The Medium is Not Enough

When Battlestar Galactica first arrived on our TV screens, it was a surprise. It took a really bad old show that for some reason we all fondly remembered from our childhoods and turned it into a really good show that took military authenticity and married it with misery, dystopia and authentic human relationships.

But as time went on, the clean, uncluttered hardness of BSG got a little dulled both by the weight of its own mythology and the occasional lapse into dramatic cliché. That’s not to say it was bad – it was still one of the best shows on TV. It was just up its own arse a little bit.

Razor, an almost direct-to-DVD movie that aired on the SciFi channel over the weekend, is a distillation of the good and the bad of BSG. On the one hand, it’s tense, well acted, gritty and has fantastic effects. On the other, it’s more than a little bit pretentious, suffers from a few hackneyed plot strands and has yet more heavyweight mythology bundled on top.

Continue reading “Review: Battlestar Galactica – Razor”