Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999)

Director: Michael Vejar

Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Jerry Doyle, Jeff Conaway, Tracy Scoggins

Have I Seen it Before: I’ll do you one better, I even watched the few episodes of Crusade that aired before TNT made good on their Babylon 5 buyers remorse...

Although, to date, I’m pretty sure I never watched the ones that didn’t air. And that doesn’t begin to cover the fact that the epic story set up by this never gets resolved in any real way.

Did I Like It: And that may be the problem with the movie as I watch now. When it first aired, it was a thrilling new adventure that launched into what we could hope to be a new grand story that would capture our imaginations for another five years.

Only, it didn’t go anywhere. Kind of like The X-Files*.

Watching it now, the big-bold finish—with Earth being soaked in an alien disease with a hard timer of five years before every man, woman, and child on the planet would succumb—rings hollow. It’s understandable that there is no hint as to the resolution of this epic story in the latest story in the chronology, the series finale “Sleeping in Light”** didn’t refer back to it, but when Straczynski returned to the universe in Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2008), I don’t recall even a throwaway line to the effect of “Hey, they sure did cure that huge plague, didn’t they?”

Maybe I just like to see stories where large, overwhelming health crises are eventually resolved. That’s what twenty years will do to you.

Even with its inherent flaws, I can’t entirely dismiss it, even if I am still stuck with the inability to recommend the film, and would instead point readers to the series***. The special effects have been updated, slightly, and that’s a little bit of a memory. The new effect of the jump gate—completely unchanged for the entire five-year run of the series—is a revelation. Objectively, it too has not aged exceptionally well, but anything new in this arena from a Babylon 5 story is like a drink in the desert. The story contained herein—divorcing itself from any larger implications—is still a lively adventure story, though. And the fact that the adventure story can rise above its flaws at all certainly puts it above the other TV-films produced in the franchise.

*Yes, I said it. And, no, I’m not taking it back. 

**Filmed at the end of the fourth season in 1997, and not aired until 1998, several months before this movie.

***Tellingly, all of the series, but none of the movies (aside from Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)) are currently available to stream on HBOMax.

Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998)

Director: Janet Greek

Cast: Jerry Doyle, Tracy Scoggins, Jeff Conaway, Martin Sheen

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah...

Did I Like It: I’ve actually tried to watch it a couple of times since it aired over twenty years ago, and I’ve never been able to really get into it, and if it failed with Martin Sheen portraying one of its central characters, then it probably would have to be the weakest of the Babylon 5 TV Movies, right? 

I’ve written before that the strength of the series has always been its ambitious over-arching storyline, and the movies they produced towards the end of the series largely eschewed that framework, aside for perhaps Babylon 5: In The Beginning (1998). This is even more removed from the main storyline, taking place some time after the fifth season concluded, and has a tendency to get weighed down by the need that the first season—before the show really became something special—had of doing stand-alone stories. Thus, we are largely left with the special effects that have infamously not aged well, even with the series best episodes.

The series also had a certain smugness (often well-earned) that it was rising above the trappings of science fiction television at the time, only to have J. Michael Straczynski try to give us what basically amounted to a holodeck episode this time out.

And yet, I couldn’t help but kind of, sort of enjoy the film this time out. Martin Sheen is Martin Sheen, and that’s usually more than enough to allow me to paper over deep flaws (see either Spawn (1997) or the fifth season of The West Wing). The ideas in the film are enough to chew on and it actually improves one of the weaker episodes for the wobbly first season of the series.

Isn’t that enough? I’m inclined to say yes. I mean, how much can we expect from a made-for-cable sci-fi movie from the 1990s?

Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)

Director: Richard Compton

Cast: Michael O’Hare, Tamlyn Tomita, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Although I think I only did so long after the final season of the series aired.

Did I Like It: There’s a couple of things one must reckon with on a re-watch of the 1990s television sci-fi epic, Babylon 5. It’s given a lot of credit for telling a fully serialized genre story on television at a time when that was resolutely not done. Granted, you would have to ignore contemporary shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine* to think of it as uniquely ahead of its time. One can’t help but admire the ability of the show to tell its full story, given the fact that the cast—especially with the main cast—was in constant flux and the loose network that aired/syndicated it folded during the fourth season.

But really, the special effects do not age well. At all. They’re almost unwatchable now, especially in the early going, where most explosions have all of the physics and nuance of a hastily produced Atari 2600 cartridge.

And that problem hangs pretty heavy over even this, the special edition of the pilot for the series. Nothing looks right, including ships, sets, and makeup for various aliens. There are only the faintest glimmer of the larger story which brought be back week after week later on in the series. Every series is going to have to shake off a little bit of jitters during a first episode (“Encounter at Farpoint”, I’m looking in your direction), so this ninety minute spell spent on the Last Best Hope For Peace isn’t the kind of experience that will pull you into the five-year saga. The season that follows has its moments, but I had to be firmly in the second season in my current rewatch of the show before I felt engrossed in the proceedings.

*Controversy lasts to this day as to whether Paramount pilfered writer J. Michael Straczynski’s pitch for the series to create their own tale of a space station in the middle of a massive intra-galactic war. Some say it’s just an instance of parallel development, although I don’t have a hard time at all imagining the executives at Paramount urging the Trek powers-that-be to follow that basic logline in order to bring to series a product that would undercut the possibility of another Space Opera franchise.