Crusade -- \"War Zone\"
I know there's a Crusade DVD's thread, but I've only seen one episode in the series so I'd rather not have to sift through there and risk having something spoiled for me, so please bear with me.
My Crusade DVD's finally came in and I just got finished watching the first episode: "War Zone."
I'm very sorry to say it, and I don't mean to offend anyone here, but as someone who thinks that the original B5 was the best show in television history, I can definitely see why Crusade didn't last past it's first season.
Now, this is setting all storyline stuff aside. I'm not going to judge the story based on one episode. What I'm talking about here is production.
It all starts with the acting. Yikes. Completely flat and then just flat-out bad. The supporting actors are terrible and not believable.
From there comes the graphics. For a show that came out years after the original B5, the graphics seem to have gone backwards. The ships fighting in space look great, everything else looks straight out of the 70's. Most of the CG of buildings, people on planets, etc looks like a cartoon, so when they put a real live flesh person in the foreground the two just contradict each other so badly and the borders between the two stand out like an orange street cone in a grassy field. Everything just looks so fake, whereas in the original everything looked so immersive.
Worst of all is the music. Now I'm assuming that the music isn't composed by the same person as the original B5. This is very disheartening since the music in the original B5 was so spectacular, and here we have music that seems to have every score composed with a background sound that I can only describe as sounding like Mexican Maracas. Hardly dramatic and it makes taking the dramatic scenes in a serious manner a chore.
Put all this together, and it just doesn't feel right. Some simple examples from "War Zone": When the Earth Destroyer chasing the Drakh ship sends out the distress signal, everyone seems to be sitting around talking casually, there's no sense of urgency, then the ship blows up? Me and my girlfriend were both kind of like "what the heck" when the ship blew because none of the actors were conveying any emotion about the fact that they were about to die.
A little bit later, someone on the IPX expedition takes a shuttle to the Drakh crash site and the Drakh begins firing on him. Before blowing up he manages to bore out "I'm being fired upon, repeat I'm under attack, etc etc" in a tone that can only be described as the same way someone would sit at a coffee table and tell their friend Bob about their day at the office. The Mexican Maracas in the background certainly don't make it any more dramatic.
As a whole it just seems so shallow, lacking any depth or emotion whatsoever. And of the few attempts to convey emotion, they're done so poorly that you have to hold back the laughter.
Again, this isn't meant to start some big arguements, I haven't read the other Crusade thread because I didn't want the story spoiled, so I don't know if others feel this way as well or if I'm just basically elicitting a slew of attacks against me by posting this. When I watched the original B5 DVD's I couldn't wait to start up the next one after one of them finished, and me and my girlfriend often ended up watching 5 of them in one night, starting from the very beginning. At the end of this episode we both found ourselves bored and uninvolved after only one episode, with no real desire to watch the next one.
It had nothing to do with the story. I guess it just couldn't live up to the lofty expectations I have for anything with the "B5" tag to it, although I really don't think I'd watch this were it uninvolved with B5 and hence didn't have any expectations anyway.
I know there's a Crusade DVD's thread, but I've only seen one episode in the series so I'd rather not have to sift through there and risk having something spoiled for me, so please bear with me.
My Crusade DVD's finally came in and I just got finished watching the first episode: "War Zone."
I'm very sorry to say it, and I don't mean to offend anyone here, but as someone who thinks that the original B5 was the best show in television history, I can definitely see why Crusade didn't last past it's first season.
Now, this is setting all storyline stuff aside. I'm not going to judge the story based on one episode. What I'm talking about here is production.
It all starts with the acting. Yikes. Completely flat and then just flat-out bad. The supporting actors are terrible and not believable.
From there comes the graphics. For a show that came out years after the original B5, the graphics seem to have gone backwards. The ships fighting in space look great, everything else looks straight out of the 70's. Most of the CG of buildings, people on planets, etc looks like a cartoon, so when they put a real live flesh person in the foreground the two just contradict each other so badly and the borders between the two stand out like an orange street cone in a grassy field. Everything just looks so fake, whereas in the original everything looked so immersive.
Worst of all is the music. Now I'm assuming that the music isn't composed by the same person as the original B5. This is very disheartening since the music in the original B5 was so spectacular, and here we have music that seems to have every score composed with a background sound that I can only describe as sounding like Mexican Maracas. Hardly dramatic and it makes taking the dramatic scenes in a serious manner a chore.
Put all this together, and it just doesn't feel right. Some simple examples from "War Zone": When the Earth Destroyer chasing the Drakh ship sends out the distress signal, everyone seems to be sitting around talking casually, there's no sense of urgency, then the ship blows up? Me and my girlfriend were both kind of like "what the heck" when the ship blew because none of the actors were conveying any emotion about the fact that they were about to die.
A little bit later, someone on the IPX expedition takes a shuttle to the Drakh crash site and the Drakh begins firing on him. Before blowing up he manages to bore out "I'm being fired upon, repeat I'm under attack, etc etc" in a tone that can only be described as the same way someone would sit at a coffee table and tell their friend Bob about their day at the office. The Mexican Maracas in the background certainly don't make it any more dramatic.
As a whole it just seems so shallow, lacking any depth or emotion whatsoever. And of the few attempts to convey emotion, they're done so poorly that you have to hold back the laughter.
Again, this isn't meant to start some big arguements, I haven't read the other Crusade thread because I didn't want the story spoiled, so I don't know if others feel this way as well or if I'm just basically elicitting a slew of attacks against me by posting this. When I watched the original B5 DVD's I couldn't wait to start up the next one after one of them finished, and me and my girlfriend often ended up watching 5 of them in one night, starting from the very beginning. At the end of this episode we both found ourselves bored and uninvolved after only one episode, with no real desire to watch the next one.
It had nothing to do with the story. I guess it just couldn't live up to the lofty expectations I have for anything with the "B5" tag to it, although I really don't think I'd watch this were it uninvolved with B5 and hence didn't have any expectations anyway.
