I liked Legend of the Rangers and would have liked to see more of those characters. Some fans tend to get hung up on a few flaws and dismiss it completely. As a pilot, I thought it far surpassed 'The Gathering'.
And I'd miss this thread if it went away, too.
Jan
That's pretty much my feeling too. There are some rather significant flaws, but at least there's no gorilla bar tender.
Without spoiling anything, from what I've read over the years I think what some fans get bent out of shape over boils down to three basic things: -
1) The dialogue: For the new characters tends to be a little more verbose than is really necessary, which is compounded by what appears to be a few cases of miscasting (or possibly the result of poor chemistry and/or rehearsal time)
2) The effects: while the quality of the effects are good (hyperspace has never looked better) I gather there were some problems with the old assets that left them with a limited amount of models to work with, as a result the air traffic over Tuzenor appears to consist entierly of White Stars and massively up-scaled Nials (Minbari fighters) that fly backwards. However, that only accounts for a few shots in the whole movie. Oh and for some bizarre reason that even one of the CG artists was confused about, a certain planet that a certain blue space station normally orbits is missing from the final shot.
3) The weapons pod: without spoiling too much, there's this bit where a character operates the ship's weapons are operated from a null gravity sphere with an all-round holographic display. From what I gather the initial concept was meant to have the operator fire the weapons in a calm, almost Zen like manner. In stead what they shot was a very sweaty woman beating her fists into thin air and grunting a lot. Which, aside from looking a little silly, didn't give one the impression of an efficient targeting system, especially not one designed for Minbari use. Probably one of those things that looked good on paper, sounded like a good idea at the time but fell a little flat in execution. Though again, it's only a few scenes in the whole film and it's not
THAT bad.
On the positive side the two primary leads (the captain and xo) are well cast and have some very good chemistry, the plot had a lot of promise that touches on some of the legacy from the old series (those wacky first ones again!) I think the thing that you need to remind yourself while watching is that 'To Live and Die in Starlight' was supposed to be a pilot, not a movie in it's own right so there's allot of threads that never get paid off since that was supposed to come later. Like the "hole in your mind" bit from 'The Gathering', there are plenty of seeds planted that would have grown over time, had ther series been picked up.
Then there is of course the final appearance - ever - of G'Kar. That alone to me is worth the price of purchase.
