Babylon 5: The Gathering/In the Beginning (1993)

Babylon 5: The Gathering/In the Beginning

THE START OF AN EXCELLENT SERIES, ONE OF THE BEST OF ALL TIME. INTELLIGENT AND THOUGHT PROVOKING. April 7, 2008

The best science fiction series ever!

The only science fiction series to ever tell a complete story. The more you watch, the more you get out of each episode. Watch it more than once to see what I mean. This is pilot that lauched the series. March 22, 2008

Essential viewing for B5 fans, though only one of these movies is very good

For newcomers to B5 the first question is, where should these two movies be placed within the entire world of B5? When should I watch them? This is pretty straightforward. Watch THE GATHERING before watching anything else. Watch IN THE BEGINNING after finishing Season Four but before watching Season Five. The placement of the latter isn't as crucial as the first film, but this is probably the best place to watch it. If you watch it before Season Four, the last minute of IN THE BEGINNING will make absolutely no sense. If you have seen it, it adds a deep poignancy to that minute.

Let me write about these out of order. IN THE BEGINNING is simply the best of all the B5 movies and if it had been released separately, I would have given it 5 stars. It is easily the best of any of the B5 made for TV or direct to DVD movies. I think there are at least two major reasons for this. First, almost all of the other movies were not deeply enmeshed in the central B5 story arcs. They were all either standalone stories or they led into new series. In other words, they didn't feel like they were at the center of all-things-B5. But this movie adds huge new dimensions of things that we more or less knew about, but not nearly in this detail. The second reason it was more successful was that it employed almost all of the major B5 characters in the telling of the story. Vir, Lanier, and Garibaldi were absent, but just about no one else was. So unlike the other movies, which sometimes have only a couple of token B5 characters involved, this one feels like a full-fledged B5 undertaking. Plus, it helps that it centers on a first rate story. This is not just the best B5 movies but one of the most interesting stories in all of B5.

THE GATHERING is just dull. Functionally it was a pilot to introduce the main components in the show. But it is slow, plodding, unexciting, and remarkably uninteresting to look at. THE GATHERING was made at a time when CGI was only just beginning to be used on a large scale. The STAR TREK series were still primarily relying on models. B5 and SPACE ABOVE AND BEYOND were the first to use CGI on a massive scale. But the brute fact is that the CGI of B5 in the beginning was just crude. You can see just how far CGI matured between THE GATEHRING and IN THE BEGINNING by watching the films back to back. CGI would get even better on FARSCAPE and then really stand out on FIREFLY and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. STARGATE would also employ a lot of CGI, but it rarely had the subtleties that FIREFLY and BSG enjoyed.

THE GATHERING is not just a bit dull; it also is a bit raw. G'Kar is hard to look at in this one. His make up makes him look like a rapacious reptile. Delenn is also more alien looking than she would be at the start of Season One. One will see that the pre-transformation Delenn of IN THE BEGINNING looks very different than the pre-transformation Delenn of THE GATHERING (for newcomers, Delenn undergoes a transformation at the end of Season One in order to look more human, for reasons best discovered there).

Still, if you are a B5 fan, you really need both of these movies. If you just plow straight into Season One without seeing THE GATHERING, you'll have a sense that something is missing. It is. The first episode assumes knowledge of THE GATHERING. It may be a low point in the run of B5, but it is necessary for understanding the whole. And you'll simply want to see IN THE BEGINNING simply because it is B5 at its best. March 10, 2008

Babylon 5: The Gathering/In the Beginning

A must have dvd to view the beginning point of the series.There are some different characters and appearances of the cast,which changes when this great series hit the air waves, but it doesn't change the theme for the series February 23, 2008

SFIFI

TWO GOOD MOVIES DIFFERNCE IN FX AND MAKEUP SHOWS DIFFERNCE IN PILOT AND SERIES GREAT SHOW SEASONS 1-4 SEASON 5 OK SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THE SHADOWS FURTHER September 19, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...