Babylon 5: The Road Home

A welcome return to B5 for fans, but confusing for newcomers. A bit like an indy band getting back together to do a remix of fan favorites as a teaser for their new album.

The story was classic B5 epic stuff, but found time for some character moments and other stuff fans dig about the franchise. Most of the humor worked, though one Zathras remark felt a bit meta and probably could've been saved for the DVD extras.

The look of the uniforms, environments, etc. Was faithful to that of the original series and its spinoffs. The B5 station, ships, planetary surfaces, etc. Were a solid compromise of the series' CGI and the movie's animated style. Obviously, the animated approach allowed the movie to give the visuals a scale the original TV series couldn't.

It was of course great to hear the voices of Boxleitner et al again, and if I hadn't known better, I'd have thought they used archived audio clips from previous B5 projects for the voices of Franklin, G'Kar, Delenn, Garibaldi, etc.

Like most franchises, B5 has had its ups and downs. The Road Home is a vast improvement over Legend of the Rangers and Lost Tales. Whether the rumored reboot TV series is animated or live action, The Road Home is a fine place to restart.

The history is not bad, and is fun to revisit so many beloved personages.

But the people designing the faces of the personages need to be fired/send to primary school.

I have seen very low budget/amateur films that do way better.

Pity, the rest is not bad - for a not big effort in animation - today you see way, way better, even in medium budget/amateur films.

All in all, the personages get decent-ish dialogues, the story don't broke the lore - you see that so many times these days - and is a pleasure to revisit Babylon 5.

Hope in the future there is more, but please, with more professional animators.

For fans of B5 it's fun to see all of the interesting alternate realities and see old characters again, but the story doesn't make all that much sense and the dialogue is kind of forced a lot of the time. They just jump around a few hypothetical realities with no real rhyme or reason (for most of them, anyways) and eventually the movie decides it's time to stop. The movie has more flashbacks than are necessary, maybe just to pad out the runtime a little bit, since this is a pretty short movie at around 75 minutes.

The updated, higher-fidelity models for shadows, their ships, etc are very cool to see, although the animation falls flat sometimes.

At the end of the day it doesn't add a whole lot to the B5 mythos apart from exploring some alternate realities which were alluded to in the series and potentially setting up a reboot, but it's fun enough to rent for fans of the series.

Overall, _The Road Home_ isn't a bad movie, per se. But it really is just for the fans, relying more on nostalgia for situations from the series than its own merits.

First, the good:

* The voice performances are excellent. Several of the original actors returned to voice their characters, and all of them fell right back into character as if they'd never left. The replacement voice actors for the (sadly) large number of actors who have passed since the show ended do pretty good at imitating the distinct voices of their characters, especially the actors voicing G'Kar, Zathras, and Delenn; while a fan can tell that they're not the original actors, they still convey the expected tone of the characters, and honor the original actors in the process.

* The effects animation, backgrounds, and ship designs are outstanding. Thanks to the advances in technology over the past 25 years, ships look even better here than they did originally. The additional detail on the Shadow ships is especially nice.

Aaaand...the not so good:

* Character design is ATROCIOUS. Most of the characters look almost nothing like their live-action counterparts. The only characters that are instantly identifiable visually are Lyta, Delenn, and Londo, and that's primarily due to the unique look of their hair and costuming, not any facial resemblance. The humans in particular look horrible, with Lochley and Ivanova being easily confused for one another until they speak, and Sinclair identifiable only by context and/or dialogue. Londo looks positively demonic. The designs for the Narns are horrible, barely even resembling Narns at all. It could be passable if there was a clear attempt at stylized designs, but they don't really look stylized, just bad.

* The Shadow character designs are thoroughly cartoonish. The Shadows of _Babylon Park_ look better than these. Every iota of added detail the Shadow ships got was at the expense of detail in the Shadows themselves.

* As bad as the character designs are, the character animation is worse. Stilted, choppy, not smooth in any way. It's the exact opposite of the quality of the effects and ship animations.

* I was particularly dismayed by seeing in the end credits that JMS is the only credited writer, because the writing in this is way below the quality fans expect from him. The story itself is almost entirely nostalgia, not covering any new ground at all in terms of themes and characters. A lot of dialogue is recycled from the show in different contexts, especially poor Zathras, who is reduced to half of his lines being retreads of catchphrases from the show, despite him turning out to be a central character here. Joe, you could have done so much better than this.

* Finally, a problem that even many fans might not notice, but which irked me to no end. The movie starts in the middle of the penultimate episode "Objects at Rest", when John and Delenn are leaving the station to go to Minbar. Two scenes from the episode are recreated: the POV of John and Delenn getting off the transport tube to face the crowd, and the trade of salutes between Sheridan and Lochley. These scenes are recreated faithfully visually, copying the staging, framing, and camera movement. (I noticed this primarily because I had recently rewatched the episode, so it was fresh in my mind.)

For all the faithfulness of the directorial recreations in these two scenes, the content was inexplicably different. In the transport tube scene, everything that happens immediately after the doors open is completely different from what happened in the episode.

For the salute, while the action is the same (aside from an added lame visual joke at the end that completely ruins the mood), the lineup of characters with Lochley in C&C is different for no apparent reason. In the episode, Lochley is surrounded by the "new generation" of B5 leaders: Ta'Lon, Dr. Hobbes, Number One, Zack, Vir, and Lt. Corwin. In the movie, she's surrounded by...a group of unknown, unidentifiable people who are clearly not meant to represent the same characters who were there in the episode.

The reason this bothers me so much is that it's horribly disrespectful to the characters and their actors, all of whom otherwise would not appear in this movie at all. I find it especially disrespectful to Stephen Furst (Vir) and Jeff Conaway (Zack), both of whom were on the show for a long time (Stephen since the very beginning) and have since passed. The likenesses of those characters are as valid to use legally as those of any of the others, so it's doubtful that there were any legal issues causing this. It's baffling and inexplicable. As with the writing, Joe, you could have done better.

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In the end, I can't recommend this movie to anyone who's not a dedicated fan of the show. Casual fans will not appreciate the constant references back to the series, and newcomers will be completely lost. And hardcore fans will be disappointed by the lack of originality. So who exactly was this movie made for?

I think the primary reason this movie got greenlit was as a test product, determining if there was still enough interest in the franchise to justify the reboot that was floated not long ago. If that's true, then fans of the original should definitely buy this movie, to show that there's still interest. But you may not enjoy it.

I was a little apprehensive when I heard the big announcement that it was an animated feature, turns out I needent have worried.

So many franchises are barely recognisable to their original fans. Whether thats for better or worse depends which side of the argument you are on.

But with Straczynski keeping the helm steady, B5 managed to make the jump from live action to animation and still feel like authentic B5, along with providing us an entertaining and enjoyable standalone story as well as a secret door option for a reboot/continuation, without undoing or ruining what came before.

Seeing so many beloved characters back in the screen was heart warming. Knowing exactly how many have been recast because the the actors/actresses died young is heart breaking.

But seeing everyone go around one more time was a genuine treat.