Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers: To Live and Die in Starlight

For someone who can come up with the concept of B5, and write most of the episodes, JMS sure can't write a movie to save his life. At a time when the B5 franchise needed a masterpiece, JMS gave us bad rip-offs of his own work. Take "Thirdspace," add some ancient shadow-like enemy and throw in a dash of young James T. Kirk and you basically got this pilot. I'm not sure why JMS threw out such tripe like "The Hand" when he knew that every B5 fan in america would call him out on it, but he did it anyway. All of the reviews, except for those that live only to praise JMS, have said that this "pilot" "telemovie" or what have you, sucks. They are right. Due to the ignorant mismanagement on the part of the Sci-Fi channel, it aired opposite an NFL playoff game. Due to hackneyed writing, however, it virtually sealed the deal of no series.

I love Babylon 5. I have seen every episode of the series and the movies as well--so it's obvious that I really care about this show. Heck, I even saw the spin-off series, CRUSADE--that's how much I love the show!! And, in light of this love, it really hurt to watch such a seriously flawed and inferior product as THE LEGEND OF THE RANGERS. I guess that after having written so much that the series creator, writer and executive producer J. Michael Straczynski finally was due for a fall as this is easily the worst of the Babylon pantheon.

So why was it so bad? Well, the fundamental idea of a new spin-off series wasn't the problem--this movie could have led to a decent series. However, the characters and writing just weren't up to snuff. Particular problems were a very, very predictable plot through at least the first half in which time and again I found myself guessing exactly what would happen next. In fact, my wife and I were both very accurately telling what would happen next because it all seemed so unoriginal and clichéd. Fortunately, it did improve later and I did like the escape pod sequences. In addition, the weapons officer and her gimmicky way of fighting was just embarrassingly bad and silly. She was completely one-dimensional and the fighting sequences made me cringe--they were THAT bad.

So what you have left wasn't without some merit and I guess it is a passable 90 minutes of entertainment--but just barely. My advice is that if you are a Babylon 5 geek (like me), then by all means watch it. Otherwise--skip it and watch the series.

By the way--take a look at all the ratings for this film. Like many popular sci-fi TV shows or movies (such as Star Trek or Star Wars), there are a small number of mindless zombies who declare that EVERY episode and EVERY movie is an artistic masterpiece--giving ALL OF THEM 10s!!! Now if you liked this movie, I have no argument with you. But, to take an obviously flawed movie that is clearly inferior to the previous series and films and STILL give it a 10 is just ludicrous. These zombies, I assume, are like cult members who CANNOT objectively rate anything from the series and think by giving EVERYTHING a 10 that they are somehow "helping" the show or being loyal. I am sure my harsh words will draw many "not helpful" ratings, but I don't care--the casual viewer needs to know that some reviews can't be trusted.

Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers is the second ill-fated attempt to launch a spin-off to the critically acclaimed space saga Babylon 5. However, not only does this telemovie, intended to launch the series, fall short of the precedent set by the epic Babylon 5, it comes off looking worse than Crusade, the original attempt at a B5 spin-off, widely criticised by fans for the network's handling of the show's artistic and storytelling side. Here, it seems that the makers of Legend of the Rangers have managed to screw up all on their own, and the result is a movie that is lacklustre at best and dreadfully appalling at worst.

Legend of the Rangers is set some time after the conclusion of Babylon 5. It deals with a group of Rangers: scouts and warriors drawn from the ranks of member worlds of the broad-reaching Interstellar Alliance. Originally an institution exclusively handled by the Minbari race, it has also been accepting humans (occurring in the Babylon 5 series) and more recently others. The main character is David Martel, a young Ranger struck from ship captain candidacy and facing disciplinary action for breaking one of the Ranger's guiding rules: never break from combat. The fact that he fled only because his ship no longer had weapons capabilities, his captain was dead and he had no chance of winning does not phase his Minbari disciplinarians. He is demoted and a rival Minbari Ranger assumes the post he was to take aboard the newly commissioned Valen, the most advanced ship in the Ranger arsenal. Backed up by his crew and Citizen G'Kar (an oddly un-engaging Andreas Katsulas), he is given command of an old, supposedly haunted patrol boat and sent off as an escort to the Valen on a secret security mission transporting diplomats to a conference.

And that's when things go crazily wrong. The Valen is destroyed by a mysterious new alien race, the diplomats are forced aboard the tiny patrol ship and Martel and his crew have to fight the aliens, find a traitor in their midst and deal with the troubled ghosts of the last crew. Martel solves many of these problems quite simply: all the solutions involve sticking heaps of explosives inside an escape pod and blowing the enemy up when they go to retrieve it. This happens twice in the course of the movie. So much for superior alien intelligence.

Nothing comes off quite right in Legend of the Rangers. The best elements seem mediocre and the worst are laughable. The acting is average, with only Martel and his Minbari 2IC Dulann coming off as likeable characters. The rest come across as narrow stereotypes: quiet Minbari healer, stupid Drazi loader, feisty Narn engineer and, who could forget, the aggressive red-headed weapons officer. In fact, its her role that creates one of the stupidest sequences in the whole movie: her in the 'weapons pod' which suspends her in a holographic representation of her surroundings in which she randomly spins in mid air firing the ships guns by punching and kicking the air causing plasma bursts to erupt from her clenched fists. This is only made more ridiculous by remembering that Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski always prided himself on having realistic technology. Is this the worst idea in a highly billed sci-fi show to date? In short: if it isn't, I deeply fear anything worse than it.

The enemies, an ancient alien order known as `The Hand' don't come off at all either. We are told they are billions of years old, and only their servants show themselves in this movie. Despite their superiority though, their technologically superior ships (which tear the Valen to pieces in seconds) have a really hard time taking out a damaged patrol vessel and its escape pod slinging captain. Their leader, glimpsed in transmissions is hardly menacing: he simply wears a horned hood and speaks in a vaguely legalistic sense. On the whole, these aliens feel like a mix of the Shadows and the Thirdspace aliens from Babylon 5, both of which relied on the exact same premise of ancient evil. The difference: the originals were better.

Even the presence of the charismatic Andreas Katsulas cant save this movie, and for the most part, he looks like he doesn't want to try. No explanation is offered for G'Kar's presence, and he feels like he's only there to bridge the original series and the spin-off and make them feel like a cohesive whole.

In the end, only the visual effects stand out as above-average, and even then we feel uneasy with them. Depictions of Minbar in this movie differ wildly from any place on the planet ever seen before, and while the space scenes are impressive, they're not above anything seen in the B5 telemovies or Crusade.

In the end, Legend of the Rangers comes off as a barely credible mess that lacks the intelligence and characterisation of its predecessor. Its not that character motives are unclear, its that they're too clear, each person so wrapped up in a traditional stereotype they are unlikely to break it. Those B5 fans still looking for a successor after the demise of Crusade will have to keep looking: they wont find it here.

I think people were unfairly harsh with legend of the rangers. It was effectively a pilot and had many kinks to work out but several of the characters were worth exploring further. Some of the actors were quite talented and have had strong performances in the years since, particularly Dean Marshall who many may recognize from the Stargate franchise. Yes it would have needed more refinement to be a full fledged series but it was a decent starting point, for something that will never get to be.

The best thing about B5 was that it was all planned from the beginning : all five seasons. That made it good. That made log story--archs possible. That created wonderful intrigues that could never be concieved in the regular kind of show (read: Star Trek) where the plot is always the same: "bust the alien-of-the-week for the mystery-of-the-week, or defeat the microbe-of-the-week with a stream-of-technobabble".

Rangers seems to be dangerously near falling into this trap. The crew was more Star-Trek-all-american-hotshots than the seasoned, competent people of a B5 crew.

The battle interface was an outright stupid idea. Let's just leave it at that.

The dialog was bad. Good lines were overused, like "we live for the one, we die for the one".

And for the love of all that's good and true... the Rangers are NOT kamikaze pilots! The original rangers were never some suicidal freaks ready to die pointless deaths just to save face. They fought in their own ways, but they were intelligent enough to realise when there was a need for retreat, to return to fight another day.

Marcus was a true ranger. He was a gentleman and a warrior of honor, dedicated to a great philosophy. This new bunch seemed more his opposits than his equals.

They were not rangers. This was not worthy of the great label B5. This is a story that might as well have been stolen from the Star Trek files.

The only thing that I really, really liked was a single line (reference to Lord of the Rings): "We stand on the bridge none may pass".

/Auryn