by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened a science-fiction film from the DVD archives
since Charles and I are doing the ConDor science-fiction convention this
Friday, Saturday and Sunday and I thought it would be a nice idea to get into
the spirit of it in advance. The film I ended up screening was a 2007 Universal
Television production called Battlestar Galactica: Razor, though the Battlestar Galactica itself doesn’t
feature in the plot of this one at all. Written by Michael Taylor, “developed
by” Ronald D. Moore (who apparently was the producer and writer in charge of
the early-2000’s Battlestar Galactica reboot) and with Glen A. Larson credited with creating the characters
for the original 1977 Battlestar Galactica and also listed as “consulting producer” on the credits of this one even
though he had nothing to do with making it, Battlestar Galactica:
Razor actually tells the story of another
vessel in the space fleet of Battlestars, Battlestar Pegasus. It alternates
between present-time reality, a flashback to 10 months previously and other
flashbacks to 43 years before, at the end of the first Cylon war. Cylons, for
those of you not up on Battlestar Galactica minutiae, are the malevolent robots who are the
principal villains on the series — and who in the original 1977 incarnations looked
as much like the Empire’s Storm Troopers in Star Wars (the property Battlestar Galactica was obviously ripping off — down to hiring John
Dykstra, who’d done the model spaceships for Star Wars and for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey before that, to do the models here
as well) as Universal dared without risking a plagiarism suit from George Lucas
and 20th Century-Fox.
The new Cylons are skinnier and look more
“mechanical,” but they also can shape-shift and assume human form, disguising
themselves as people in order to commit espionage and thereby gain a leg up in
the renewed hostilities between humans and Cylons that started up again 43
years after an armistice ended the First Cylon War. I was curious about this
one for some of the same reasons I’d wanted to watch the recent Rogue
One: A Star Wars Story:
it was a way to re-enter the fictional universe without having to watch a whole
bunch of shows in succession since it was billed as a one-off. It wasn’t,
really: for the first third of this film Charles and I both found it awfully
confusing since it presupposed quite a lot more familiarity with the Galactica universe than either of us could muster. The central
character is Kendra Shaw (Stephanie Jacobsen), a young woman who previously
served on the officer corps of the Battlestar Pegasus but disgraced herself in some way we don’t learn
definitively until two-thirds of the way through the film. Ten months earlier
the Pegasus, then under the
command of Admiral Helena Cain (Michelle Forbes), had encountered a Cylon
battle fleet and barely survived the engagement. At one point, in order to
replenish her crew, Cain had sent a landing party to a planet colonized by
Earthlings in order to capture and forcibly draft people for the crew — an
interesting transposition to science-fiction of the practice of “impressment,”
by which British naval ships would board American vessels in the early 19th
century and kidnap crew members or even passengers and force them to serve on
the British ships (which was one of the issues the War of 1812 was about and is
also at the heart of Melville’s novel, and Britten’s opera, Billy
Budd). Earlier she had launched a direct
attack on part of the Cylon fleet, contradicting her previous instruction that
since her battle forces were vastly outnumbered by the Cylons, she’d only fight
in guerrilla fashion — and when her second-in-command (her “XO,” to use the Galactica argot — it stands for “executive officer”) declined
to obey her order, she pulled out an old-school pistol (one of the quirkier
parts of the Galactica universe
is that though it’s supposed to take place centuries in the future, some of the
technology, including portable radios as well as small arms, looks like what we
have today) and shot him on the spot.
This time she orders that if anyone on
the planet resists impressment into the Pegasus crew, not only they but their entire family is to be
killed — and Kendra Shaw carries out the order and kills 10 people before the
rest of the people realize that resistance is futile and go along with Cain’s
press gang. Word gets around that Shaw committed a war crime, and so 10 months
later, with Cain having died in battle to preserve the Pegasus, no one will hire Shaw for an officer position —
until the Pegasus’s new
commander, the boyishly handsome Lee “Apollo” Adama (Jamie Bamber), who got the
job because his dad, Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos), is a high
official in the fleet, insists on Shaw as his XO. The intrigue involves a Cylon
attempt to kidnap people and turn them into human/robot “hybrids” who can be
used to take over … well, whatever the Cylons are interested in taking over
instead of just destroying, since a passing piece of dialogue hints that the
Cylons have already destroyed Earth and all its colonies, so the 60,000 people
on board the various Battlestars are the only part of humanity that’s left —
and the heroic decision of Kendra Shaw to blow herself up with a nuclear weapon
in order to kill the hybrid as well, sort of like Sigourney Weaver at the end
of the original Alien. (At least
that’s how I read the ending of
the original Alien — Weaver’s
character killed herself in order to make sure the alien was destroyed before
it ever got to Earth — though they put her through increasingly ridiculous
revivifications in order to create the sequelae.) I liked Battlestar
Galactica: Razor better than I had Rogue
One: A Star Wars Story,
though both had the same problem — they were ostensibly prequels to the series
but they still presupposed a large amount of knowledge of the previous items in
the oeuvre and really didn’t work all
that well as one-offs. I’ll give Razor credit for several things, including making Helena Cain a Lesbian
whose girlfriend turns out to be a Cylon spy and at least attempting to deal with serious issues like father-son rivalry
and whether war crimes are ever
justified because the enemy is so implacable and so relentlessly evil that any
tactics, however inhumane or wrong, are morally acceptable to win.
Battlestar
Galactica in both its incarnations is very
much a story of its times: the first one came out in 1977 and I’ll never forget
that the first five minutes of its premiere were pre-empted by the live
coverage of the peace deal then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter brokered between
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Then,
when the special news flash ended and the series came on, the first dialogue we
heard was about the fragility of alliances and how easily treaties were broken
— as if the writers of Battlestar Galactica had set out to blunt the good news that Israel and
Egypt had signed a peace treaty. Like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica came out while Carter was still President but
anticipated the trends in U.S. political and ideological thinking that would
defeat him and elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, including the desire for
“toughness” and “strength” both at home and abroad. And the reboot of Galactica came out in the wake of 9/11, when another
Republican administration was proposing authoritarian “anti-terror” measures
and arguing that they were justified and, indeed, necessary because the enemy
we faced was so implacably evil any
means to defeat it were morally acceptable. The very strong pro-military, anti-peace sentiment is common
to both Galacticas and is as integral
a part of this material as it was of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and the film based on it — even though Michael
Taylor isn’t as good a writer as Card was and therefore he doesn’t communicate
the message quite as powerfully. Indeed, this film piles flashback on top of
flashback so relentlessly that at one point I joked, “Casey Robinson lives.”
(Casey Robinson was the early-1940’s Warner Bros. writer who was known for
piling flashbacks on top of flashbacks; he was also known around the industry
for having written the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman
in Casablanca but declining
screen credit because at the time he was taking credit only for films he wrote
entirely by himself — which meant he did himself out of an Academy Award.) According
to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, Battlestar Galactica: Razor (the title is a reference to Cain’s advice to Shaw
that she turn herself into a “razor,” a merciless, compassion-free instrument
of war to ensure humanity’s survival) was originally intended for theatrical
release, but eventually was sold as a TV-movie because by a quirk of
Universal’s contract with Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson, Universal owned the TV
rights to the property but Larson retained the feature-film rights — and he
vetoed the release of this story, which he’d had nothing to do with making
despite his “consulting producer” credit, as a theatrical feature.
