Battlestar Galactica

I'm not certain the Battlestar Galactica miniseries on Sci Fi was necessarily better than the original, as some reviews said -- after all, it was a different time, and a different focus, with different production values and different aims in telling the story -- but it was quite good.

I don't think you can necessarily compare the two, actually, for just those reasons. They were telling sort of the same story, set in sort of the same universe, but they took those familiar beginnings and went another way with them.

I suppose I should clarify that -- I tend to prefer remakes where they do that. Patrick was really into the remake of The Parent Trap a few years ago, with Lindsay Lohan before she was all famous and, you know, singing, like the rest of the teenyboppers, and that was exactly what I liked about it. It's one thing to take the old script and refilm it...it's entirely another to tell a similar story with the same base premise.

Anyway, I just finished watching the first episode of the actual series, "33," and I have to say -- it was very well done. I especially like the way they film it...I don't know the official term, but it seems raw...kind of gritty. The space battles especially (I noticed this in the miniseries too) are intentionally jerky, as though we're seeing through the lens of a newscamera as they struggle to keep up wtih unpredictable action. I think it adds a lot to the tone of the overall series. Whether they keep up with that, of course, remains to be seen.

However, I must say, I don't think humans can actually reasonably go that long without sleep without starting to hallucinate and do other bad things. 131 hours is something like 6 days or so, right? Yow....