Movie #15 of 2024:
Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)
Okay, I like this. I don’t love Babylon 5 as a franchise quite yet, but this TV pilot movie is a solid setup for the sci-fi framework to follow. If I were a Warner Brothers executive in the 90s, I likely would have ordered a full series on the potential of this initial release as well. It’s very reminiscent of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to me, which I understand is not necessarily a coincidence — this title aired midway through the debut season of that other one, with its own first season a year later, but they were obviously in development at the exact same time. And since Paramount initially passed on the Babylon 5 pitch before commissioning DS9, I know there’s an argument to be made that the Trek producers might have poached certain elements that they liked without attribution, whether consciously or not.
Or it could just be a fluke. Regardless, both shows are set on a space station outpost where multiple alien cultures clash and political intrigues abound, but as a viewer I watched through Deep Space Nine without any knowledge of Babylon 5, so I’ll try to keep the comparisons out of my reviews on this side now in turn.
On its own terms, this film introduces us to the setting, the factions, and a few figures who will presumably be important going forward, but it’s not always the most elegant in its scripting. There are a lot of scenes where one character tells another something that they logically ought to have already known, serving the transparent function of providing that exposition for the audience’s benefit rather than actually moving the plot along. The acting doesn’t all feel keyed-in either; a few of the performers are either stilted or overly sardonic in their line readings in a way that I hope gets ironed out later on. And the immediate story is pretty bare-bones, concerning an assassination attempt on a newly-arrived ambassador and its subsequent investigation, which doesn’t go anywhere interesting except for temporarily implicating the guy who appears to be our main protagonist. It’s not great science-fiction at this point, but it’s definitely promising for the road ahead.
★★★☆☆
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