If the proposed big-screen remake/reboot of the original “Battlestar Galactica” is going to be successful, actor Richard Hatch thinks producers should take a page from the “Star Trek” playbook.
Talking to Moviehole, Hatch said the new movie “Should go further back like ‘Star Trek'” in terms of the setting for the film. With Trek, says Hatch, it “was still the characters we love, but they went back twenty…thirty… years to when they were just kids. But with ‘Battlestar;, they’re just going to go back to the same timeframe we saw in the series’ and recast those roles. I don’t think ;Star Trek’ would’ve been successful if they had recast the ‘Star Trek; characters at the same age as they were in the previous films. By going back, it gave that film a window so fans could expect a change of cast.”
Hatch went on to say that he believes Paramount has a better grasp on the fandom of “Trek” than Universal does for “Battlestar.” He said that he hopes Universal finds the write behind-the-scenes staff for the movie–those who respect what the original series was but also breathe some fresh life into the series.
“”I recently saw the original Battlestar movie on the IMAX screen, as part of the 25th anniversary convention, and let me tell you, it was born for the IMAX!” he exclaimed “Even with the bad matte paintings on the original, it still looked amazing on the big screen! If they did it today, a full-blown movie of Battlestar, I think it would be amazing… so long as whoever does it understands the characters, the heart & soul, and mythology of it. I just hope they really get it.”
What he doesn’t want it a movie along the lines of this summer’s latest installment in the “Terminator” franchise.
“I was so disappointed, Hatch said. “Based on the cast they have in there, I thought it was going to be really good but… they just lost…the whole thing. If I was an actor of Christian Bale’s calibre, would you not look at that script and say ‘there’s something wrong here?”
And fans of the Ron Moore version shouldn’t lose hope that the upcoming TV movie, “The Plan” will be the last we see of that version. Hatch believes that if the economic factors warrant more of the new “Galactica,” there will be more–whether it be standalone films or a feature film.
“”It’s never the end if fans want more. It’s a money game. If they realize people want more, believe me, they’ll make more of them – they did it with ‘Babylon 5’, and a number of other sci-fi shows,” he said. “‘Battlestar’ is not done yet, it’s just a question of how and when it’ll come back.”
I would love to see the Ron Moore version make its way into book format. I’m a reader and love the Star Trek novels as well as the Star Wars Expanded Universe books and I think there is just an incredible amount of potential for a BSG genre of books – if they can find the right writers to pull it off…
fapfapfapfapfap…..
Oh God…. I have never agreed with Richard Hatch more than I do now!
If Universal tries to pull of a movie remake of the original series with Starbuck as a guy, Cylons still just toasters, no skin jobs and the Quorum as a bunch of mystics then this is gonna be really hard to swallow and just really odd. It would be unprecedented IMO.
A time shift has to play into this. But even a time shift is tough since the new series blocked in the invasion to earth. The new movie could be about the Cylon wars before the truce but then again the big difference is the the Ron Moore version has the planets (colonies) in place and the old Glenn A Larson version, which was MUCH shorter, didn’t have much of a detailed back story and was just basically a rag-tag fleet of ships looking for earth.
Battlestar Wiki has reported that Brian Singer (Xmen) is on board and the slate is clean and they are at ground zero. So do we get a remake, a companion piece to the much more successful reimagined Ron Moore series, or something completely new altogether.
The should have just brought Moore in at the onset so he could have gone to town. The only problem with BSG is that from the original series the entire goal, thesis, premise or whatever you want to call it was to reach earth. The recent series accomplished that feat. Are we going to focus in on more specific time sequences like a smaller story arc that resides inside the scheme of the RDM vision? Maybe a reunion happens and everyone that departed to all corners of Earth are gathered up to fight the Cylons again. After all, All this has happened before, and it will happen again.