Director: Matt Peters
Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Claudia Christian, Peter Jurasik, Bill Mumy
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I’d been holding off on watching it after its release, mainly waiting for it to get cheap on Apple TV. Then the whole series went on sale, too, and so my collision with this was something of an inevitability.
Did I Like It: I really love the series. It’s special effects aged like milk that had come out rancid in the first place, and while some might call pieces of its storyline derivative, I can look over those moments and decide that most of the characters have never read a book before*.
Glancing at the plot synopsis and realizing that this largely takes place in that period between the final episode, “Sleeping in Light” and the second-to-last episode “Objects at Rest,” I decided to fit this movie in between the two episodes.
I kinda wished I hadn’t. Had I watched this completely detached from a re-watch of the series, it might have been a nice nostalgic trip back to syndicated television of the 1990s. In my situation, it was just a weird, discordant note in the middle of watching the fifth, somewhat discordant season of the show. The continuity problems—largely papered over by having Sheridan (Boxleitner) jumping from universe to universe—were all the more noticeable, as the true canon only happened for me just a few hours earlier.
I knew the film was going to have a bit of a problem with the fact that a large portion of the cast has since passed away and are replaced here by voice actors trying to sound like those departed. The actress playing Delenn may not quite sound like Mira Furlan, but she has the ethereal spirit of the character down, and given that the character is not present throughout the film, but makes the moments she does appear largely work. Garibaldi, Sinclair, and Dr. Franklin have varying levels of success resurrecting the dead. The film completely falls apart, however, in its few moments that feature G’Kar. Andreas Katsulas had such a distinctive voice, and it filled every inch of the angry scoundrel who became the quiet, reflective scribe. It’s not like I need verisimilitude from my space opera, but don’t take me out of the whole thing.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to go watch “Sleeping in Light.”
*Including 1984, The Lord of the Rings, and any other major piece of literature not written by Harlan Ellison. Honestly, five miles long, and there wasn’t a library on that space station?