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Battlestar Galactica: (Richard Gibbs) When the original
Battlestar Galactica was shown for one doomed season in 1978-1979, it
was a clear reaction to biblical space opera that had so overwhelmingly
impressed audiences in
Star Wars the year before. The show was
cancelled partly because of its own cheesiness, partly because of high
production costs per episode, and partly for half a dozen other various
reasons, and die-hard fans of that series have hoped for years of a
reintroduction of
Battlestar Galactica in the same way that
Star
Trek was similarly resurrected on television. Even original production
and cast members lobbied for years to give the show a second chance.
Finally, in 2003, the Sci-Fi Channel, with a few impressive films under its
belt (including resounding successes for their
Dune adaptations) took
on the challenge of bringing
Battlestar Galactica back to life in a
three-hour miniseries and subsequent series. This new series comes at the
25th anniversary of the original show and its celebratory, complete release
on DVD. When you're dealing with something as cultish as this, however, it's
hard to satisfy everybody, and through the tinkering of the show's basic
plot, characters, and style by director Michael Rymer and writer Ronald
Moore, the show has managed to become a major annoyance for those die-hard
Battlestar Galactica fans. The primary characters have been
completely switched around in gender, ethnicity, and personality, with the
male Starbuck character now, for instance, a rebellious female character.
The direction of the show has completely lost the swashbuckling space opera
attitude and opted for more of a realistic, documentary approach. Included
in this change is the use of hand-held cameras that swoosh around and around
characters from all sides and always wiggling around in the fashion that
E.R. made so famous in the 1990's. The score would be a 180-degree
turn from Stu Phillips' original brassy fanfares, with former Oingo Boingo
member Richard Gibbs continuing a collaboration with the director that
includes
Queen of the Damned. As with many such productions, Gibbs
and his assistants had an insanely short period of time in which to complete
the score for over two hours of spotted material in the film.
Naturally, Gibbs does express his disappointment in not
being able to write a huge, swashbuckling score. His attempts to adapt
Phillips' original theme were unfruitful and eventually abandoned. He did,
however, capture the essence of the documentary in many of the ways that the
director had requested. The score is foreign and distant in sound and style,
paying no attention to brass instruments whatsoever, and in the same sort of
meandering fashion, Gibb's score will bring back memories of Grame Revell's
Dune score for the Sci-Fi channel's first entry in that series. Like
the Revell, score, however, Gibbs'
Battlestar Galactica is so vastly
different from the original show that whether you like it or not will depend
solely on how attached you are to the premise of the original show (and
perhaps the genre of fantasy overall). The Sci-fi Channel did a 180 degree
turn with
Children of Dune and rectified that series' musical
approach with a wildly popular, hugely orchestral score, and the concept of
the Middle-Eastern female vocal in a fantasy film (a highlight of that film)
certainly got attached to
Battlestar Galactica as well. It is the
prominence of these vocals that makes Gibbs' score schizophrenic and
difficult to understand. On one hand, the noble themes are gone and the
action sequences are scored with tapping and beating percussion. Much of the
larger, active shots are scored in the self-described "minimalist" style (in
the words of the composer and director), and yet whenever the elements of
humanity come into play, Gibbs falls right back into that conventional style
of flowing strings, other-worldly electronics, and female vocals (complete
with a duduk sound) that are absolute stereotypes of modern science fiction
music. Thus, the two kinds of music you hear in this score (and really, you
get either the soft and lyrical vocals and strings or the harsh, lonely
percussion --there's little middle ground) have nothing in common. One plays
to the director's documentary style while the other tries to appease the
expectations of audiences who may watch this show and say "what the
heck?"... In the end, the hour-long album includes a few very enjoyable cues
of these vocals and strings ("To Kiss or Not to Kiss," "The Lottery
Ticket"), but the extended battle sequences are painful to tolerate because
of their stark construction. No matter where you fall on the argument of
whether this new
Battlestar Galactica is a travesty or not, the score
on album is stuck halfway between the originality of the new, and
stereotypes that mirror the old, and it can make for a very disjointed
listen.
***
The insert includes extensive information about the score and film by the composer and director. It has an overwhelmingly bad smell, for some reason...
