Brace yourself. The next few episodes are a bit of a roller-coaster.
Babylon 5
- Thread starter Kail
- Start date
Yes! That's probably why it jumped out at me every time.
I once got into a huge argument with a friend on this issue with regards to "American Beauty". He called me a judgmental hipster.
This was slightly defensible given the relatively low budget of the show. They just didn't have the money or the time to film so many camera angles to make the scene more dynamic, or block out what happens before or after the actual dialogue spoken. The flat and practical lighting they tended to use didn't help.
OTOH, jms had plenty of TV writing experience before B5 and should have been able to script the dialogue to seem more natural and not as though it just started when they began to speak. It's further exacerbated when you have people continue to talk when in more traditional drama there would have been a cut back to other characters - but in B5 people just KEPT TALKING without being prompted, as though they had been. I understand it's just jms' style, but when someone is the SOLE writer on a show for multiple seasons, it can go from jarring to grating at times. For me it just comes down to a case of great story, terrible dialogue.
Just watched through "Midnight on the Firing Line" and all that we've been talking about jms' writing style is there. I'll try to find a later season episode and see if/how it evolved, because in my mind it didn't really change much over the years.
Mark
A huge part of that is that Katsulas was one of the few actors on the show who was legitimately talented enough to make some really, really hokey shit play well. Most of the cast -- Boxleitner, Doyle, Thompson, Conaway, occasionally Furst and Furlan, especially Christian -- just didn't have the chops to do that, because they all basically had one or two modes of delivering dialogue and weren't particularly adept at nuance or subtlety.
It's not entirely different from the movie Gettysburg, in which much of the dialogue feels more like a tone poem, with characters giving long-winded speeches at one another. It's one thing when Martin Sheen or Jeff Daniels or Sam Elliott is doing it, but it's another thing entirely when it's Tom Berenger or C. Thomas Howell.
Wait til you get to Byron. That will change.
After re-watching the series recently, I realized that I loved Marcus more than any other character not named G'Kar or Londo. Marcus consistently brought the warmth and humor I felt a lot of the characters lacked. Other actors had a hard time making the humor that JMS wrote work, but Marcus did it with ease.
That had as much to do with the fact that most of the humor written for the other characters just wasn't very funny.
I like the epic style of dialog. It made the scene feel important and added to the story.
Most of it was written by the same guy. I just think Jason Carter was better at turning the unfunny into something not so cringe-worthy.
The dialogue is perfectly normal for the 23rd century and I challenge anyone to disprove this.
How ironic.I once got into a huge argument with a friend on this issue with regards to "American Beauty". He called me a judgmental hipster.
Just curious, what episode are you on.
I think it's Messages from Earth.
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