Dynamic Subspace » BSG

Battlestar Galactica Reboot Crowdsourced

Jason Ellis — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:51:05 +0000

The news last week that Universal has tapped Bryan Singer to helm a box office reboot of Battlestar Galactica struck me as a strange notion. The Sci-Fi Channel four season BSG series just ended. The series as a whole has a dedicated and adoring following. And to top it all off, there is a BSG narrative filler movie in the works with most of the principle cast, and the prequel series Caprica in production.

Now, the studio wants to reinvent the wheel by producing a new BSG story line with a big-name director/producer that doesn’t connect to David Eick and Ronald D. Moore’s improvement on Glen Larson’s original concept. I can understand how a movie studio would want to cash in on a hot property. However, I believe that there is more to this announcement, and only time will tell to what extent my hunch is true.

I suspect that this announcement is simply the studio’s crowdsourcing its marketing research. Immediately following the announcement, many folks (myself included) online immediately put fingers to keys to decry or question the reasoning behind this new project. A dedicated support staff with the right tools could easily chart and study the responses to this “proposed” project through active blogging, commenting, and Twittering. Obviously, any movie scale project needs to appeal to a wider audience than the SF crowd to make as much money as the studios executives desire (which is a fault in the current movie production and distribution system than a universal rule), but the online debate regarding a project such as this could give producers the information to either kill or further the project internally.

I do not believe that this second BSG reboot is the first project to be silently crowdsourced in this manner. In recent years, there have been a number of films announced that eventually fall into “development hell,” or even worse, a bottomless abyss following a hot flurry of blogosphere talk regarding how bad or undesirable a film may be. That being said, I also do not believe that studios may choose exclusively to listen to fandom prior to greenlighting a project (the majority of Eddie Murphy films are a case in point). I think it just bears repeating that studios are about exploitation, and that the possibility of crowdsourced movie development is a form of exploitation of the fan community most likely to eventually pay to see the films. However, this exploitation does give the community a greater voice in what is produced for them to see in theaters, but at the cost of not knowing without a doubt that their voices may in part determine what makes it way to the screen.

I am curious to see how this project develops following the recent posts around the web about how misguided Universal is. Perhaps the project will disappear, or the studio will claim that it was viral marketing for something else. Or, the studio will proceed without heeding the clamoring yells beneath its dingy tower.

Posted in Science Fiction Tagged: BSG, crowdsourced

Terminator Salvation and Battlestar Galactica

Jason Ellis — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:57:12 +0000

I spent part of today catching up the last part of Battlestar Galactica Season 4, and I saw Terminator Salvation this evening with Yufang. I learned in BSG today that the Thirteenth Tribe were actually Cylons–skeletons, bodies, and all. In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright is constructed in the other direction than Terminator 3′s Terminatrix–Marcus is the fusion of man and machine. However, Marcus was once a murderer–the unconscionable, monstrous, the inhuman. Given his second chance, he becomes human, or at least what we may consider the human ideal–altruistic, helpful, and self-sacrificing. Thus, the machine makes the man more human. However, throughout Terminator Salvation and BSG, I’m reading a shift in the concern about the machinic appropriation of the human. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Terminator and T2 films, and older SF, the fear was only about the surface, about the appearance of human mapped or stretched over a cold, metallic infrastructure. Now, it seems like the concern has more to do with organs and the organic. Where does this anxiety over our bodies and the tissues that make them work and function come from? Obviously, the fear of losing human-ness to the machine is rooted in the emergence and subsequent evolution of anxieties following the integration of humans into the great machine and system of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps following the turn of the century into the 2000s, the organic (i.e., genetics) meshes with the machine (i.e., AI representing the networked/computerized landscape of the now). What this might mean for future SF and our engagement with organic and machinic technologies I do not know. However, I am eager to discover where this future might lead.

Posted in Movies, Review, Science Fiction Tagged: androids, BSG, humanity, machines, mcg, organs, terminator

Battlestar Galactica Season 4 Updates

Jason Ellis — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:30:18 +0000

Galactica Station reports that the date for the BSG Season 4 premiere is set for April 4, 2008. Read more here.

Entertainment Weekly is running a “Last Supper” photo of the BSG Season 4 cast. There is an interactive version with hints about the upcoming final season available on the EW website here. A high resolution version is also available on Flickr here.

The beginning of the end approaches!