The Hyperlogos

I am a pretty big fan of the series Babylon 5; I own all the series DVDs, and decided to start in on the movies. I missed most of them when they originally aired, and even though some of them had very bad reviews. I decided to see them all anyway, just so that I would be familiar with the entire story line. This turned out to be a bigger mistake than I thought, at least in the case of The Legend of the Rangers.

Rangers takes place sometime between the end of the series and the death of Sheridan and retirement of Babylon 5. It features just one character from the original story - G'Kar, portrayed by Andreas Katsulas as he was in the series. Unfortunately, this is not enough to rescue the story, and G'Kar's moments on screen tend to seem overacted due to their poor company (although in one scene, he did it all by himself.)

JMS likes to play with the metaphysical, and we see that here with a plotline involving a haunted space ship. We can also see that he's not very good at it and should probably swear a sacred oath never to try to do it again. The show's special effects are at least consistent, with quality near the top of that which we have seen during the series. There's a whole new fleet of ships with a very, very low polygon count, which to me suggests either that they were planning an official video game, or that a number of their animators fled the studio before this picture was mde.

In spite of all this, the movie really isn't that bad. It truly has one flaw which literally ruined the entire movie for me: the weapons officer floats in a holographic display system and punches and kicks in order to fire the weapons. The really sad thing is that I thought it was pretty cool and reminiscent of Outlaw Star or Vandread when she hopped down the chute and slid into the weapons console system, flipped around and reticles started being drawn around enemies. Then she started punching and yelling at things and the cheese factor slipped past "discount grocery cheese log" and flew right past "two pallets of easy cheese on the loading dock". She looks like a baby throwing a tantrum and the whole scene comes off as something invented by a two year old. Later, they do it again, and this time it's even worse.

I am seriously going to tell you to avoid this picture based on the above. No kidding. It really, truly ruined the entire movie for me, which honestly wasn't too badly acted, plotted, or even staged with that notable exception. I found every other Babylon 5 movie to be at least watchable, if painful; if I could go back and get the time I spent watching this movie back, I would. The only consolation is that I may prevent others from making the same mistake.