Hope you like Cavil.
It’s been almost a year since the final season of “Battlestar Galactica” began, and I’m sure I’m not alone in seriously missing it since its conclusion. But fans’ hope has been kept alive by the prospect of at least one standalone movie based on the series, following in the footprints of the excellent 2007 prequel, “Razor.”
And now that first (Edward James Olmos has promised more to come) post-“BSG” standalone movie, titled “The Plan,” is finally being aired at 9 p.m. Sunday on Syfy. That’s the good news.
The bad news is, it isn’t very good.
“The Plan” was released on DVD a few months ago, and I found it to be a big disappointment. It’s a disjointed mess, which was all the more frustrating knowing how good the series was.
The movie tells the story of the Cylon plot to kill humanity from the Cylons’ point of view, and roughly parallels the series’ first two seasons. But there’s no real plot, no single narrative to tie it all together. We see familiar scenes from the first two seasons, and get a little extra depth into the backstory behind them (kinda like those “Back to the Future II” scenes with Marty behind the stage as his past self is playing guitar), but it seems more like a collection of DVD extras and deleted scenes than any cohesive story.
One glaring problem is the lack of a good number of the original actors, including Lucy Lawless (how can you tell the Cylons’ story without the critical No. 3, perhaps the most interesting Cylon model in the bunch?). Regulars such as Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), Jamie Bamber (Apollo), and James Callis (Baltar) didn’t return, and are instead seen only in recycled footage from the original episodes. The jumps from old footage to new scenes are jarring at times, and really mess with the flow. It doesn’t help that characters like Tyrol change appearance drastically over the natural course of the series.
And instead of focusing on the interesting (errr, OK, hot) Cylons, like No. 6 (Tricia Helfer) and No. 8 (Grace Park), it mostly follows Dean Stockwell’s Cavil, with a little bit of Anders thrown in. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Dean Stockwell, he’s a great character actor and Cavil is a great character. But he’s in the vast majority of scenes in “The Plan,” and it’s a bit much to ask Stockwell to carry an entire movie. He’s never able to rise to the level of his gripping, poetic “I want to see gamma rays” rant from the series. It’s a little confusing too, since there are two Cavils who are at odds with each other. I’m a diehard “BSG” fan, and even I was left going “Whaaa?” a little too often.
“The Plan” is aimed entirely for “BSG” uber-geeks. I mean, who are we kidding? If you loved “BSG,” you’re probably going to watch (and if you never saw it, don’t start with this, you’ll be totally lost). And sure, you’ll find a handful of interesting scenes (the ones with Anders are all pretty good, that should have been the movie) and get a lingering question or two answered (like why their genocidal plan failed, though we already knew it was pretty much because humans were so darned likable). But more than anything, you’ll just be reminded how great those early seasons of “BSG” were. And how “The Plan” really should have been better.
