The Movie

Feature-length tie-ins to television series can be tricky. Along with becoming a part of a larger story, they have to tell a unitary story on their own. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan attempts to satisfy both of those requisites, but it ends up not achieving either purpose. Its story is that of a robot race’s attempt to wipe out humanity, but the story suffers from having little substance and too often returning to the same concept: that the robots experience difficulties and qualms in completing their task. Its issues are irrelevant to anyone on a literal basis, and it adds almost nothing to the series.

The Plan spans a vast portion of the Battlestar Galactica series, which tells the story of a distant race of humans who have created a race of highly sophisticated robots, called Cylons. The robots rebelled, were exiled, and years later returned to destroy us with a nuclear assault. They did not anticipate any survivors, so when a fleet of roughly forty thousand escapes the attacks and goes searching for a fabled place called Earth, the robots, fully sentient and now looking and acting like humans, have to improvise. Posing as survivors, a small group of them boards the Battlestar Galactica, the fleet’s only military vessel, and spends the following weeks and months attempting to complete their mission by sabotaging the ship and crew in various ways. The movie takes a viewpoint opposite that of the TV series and tells the events from the Cylons’ perspective. It presents them as beings struggling with empathy for their enemies as they attempt to finish cleansing the universe of the flawed human race.

The presentation of the show’s events through the Cylon perspective, though interesting in theory, turns out to be pointless. Aside from seeing how the Cylons plan and do things, this technique provided the opportunity to show an opposing philosophical and moral point of view compared to that of the humans. However, one of the conclusions the film comes to (moderate spoilers for the rest of this paragraph) is that the Cylons never had a particularly good reason for trying to wipe out their creators – they were, as one Cylon puts it, having “a temper tantrum in the form of a cataclysm.” They have no real justification for what they are trying to do. That’s fine and all, and it would work well as part of a TV episode, but it makes no sense to use an entire movie to tell us that.

This movie proves that the key to Battlestar Galactica’s success was its human element (though, to most, that was already apparent). The Plan is every bit as well-produced and -acted as the show, and it even features an abundance of recycled footage from the series; however, it does not achieve the same emotional impact because the main characters are now robots which, though sentient, are either killed off before they can be sufficiently developed or are so evil that we cannot relate to them. If you look at this as a standalone movie (which it is not¹), you will find little reason to care about what is happening because you do not get to know any of the characters and because its thematic concerns are sparse and repetitive. If you take it for what it is – a feature-length expansion of the Battlestar Galactica franchise – your understanding of the Battlestar world, characters, and events will not be changed. It’s the same story, just highly abridged and presented from a viewpoint that, though enigmatic, is uninteresting. You do learn things in The Plan that you didn’t know about the Cylons, but most of it is inconsequential. If it was necessary, it would have been included in the series' television run.

Click here for our full review of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

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The Extras

• Commentary with Director/Actor Edward James Olmos and Executive Producer/Writer Jane Espenson
• Deleted Scenes
• From Admiral to Director: Edward James Olmos and The Plan
• The Cylons of The Plan
• The Cylon Attack
• Visual Effects: The Magic Behind The Plan

Surprisingly, the extras leave a lot to be desired. Battlestar Galactica fans are undoubtedly looking forward to hearing Olmos in particular, but the commentary is dull and lacks insight. Olmos and Espenson mostly talk about how great the movie is and how great of a job everyone involved did -- that is, when commentators are talking. If you were to take a shot every time they say "amazing" or "fantastic" in reference to their movie, you'd be worse off than Colonel Tigh at his lowest depths. There is one cool thing about the commentary, though: Olmos naturally talks exactly like he does in his role as Adama. So, when you get bored, you can pretend you're listening to Adama himself. Or you can just turn it off.

There is little substance to be found in the deleted scenes: one or two conversations that we don't get to see in the finished product and a couple scenes that were simply longer than they needed to be.

The rest of the extras are all short featurettes. They consist mostly of generic behind-the-scenes footage. "From Admiral to Director" is the best but still is not revealing in any significant way. This featurette provides brief interviews with Olmos and gives you a peek at his directing style. It's fun hearing him talk about his fondness for Battlestar and his sadness at seeing it go, but that's pretty much all there is to it aside from random discussions with him and some footage of him directing.

Video/Audio

This is the best part of the movie. The DVD is presented in 1.78:1 on a dual layer disc, and it looks great. The makers of Battlestar Galactica add in digital grit to give the shows a rougher feel. That is present in The Plan as well, so the picture is, by design, rarely crystal clear, but it still looks every bit as good as it should. The colors are just right, there is no noticeable ghosting or artifacting, and the scenes with less grit are surprisingly clear. This is one of the better looking DVDs I have seen in a while. In fact, its picture begins to rival that of the Blu-ray release.

The Plan's audio comes in Dolby Digital 5.1, which is used well, the back channels reserved for peripheral sounds and music, as they typically are. The sound effects of the warhead during the attack on Caprica are frighteningly real. Alarms and metallic sounds on the ship come through clearly without drowning out the dialogue. The audio is just as good as the picture.

Packaging/Menus

Everything is basic: a standard DVD case with a slightly textured and metallic cardboard covering, and a basic menu system with graphics featuring characters from the movie.

Conclusion

Battlestar Galactica is a great franchise. It is enjoyable not only because of its drama but because it presents issues that are pertinent to humanity. The Plan tries to take the show's themes and elaborate on them one last time. However, what it ends up doing is simply stuffing those themes with a little extra information. What results is not a more complex presentation of those concepts but a stretching of them. The problem is that the themes were fine as they were; they didn't need to be stretched. This is not a bad movie by any means. It is just as well-made as the series itself was. It's just that it was unnecessary, and, by focusing on the inhumanity of the antagonists, it loses its human touch. The DVD looks and sounds great, but with an unneeded film and shallow extras, you're best off passing on it.

Click here to purchase Battlestar Galactica: The Plan on DVD.