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: In The Beginning (1998)

Director: Michael Vejar

Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Andreas Katsulas

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. The Babylon 5 movies were an interesting thing. After the series moved to TNT, we got four full fledged-movies aired over the course of the last year of the series. Although, for my money, the story was pretty much told in the first four years, so everything that aired on TNT felt like wheel spinning. And yet, I can’t help but think of both this movie and Babylon 5 - A Call to Arms (1999)—both aired as New Year’s events—as the first movies released in those formative years in my life.

Did I Like It: The movie has a series of less than enviable tasks. First, it launches a new era for the show which, as I mentioned above, were already behind them. It needs to weave together a complex mythology into an exciting story on its own rights. It also needs to bring in a new audience, so as to justify TNT’s enormous expense.

In case you’re wondering, it succeeds mildly in those earlier tasks, while utterly failing as the list goes on. Built out of a mishmash of flashbacks from previous episodes and some new material, the story never gels into a coherent narrative. There are moments where it transcends its restrictions, mainly surrounding the framing device in the future with Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik). Still, the productions collective budget on hair dye in pursuit of convincing everyone the story takes place nearly fifteen years prior to the main storyline must have been staggering.

It does launch a new era for the series, but that new era underlines how, when the Prime Time Entertainment Network was collapsing in on itself and the story rushed to its natural and satisfying conclusion a year ahead of schedule. Babylon 5 has not been the same since the end of the fourth season when we saw humans a million years hence reaching their ultimate destiny.

And, too, it failed to pull in a new audience. Utterly, so, as it would turn out. It had no hope of doing so, as bringing in new people to a show whose story is already done appears to have been a fool’s errand in retrospect. The network quickly gave in to buyer’s remorse, and the future this movie promised was done within a year, and the series relegated to DVD sets for all time within another year.