Battelstar Galactica - A (short) Retrospective review

So I finally finished watching BSG from start to finish.

I was originally going to write a long review, but you guys have the attention span of flies.

Here I go:

SFX: Very well done, especially the "blurry" Firefly camera and audio design. But the Centurion animations and rendering were generally poor.

Acting/characters: Hit a miss really. Some excellent characters were Baltar, Sing, Admiral Adama, the Cylon from Quantum Leap, and my favorite, Tom Zarek (I love his two face persona).

On the other hand, several characters were very annoying, like Adama jr (always crying/bitching about his dad) and the worst character of the show, Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace. I mean, she is supposed to be a hot-shot pilot, but can barely follow orders (others have this problem too). Aren't these people supposed to be soldiers? And she attempts to go Sarah Conner by masking her femininity with hard edged animosity. Give me a break. She isn't even remotely attractive, yet she seems to be chasing guys left and right all day.

Story: While I like the continuous/epic feel of the show, this is generally where the greatest faults of this series are found. Most of the story arcs are mind-numbingly ridiculous and even laughable (like when the 4 of the "final five" were revealed at the end of season 3, oh no, Colonel Saul Tigh has become what he hates the most, how cliched). And thee fact that the whole human race is frequently risked as the expense of a huge and blind "leap-of-faith". Like when the go look for the final five because, supposedly, and nobody really knows how, the know the "way to earth". What the hell? And at the end it's still not explained why Baltar sees those "angels" or how Starbuck is actually still alive. But you wouldn't want things to make sense right?

On the other hand my favorite part of the show, and something that most people would miss, is the existential aspects of the human-cylon juxtaposition. The phrase "cylons aren't human" seems to justify doing horrible moral things to them, even though for all intensive purposes cylons are 99% equal to humans. Would these people horribly torture, for example, monkeys since they "aren't human"? Cylons might as well be humans as what they do (which seems to be almost exactly what humans do) defines who they are.

Overall rating: