Last night’s movie: Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers

J. Michael Straczynski delivered a stunning and original vision in the late TV series Babylon 5. He felt five years, plus a couple of movies, was enough to tell the stories of that particular set of characters. So he moved on to a different aspect of his creation in the series Crusaders, which went nowhere fast. Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers is an attempt to recapture the magic of the original but at a different level; this movie is a pilot for a proposed series.

B5 was very political with a high level military component. Heck, the lead character was commander of a small world at the beginning of the series, leader of a rebellion against a dictatorship on Earth, and president of an interstellar alliance at the end. The connecting character to Rangers is G’Kar, a Narn, who is an ambassador for the Alliance now, although he was a leader of the Narns in B5. In Rangers we are going to follow a somewhat tarnished starship captain and a misfit crew. The Rangers, who played a key role in B5’s war against the Vorlons, are a 1,000 year old group of interstellar, well, cops.

In this movie, we meet Captain Dylan Neal and his crew as they disgrace themselves by running from a suicidal battle. As the saying goes, “We live for the one, we die for the one.” And these guys didn’t die. Actually I thought this was a logical weak spot since no military organization, at least that I know of, can afford to have highly trained, expensively equipped troops and officers throw themselves away in unwinnable situations. Still, they make it back home and are almost drummed out of the corps until G’Kar intervenes. Given an old, haunted ship, the crew head out on what looks like a milk run.

Of course the trip turns bad, we meet (at a distance) some of the puppets of the immensely evil bad race which apparently will be the villains should this be picked up as a series. Here is another complaint: Why would a race that is so ancient as The Hand and so powerful want to destroy everything? In B5 the Shadows at first seemed like a similarly inexplicable group of old baddies until we learned that they had a philosophy that said conflict breeds advance. I expect finding out what is guiding The Hand will come out eventually but for now it just makes them look two dimensional.

Overall I enjoyed the show and would probably watch if it turns into a series. The crew compliment and interviews with Straczynski show that this is set up differently than a Star Trek. Humans are only part of the mix, not the whole story. And Straczynski has a way with visuals that is terrific.