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

I read what D-J-Phillips wrote and I have to agree with him This pilot is not that bad, and actually let me dare say that David Martail has a huge potential to be the next John Sheridan, he even shines more confidence than Mathew Gorden in Crusade, B5 needs more fans to support any new production that comes, the legend of the rangers can be a good pilot for something better, this new aliens (the hand) need not to be another shadow, may be the story will twist and they end up to be bluffing, or that new race has found those old ships and is using them to frighten everyone else.

I always said that if B5 is to be revived then new story lines have to be developed and they need not be around the B5 universe itself, give the station a rest, and explore new options.

It is as londo said "a very big universe" and lots can be discovered and done

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.

Rangers !? These people are cowboys. Gone is the intelligent, cool, skilled ranger. In the original series Rangers were a highly trained group of multi-talented people, kind of like a special forces unit. They were trained in Minbari ways, had a lot of personal control and subtlety was an important part of the way they worked. This group of rangers seems to have practically no knowledge of Mimbari ways, little self control, and no subtlety.

The ship is ridiculous. The Whitestar ships were beautiful and elegant. This one is poorly lit and silly. Some of the control stations are in hallways -- that's where you want crucial system controls -- in the hallway so the operators can block people rushing from one station to another. That way they can get blocked when something hits the ship and all the actors have to do the old "Star Trek" "something hit the ship boogie" (yes, they do resort to that in this movie). The ship is constantly losing weapons systems. It seems like their ships should be better equipped than that, but then again, if they didn't keep losing weapons there would be no other way to make the "plot" work. With properly working weapons it would be a half hour movie !

I am an avid fan of Babylon 5. I love the series and all the other movies. This movie is nowhere close to the same quality. The acting is stilted, the characters are shallow and the special effects are lame (the lady "punching" the projectiles is really funny).

This movie has been promoted for months, yet it has the feel of a movie that they didn't have enough time or money to do properly.

Oh Marcus, we miss you!

This film's quality should not be linked to the rest of the Babylon5 universe. It's probably awful for more than 100 reasons, but i'll just list the first 3 that come to mind...

1-Cast ) The acting or characters are uninteresting. There is nothing new here at all. The crew are the usual suspects in terms of mixed species, colors, ocupations. The captain reminds me of the lead guy in farscape, he's so boring. I think i'd rather see really bad acting just so I have something to laugh at.

2-Plot ) JMS is a master of writing story arcs. Building upto episodes that you think are gonna be great, and they are better than you hoped. Even a quality show like SG1 has really bum climax'. I can't think of a single dissapointment in the plots in b5. Unfortunatly this movie raises the bar. It kinda says that all that happened in b5 was big, but this is bigger! *accompanied by the sound of a whoopie cusion deflating*

3-Ships )Starship design is a highly personal thing. Some people love the enterprise D, some people hate it and love the enterprise E. I ain't met anyone that likes the ships in this film though. You can probably lend the blame to Warner Brothers for loosing the ship models, but they are releasing the DVD's and I want to get rid of the Crusade VHS yucky format too so I gotta be nice to them. Blame sierra even tho they supplied their game project files, cause they didn't finish that b5 game due to being gimped.

Any B5 fans out there that havent seen this film, I advise caution...

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