Leoben, that tricky toaster, was right: All of this has happened before, and all of it is happening again.
Battlestar Galactica: The Plan retells major events from the first two years of the celebrated sci-fi series through the eyes of the Cylons. It weaves together recycled scenes from the series with new footage to reveal a first-hand account of the Cylon agenda, or "plan."
The result is a film that feels incomplete, episodic and disjointed. It plays less like a movie and largely like a disk full of high quality bonus material. Most of what happens here feels irrelevant to the series -- almost like it was tacked on to the BSG mythos to satisfy completists and hardcore fans. Still, it's worth watching to see Dean Stockwell carry the film with a fearless performance as the scheming and duplicitous Brother Cavil. The veteran character actor takes center stage in The Plan, and your enjoyment of the film will rest largely on how much you like, or dislike, Cavil and his major role in the series.
Stockwell's performance isn't the only thing worth recommending here. The Plan fleshes out a few of the series' more compelling stories, and it makes room for a new one involving Simon (Rock Worthy), aka Cylon Number Four. Worthy is terrific as a Four living with a human family and torn between his human life and his duty as a Cylon. Cylons learning to love other humans and to cherish their own humanity is a repeating theme in The Plan.
We also get more insight into Boomer's (Grace Park) headspace from season one, when she was working as a Cylon sleeper agent. It's not necessary to learn the details of her mission or how the Cylons controlled her, but the new scenes between Park and Stockwell are fantastic. In a scene that foreshadows the Cylon civil war, Boomer tells Cavil that she prefers being human – feeling love, friendship, and even heartache – to being a machine. Cavil responds with a nasty rant about the inferiority of humans to machines, echoing his famous "I want to see gamma rays" speech from the series.
Some small loose ends from the series are tied up here (Whatever happened to Shelly Godfrey? Who was Six waiting for on Caprica before the attack?), but these aren't really questions I was dying to have answered. I would have preferred to learn more about Cavil's past with the Final Five or about Leoben and his obsession with Starbuck. The Plan devotes some screen time to Leoben's story, but his scenes feel rushed and underdeveloped, especially when compared to the Simon or Boomer scenes. The Plan is more interested in showing us how Cavil was directly responsible for a lot of the havoc aboard the Galactica, and how his efforts to destroy humanity were doomed from the start.
Also missing is the biting social and political commentary we've come to expect from Battlestar Galactica. Many of the series' major cast members are MIA as well. Great actors like like Katee Sackhoff, Tahmoh Penikett and James Callis only show up in old footage from the series. Even the Admiral himself, director Edward James Olmos, is mostly seen in recycled clips.
Olmos pulls great performances from his cast, and his film offers some very impressive special effects for a straight-to-DVD movie. The Cylon attack on the colonies is shown in vivid detail and is scored by a hybrid Cylon's haunting play-by-play of the devastation.
The Plan DVD does feature some male and female nudity. Olmos and writer Jane Espenson defend this choice on the commentary track by arguing that Colonial society didn't have the same hang-ups that we do about our bodies (or something like that). Still, it feels a little unnecessary, especially one scene in the Galactica's unisex locker room.
I was hoping The Plan would offer more original content and would be able to stand on its own as a film. Instead, it's an imperfect but welcome love letter to the fans, and it was clearly a labor of love for the cast and crew.
Battlestar Galactica: The Plan premieres on DVD Tuesday, Oct. 27.
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