Review for Babylon 5: The Movie Collection

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Introduction

It’s not the movie collection of course. After all, it’s missing The Gathering, In The Beginning, The Legend of the Rangers, and The Lost Tales, you’ll find them elsewhere, separately in the big B5 box. But this boxset within a box collects three of the Babylon 5 movies, Thirdspace, The River of Souls, and A Call to Arms. That’s one of the drawbacks of creating a heavily serialised story, it becomes harder to find a place within the narrative to go the full Star Trek and just do something standalone. These spin-off movies, or at least two of them offer that chance, just 90 minutes to tell a story in the Babylon 5 universe that needn’t be connected to the big picture. The creators of Babylon 5 got that opportunity after season 4, as well as a reprieve from cancellation, when production moved from Warners to TNT. Thirdspace and River of Souls function as standalone stories, but A Call to Arms is actually a prequel/pilot to the Crusade spin-off.


Thirdspace

The year is 2261, the Shadow War has just ended, the battle for Earth is yet to begin, and Michael Garibaldi has just quit as security chief of Babylon 5 (You’ve just watched episode 8 of Season 4 if you’re being all chronological). Babylon 5’s Starfury squadrons are flying missions against raiders to protect valuable shipping. It’s on the way back from one such mission that Ivanova’s squadron discovers a mysterious alien artefact, hidden in hyperspace. The squadron tow it back for further analysis, which is when telepath Lyta Alexander starts having flashes and hallucinations of something ominous. Scientists think that it’s an advanced form of jump gate, one that reached beyond hyperspace into what they dub Thirdspace. They posit that access to Thirdspace will revolutionise interstellar travel, alter the balance of power. They have no idea that there is something already in Thirdspace and it wants out.


The River of Souls

It’s been six months since Sheridan and Delenn departed Babylon 5 for Minbar, six months of relative peace and quiet on the station. Then the head of Edgars Industries pays a visit. Michael Garibaldi is there to meet an employee, to ascertain whether Dr Robert Bryson’s archaeological research is worth continuing to fund. Bryson’s field of expertise is the search for immortality, the secret of eternal life, which isn’t quite as outlandish as it seems in a universe which has seen the Vorlons, Shadows and First Ones. Bryson might just have made a breakthrough, or he might just have made a big mistake in acquiring one of the Soul Hunters’ orbs, and the Soul Hunters want it back. If that isn’t bad enough, the particular souls in this orb are in a bad mood, and they’re looking for a way out and revenge. That isn’t the worst of it for station commander Elizabeth Lochley. Some idiot has just gone and opened up a holo-brothel on the station.


A Call to Arms

Six years later, President Sheridan is hitching a lift with Garibaldi to inspect the pride of the IA fleet, the newly constructed Excalibur and Victory starships. It’s a bad time for the president of the Interstellar Alliance to start having strange dreams, and an even worse time for him to start following the message within. For the dreams have been sent by the technomage Galen, and he warns of an oncoming Drakh threat, a threat targeted at Earth itself. And Sheridan is the only one who can stop it. Actually there are four who can stop it, Sheridan, a Drazi trader, an alien thief, and a captain in Earthforce. All four are drawn by Galen’s vision to Babylon 5, but when Sheridan gets there, it seems only three of them have turned up.

Picture

The Babylon 5 movies have had the same treatment as the series, the original 4:3 transfer broadened out to a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer. You have clear and sharp live action film elements, albeit occasionally afflicted by print damage and minor scratches. The space effects shots are cropped and zoomed from the video masters, and any live action shot with effects is also going to be cropped and zoomed, as are the credit sequences, and crossfades between live action and effects. The movie of the week scope allows for more extravagant special effects work, but other than that it is little changed from the series for all three films. A Call to Arms has an upgrade in the effects, with the perennial doubling of polygon counts in ship designs joined by new jump gate effects, all no doubt looking forward to the Crusade series.

Sound

You get DD 5.1 Surround English, and German, alongside 2.0 Surround French, with plenty of subtitles. Just as with the television show, the movies were originally broadcast in stereo, so the surround doesn’t offer much more than that in the way of discreet placement of effects and action. But still, the general experience is quite immersive, and enjoyable. The dialogue is mostly clear, although volume levels are low. An occasional flick on of the subtitles might be required. Christopher Franke maintains the show’s style, one of symphonic electronica. Once again, A Call to Arms is different with an atonal, dissonant soundtrack from Evan H. Chen.

Extras

The discs boot to static menus.

All three films get short introductions, around 5 minutes from J. Michael Straczynski, select cast and crew members.


All three films also get commentaries. Thirdspace gets one from director Jesus Salvador Trevino, and stars Bruce Boxleitner, Stephen Furst, Jeff Conaway, and Patricia Tallman. The River of Souls gets one from director Janet Greek, J.Michael Straczynski, and Tracy Scoggins. A Call to Arms gets its commentary from J. Michael Straczynski and director Michael Vejar.

Also on the A Call to Arms disc is the Babylon 5: Creating the Future featurette, which lasts 8:38 and looks at the production design of the show.

Conclusion

Thirdspace

I actually watched Thirdspace on rental VHS before Channel 4 broadcast it, but I haven’t re-watched it since the late nineties. The reason why is obvious. Thirdspace is pretty bad. J. Michael Straczynski wanted to tell a sci-fi horror set in the B5 universe, and this is what we got, a pseudo-spooky tale of a weird giant space gizmo driving people crazy, before powering up and unleashing a horde of life-hating aliens for a whopping great battle sequence. Thirdspace follows the rules of any run of the mill Star Trek episode in that there are no consequences following the end of the story, and everything resets. That’s okay in Star Trek, but with Babylon 5 predicated on consequences, and the characters getting pretty crazy, with the station turning into a veritable battleground at points, the fact that there are no lasting consequences is a problem. It makes Thirdspace not fit in, and may be the reason why River of Souls is set after the series.


The second thing is that the story is pretty dull. It almost feels like a retread of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, albeit with lots of fighting, and with parts of the narrative set in a telepathic mindscape, lacking tangibility. The final issue is that the Babylon 5 characters that I do love, G’Kar, Garibaldi, and Londo, just aren’t in the story. This one’s more about Sheridan, Lyta, Ivanova, and Zack Allen, and other than a couple of scenes (Zack and Lyta in a lift, Ivanova wondering how many scientists she can kill), the character arcs in this story lack fizz.


As I’ve re-watched the Babylon 5 series up to this point, I’ve perked up with each episode, got drawn into, and invested in the story and the characters. It’s been a fantastic ride to where I am at the time of writing, in the middle of Season 4, but Thirdspace put me to sleep. It’s amazing that they managed to get funding for more movies.

5/10


The River of Souls

This is much better. The River of Souls is an interesting, and entertaining story set in the Babylon 5 Universe, expanding on a story thread that was briefly toyed with in Season 1, and gets developed in a fascinating way here. It’s well paced, has a really decent sci-fi concept, and it also has a solid mix of comedy and drama to keep it engaging. There was no nodding off as there was when I watched Thirdspace. Also set after the series proper, it works better as a standalone piece, with no ongoing story arcs to keep in mind.


What surprises me most about The River of Souls is that the central character in this story, Elizabeth Lochley really does work well, engaging and likeable, and with far more of a personality than she had in the series proper. With much of the cast now departed, and the story really only holding onto Lochley, Garibaldi, Zach Allen and Corwyn from the original characters, there’s less of a need to divvy up screen time, and the story gets much better definition here.


The Soul Hunters were aliens that went around the universe, harvesting souls at the moment of death to prevent them vanishing into nothingness, following their religious mission with an unyielding fervour. Naturally the questions arise about the definition of a soul, the existence of an afterlife, and how the Soul Hunters beliefs conflict with those of everyone else. A Buddhist hoping for reincarnation and eventual Nirvana might not take kindly to spending eternity in an orb. River of Souls goes one step further and asks what happens when the Soul Hunters make a mistake. It’s a good idea to explore in science fiction, and this movie does an intriguing job with it. It also gets solid support from guest stars Ian McShane and Martin Sheen.

8/10


A Call to Arms

The Call to Arms movie has to walk that familiar tightrope every spin-off pilot has to walk, balancing the familiar old property while setting things off with the new. This film keeps the balance firmly tilted towards Babylon 5, introducing just a couple of the new characters, before setting things up for the new Crusade series to pick up and run with. This is very much John Sheridan’s story with a handful of familiar characters such as Garibaldi, Lochley, and Zack Allen, and it’s once again centred on Babylon 5. The biggest ‘star’ from the Crusade series in this movie is actually the hero ship, Excalibur, although the technomage Galen makes an impressive impact here.


A Call to Arms is an effective piece of entertainment certainly. You can’t go wrong with a doomsday plot, and a battle against the odds. The Drakh have their black hearts set on revenge against the race that defeated their masters, the Shadows, and they mean to strike at Earth directly. It falls to Sheridan to once again rise to the challenge, although the means in which he learns of the threat, and with which he is led to his new allies is rather esoteric, all done to build up the technomage character. The Technomages made a brief, but tantalising appearance during the B5 series, beings that embodied the Clarke-ism, of any technology sufficiently advanced appearing as magic, and just as with the Soul Hunters of River of Souls, they get expounded on and further developed here.


It is an adventure movie, a quest movie, taking the audience from A to B to C alongside the characters as they try and unravel the mystery of the dreams, uncover the Drakh plot, and do the best that they can to counter it. As a result, it seems the characters tend to get short shrift, and appear at the mercy of the narrative. As I’m on a Babylon 5 kick at this time, I’m also revisiting the novels, and Garibaldi gets a lot of choice scenes in the Call to Arms tie-in novel that aren’t in the final film. The same is true for the other characters as well, and the lack of character focus in the film is detrimental. I certainly didn’t engage with the movie in the same way I did with River of Souls. But A Call to Arms is watchable enough.

7/10