised peoples searching for their true homeland. Moore and Eick make explicit, and contentious, what was only implied (if it was even that) in the original, and with a clever twist. The human beings worship, when they bother to, multiple gods who are patterned after the Greek gods. The Cylons are monotheistic. Though machines, they worship a sole god. This is a male god, and you might suspect that he is patterned in dimensions and through Cylon anthropomorphizing, after their human creators. In the continuing subplot of the Sagan-like science genius Baltar (James Callis) and his debates with a fantasy No. 6 who visits him every episode to either have sex, advise him, or debate the merits of a core Creator, the religion theme is fully explored.

This thread of the show resides mostly between No. 6 proselytizing and converting Baltar, who does enjoy the odd munificent moment from God at crucial plot junctures, which makes you think that the filmmakers think that the Cylon god does exist. So the ostensible good guys have the archaic religion, and the bad guys more resemble middlebrow America. This is more than a Blue State - Red State division, it is an interesting subtext that gives the show both political and religious gravitas

Baltar is the Vic Mackey of the show, the compromised, complex louse who manages to escape exposure as corners him yet again. Or maybe he's BSG's Flashman, a coward who finds himself at the center of significant events from which he emerges as a hero, and events conspire to elevate him to power (lucky actor, that Callis; his is the only male character who gets to fuck anyone).

The show is dark, and in fact on the commentary tracks Moore and Eick mention the congenial debates that the makers had with the network. But the darkness comes not just in the mass slaughter of women and children, but in the mood of dispirited determination the characters show, none of whom may be worth saving. The tone is set with Adama's speech during the ceremony ostensibly to put the Gallactica in mothballs, but which turns out to be a prelude to battle. Adama wonders aloud if, back in the first robot war, human beings were even worth saving.

BSG is one of the few TV shows where I've felt legitimate suspense, probably because Moore and Eick have shown a willingness to kill off anyone if it suits their needs. Take, "The Hand of God," in which the team has to trick the Cylons, blow up their base, and then take the fuel stored there. The climax is a really scary sequence. I wasn't sure at all how it was going to end. This level of viewer engagement is, to me, all too rare on TV, but doesn't need to be. The snap zooms serve the paradoxical purpose of making the special effects even more realistic, and I like the SHIELD style docu-style camerawork.

Universal first presented the mini series on DVD back in December of 2004, but it's been superseded by the recent release that adds the miniseries to the full first season, which comes with additional audio commentary tracks by the filmmakers, and that evolve into the tracks that Moore started to release as podcasts after episode eight.

Other supplements on the five-disc set include Behind the Scenes, which includes From Miniseries to Series, Change Is Good, Now They're Babes, The Cylon Centurion, Future/Past Technology, The Doctor Is Out (Of His Mind), Production, Visual Effects, and an epilogue. Carried over from the earlier disc is BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Series Lowdown, and deleted scenes (including an alternate credit sequence and an attempt to explain the photograph the pilots touch on their way to a mission), and sketches and art.

The widescreen transfers (1.78:1, enhanced) are excellent, and the shows come in English 5.1, with subtitles in English and Spanish. The musical menu offers four-chapter scene selection per 40-minute episode.

Media Notes From All Over

The always-amusing M. E. Russell has just published a cartoon strip in his CULTURE PULP series, which appears in the Portland OREGONIAN every other Friday, on a subject of dire interest to me.

Screening rats.

Perhaps you are unaware of these freeloaders on the body filmic, these denizens of some dark and vile place who emerge nightly to present their passes to get into advance screenings of movies. They are called screening rats because they over-run in packs word-of-mouth screenings, usually those at night sponsored by a local radio station. They arrive en masse and take up 50 to 60 seats that might better go to civilians who really want to see the movie. The rats, on the other hand, are there for the shirts and the CDs that are given away, for the bragging rights of saying that "I saw that piece of shit already" (for rats don't actually like movies; to them, every film is a piece of shit).

Far be it for me to begrudge someone the chance to see free movies. That's the reason that I got into movie reviewing in the first place. It was solely to feed the movie jones, even though I knew I wasn't very good at the writing part (which, I soon learned, never stopped anyone from writing anyway).

But rats are not movie lovers. They arrive at the theater at 4 PM for a 7 PM screening not because they are movie lovers, but because they just want to be first in line. The have radio station call in numbers on their speed dial not because they love movies, but because they always want to be that 10th caller. They scramble into the theater to be near the box of t-shirts and CDs not because they love movies but because they want to hoard swag in order to sell it later on eBay.

Portland isn't the only city with a rat infestation. Los Angeles apparently has a troupe of eccentric screening rats who look like leftovers from Ed Wood's entourage. And Chicago has such aggressive rats that one of them is even suing either a theater or a publicist for what he claims is discriminatory behavior. Elsewhere, they are called "Passholes" and other sobriquets. But no city has as many or as dedicated a lot as Portland, at least according to a promotions guy at KGON here whom I interviewed several years ago when I did a story on the rat phenomenon.

This rat phenomenon began back in the mid-1970s, when studios gradually weaned reviewers from private daytime screenings to sponsored word of mouth night events with local media tie-ins. These carnivalesque affairs drew a small clutch of "early adopters" who sussed out the names of local publicists and buttered them up (only to mock them behind their backs). The rats learned early that certain studios favored certain radio stations, and also created lists of forthcoming movies derived from VARIETY and other sources in order to create charts of potential and actual screenings.

The two main early adopters soon drew friends and neighbors and co-workers into their circle and that body duly increased. The early rats liked to get multiple tickets from a source (a local shop, a weak-willed publicist) and then bestow them upon their friends as if the tickets were their largesse. Even today, one of the lead rats circulates among the crowd before screenings in order to let his friends kiss his ring, as if he mounted the screenings.

We critics know the names of some of the rats but we prefer to call them by the synecdoche of their most obvious traits. There's "cancer lung," the thin, angry old man in a leather jacket who invariably coughs up a bog of phlegm about midway through each screening, to the nausea of those sitting around him (the critics know to avoid his presence). There's "Chuck Norris's seedy brother," the drab, nearly moronic dwarf who always grunts his laughs out about 10 seconds after everyone else has got the joke. And there's "baldy," the thin and dull white guy who, said to be a lawyer, almost always leaves about midway through a film. But most of the rats are relatively anonymous, except for the pack of 20 fat Philippine women and their henpecked husbands or Caucasian boyfriends.

Russell's strip is an accurate account of rat behavior. Personally, I have seen rats sneak into screenings that were labeled critic only. I've seen rats grab t-shirts out of the air that were hurled across the room to legitimate recipients. I have seen physical fights break out between rats during screenings. I've been jeered at and harassed by rats while passing them in line for films. I once saw a rat try to steal a publicist's rep's leather satchel (there were future passes in it) and then punch the publicist in the face when he stopped the thief, before fleeing the theater. Once a rat tried to knock me down during the final credits of DEATH TO SMOOCHEY because I was standing in his way.

I've always been puzzled as to why the publicists (who in the Northwest tend to live in Seattle whence they set up screenings elsewhere, and hence don't experience rat behavior directly) tolerate such horrid behavior. The rats cackle openly about the scams they have pulled on publicists (one even briefly became a rep, actually running some of the screenings!). They openly defy the theater managers by bringing in their own food and unfurling it from under crinkly plastic wrappings with achingly slow deliberation. The most a rat has ever gotten from a concession stand is a free cup of water. They disparage the critics (thus creating what is in essence a "hostile work environment"), and try to pull endless scams against the radio stations. The KGON promotions guy I talked to told me that he'd changed his home telephone number three times, but the Chuck Norris rat still managed to unearth it and continue to pester him.

Perhaps the sine qua non of rat behavior was something I witness before a screening of CUFFS several years ago. It was craven, desperate, childish, and thugish all at once, which made it typical rat behavior. One of the rats often brought his fat son to screenings in those days, where he trained him in rat scams. On this night the local radio station was passing ticket halves to attendees for a later giveaway (as Russell notes in his cartoon, the publicists used to tape things to the bottom of theater seats but rats soon caught on to that trick and would burst into the auditorium early and snap through seats until they found one with a tag; ticket halves were a temporary solution to that rat problem). Fat rat junior happened to luck out and receive a winning ticket half. He rushed to the front of the theater and picked up his shirt. He returned with shirt, but also the ticket stub, which the radio station guys neglected to retrieve. Father Rat saw the stub and did the rat version of a double take, sort of bounding in place like a football player during training. He then grabbed the ticket out of his son's hand, rushed to the screen, got in line, and took his unwarranted t-shirt, thus depriving a legitimate winner of their prize. When he returned to his seat he grinned like a Cheshire cat, and then, when he sat down, secretly flipped off the radio station, hiding his middle finger behind the seat backs in front of him.

Make no mistake; the rats are very unpleasant people, not to be trusted. I can only echo Marlowe in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS: "The horror. The horror. Exterminate the brutes!"

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, December 28, at 9 AM.

COMING SOON:Numerous Alfred Hitchcock films, the 3rd Annual DVD Tray of Terror, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!

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