Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome [Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet]

I highly enjoyed the series of Battlestar Galactica (mostly Season 1 and 2 plus the Razor movie)
I never watched Caprica spin-off series so when I heard that Blood & Chrome was coming out, I decided to check it out simply by curiosity and the fact I love stuff done by computers.

Blood & Chrome was what I expected it to be. Entertaining to a point where I didn't see the time pass, has some funny moments and some development over the story. You just know things are not going to go the way it is suppose to.

Young William Adama was cocky and he knew it. It was a pleasure to see this and the story had a twist I half saw coming ( in the sense I knew something was up but couldn't put my finger on it)

I always asked myself the same question throughout the movie, is it real or is it made by computer. I found it hard sometimes to think the animation was done by computer and I wasn't watching real actors play their part.

I recommend, this short movie made me want to rewatch the BSG series, which I will promptly do this week.
Die hard fans might be more hard on it while fans who know nothing about the BSG series might feel lost.

It's hard to fairly judge Blood and Chrome, given that it was produced in a different way and for a different medium than BSG, the re-imagined version. In fact, I admittedly feel there's something of determined genius about moving forward with this project despite the fact of it having few or no physical sets. That frankly speaks of passion. The results? Visually, I found the CGI highly disorienting and surreal - though this wasn't always necessarily a bad thing. As others have mentioned, it took on a predominantly dark, smeary, highly saturated appearance, punctuated gauzily by frequent flares of light - and were this a different project, with a different legacy to live up to, I would have found it a stylish and absorbing new visual science fiction language (with admittedly a few rough edges where foreground and background were clearly pasted together. Hell, though, go back and look at the original star wars. Somehow we got through that!)

But, because it was an extension of BSG, I found the different 'visual language' simply jarring and generative of almost a complete lack of continuity for the feel of its predecessor. Sounds like an abstract complaint, I know, but it was as though they'd substituted not just the actors, but everything else that was great about BSG. Not necessarily worse substitutions, but completely different. I imagine those who loved the original campy seventies version of Galactica found themselves similarly disoriented and off-put by the reimagined series.

That being said, I really appreciated the added effort in rendering the grit and mechanistic detail of what, for instance, a flight deck on a Battlestar might really look like - and I couldn't help but wonder how BSG would have fared with such detail. However, I found myself being far more absorbed in background details - oh, THAT'S how they get vipers from place to place! - than in anything that was going on in the foreground. The frame was more interesting than the picture - a classic mistake. That, coupled with the jangling way Blood and Chrome was shot left me with the gasping sense of not really being able to clearly see anything, anyway. Again: one part genius - how else were they to work with the fact that they didn't really have sets? - but another part aggravating.

In terms of story and character development, I find it difficult to have anything constructive to say. The reimagined series simply grabbed us by the nuts. Who didn't feel like they were going to have a heart attack watching the episode '33', for instance? Blood and Chrome, however, felt as though a bunch of people moving through their lines in a story that did not need to be told. In fact, like The Plan, I personally felt that it actually diminished my enjoyment of BSG. I hate saying that, because I can't even imagine how much work and passion must go in to developing this kind of vision. And guts! They were, after all, deciding to elaborate on something that - whatever else you want to say about it - was a complete story. However, while it took courage to plow ahead with Blood and Chrome, knowing that it was risky tampering with something that people had already developed a strong relationship with, I can't help thinking how great it would have been if somebody stood up at the board room and said: wait a minute, are we really sure we want to do this?

All in all, I found Blood and Chrome to focus on and exaggerate all the wrong things about BSG - turning what was beautiful about the reimagined BSG (subtlety, tension, character development, storytelling) into big snakes, people saying 'frakking' a lot, and a story where greasy, dirty faces substituted for acting. So well intentioned, but so awful.

Okay, there was one thing I liked: Cylons have feelings.

Im a huge fan of Battlestar and I waited eagerly for this, but it turned out to be lots of flash. Gone are the great characters I loved so much, replaced by lots and lots and lots of action. Boom! They're being attacked! Pow! There's Cylons spaceships! Wham! There's ground troups! How can so much happen to one guy in the space of a day? Also, the interior look of the battlestar has changed so much....it's just so many lights and flashy bits and cables and machines moving around. Somebody went way to crazy with the CGI. It's obviously made for sixteen-year-olds. If you like the pacing of Hawaii 50 you'll probably like this.