It was really good to be back in the old place. For the story and dialog, it had a bit of a crossover kind of vibe, all the characters were heightened versions of themselves. I can see how it could be intended to be a decent "taster" for the series for new people, but I also see the argument that it bounces around a lot and if you aren't inclined to go with the flow, that could be off-putting if you can't immediately zoom in on the context (or if you're providing too much context on your own; two different places in the story I was wondering about Anna Sheridan). I was a little nervous about the spoilers I saw about the movie ending in an alternate timeline; I'd thought that meant Sheridan didn't end up back home, but he did, and that's nice. The movie slots in pretty cleanly in a chronological watch-through (unlike, say, The Lost Tales, which has the pre-credits sequence "rewinding" from "Sleeping in Light").
I'm not too thrilled about the prospect of future movies in that timeline, though. I do defend the episodic, slice-of-life, world-building aspects of the Earth Force-uniform era of the show, but "Babylon 5: No arc, just vibes" is a very hard sell. I feel like filling in the conspicuous missing pieces and doing new all new stuff in the mainline universe a la what TLT was intended to be would be a better path forward, especially in the best-case scenario that the animations and the live action show both continue on. We'd basically have a prestige-drama alternate universe, and
a coffeeshop alternate universe. Though that could be intriguing to JMS; his original lightbulb moment was realizing that the Casablanca-in-space and fall-and-rise-of-empires sci-fi story ideas were actually the same story, one telling the other in microcosm, so splitting Babylon 5 back into its two components might be something he'd find interesting or refreshing.
As for the visuals, I'm more on the design-purist side of things, but given that it was stylized animation, I'm not going to begrudge them every set and starship reimagining. They always looked interesting, if not necessarily better, and they captured the vibe where it counted. I do have some notes, though.
First of all,
I saw JMS explain that, since Vir, Zack, and Corwin (and, I suppose, Number One) weren't in the movie except for the one shot recreated from "Objects at Rest," they didn't spare the money to secure their likeness rights, which is why Vir has some conspicuous facial hair, Zack was a security guard of a different ethnicity, and Cowin was a woman. Didn't seem to apply to Marcus, though, which is odd, considering what we heard.
Couple of little glitches with the space shots. B5 isn't rotating from time to time, and the Observation Dome is upside-down. On the other hand, I feel like there must've been on Babylon 5 die-hard on the animation team who just put all their energy into the space-battle shots during the not-quite-alternate-War-Without-End timeline. We got the cobra bays, a Starfury flip-and-fire, all four of the defense grid guns (complete with the correct doors opening!) and even the Starfury grappling claw.
I was a touch disappointed with the quality of the 4K blu-ray. I'm not sure what exactly it was, but especially in the first parts of the movies, there were some strange artifacts around some of the linework, like it was a little overcompressed, which is not something that should be happening for a 75 minute movie on a 100 gigabyte disc. Unfortunately, I don't have an HDR screen, so I can't speak to that aspect of the transfer.