Pluskylang
Great Film overall
AshUnow
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Lollivan
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
classicsoncall
For a movie that wound up on IMDb's Top 250 List all the way back in 1996, this movie only had nineteen user reviews posted when I came to this page. That seems rather odd and I don't know what to chalk that up to. Although I've never watched an episode of the TV series, it seems to me this series pilot ought to have had more of an impact on viewers to warrant a broader host of reactions.Arriving a couple of decades after the Star Trek TV series, one can appreciate the improvement in special effects compared to some of the almost cardboard looking sets of The Enterprise. However much of it looked like video game quality compared to the incredible visuals of today. One can definitely measure the progress over time of how television adopted technology to achieve some of the stunning illusions and visual tricks we can witness today.The story itself here is pretty much by the numbers for a sci-fi outer space saga. Much of the acting is a bit sketchy, and the Minbari and Narn prosthetics leave a bit to be desired. My understanding is that some of the pilot actors used here didn't make it into the series, and in the case of Tamlyn Tomita's character, Lieutenant Commander Laurel Takashima, one can see why. Some of her dialog and screen presence was downright cheesy. Even Commander Sinclair (Michael O'Hare) left something to be desired in the way of a forceful presence aboard Babylon 5. With Captain Kirk, you always knew who was top gun on the Enterprise crew. The handful of reviewers for this pilot seem rather mixed in their appreciation of the show. Again, with no basis for comparison against the actual series that followed, I'd have to say it was generally okay with an intriguing story line that got muddled a bit along the way. It wasn't enough to get me interested in the program that it introduced, although I can't say I'll never get to it at some point. Maybe one day.
SnoopyStyle
It's the dawn of the third age of mankind. It's 2257 and it's the last of the Babylon stations deep in neutral space. It's a port of call for a variety of alien species. Jeffrey Sinclair is the commander. He's still haunted by the Battle of the Line. The remaining Earth forces were gathered in a final battle against the Minbari. Despite destroying most of the remaining Earth forces, the Minbari surrendered without explanation. Laurel Takashima is the second in command. Lyta Alexander is the newly arrived telepath. Michael Garibaldi is the security chief. Delenn is a Minbari. Humans made first contact with the Centauri. The Narn do not like the Centauri after overthrowing their enslavement. The Vorlons are a mysterious powerful race and their ambassador Kosh Naranek is the last to arrive. Kosh is poisoned and Sinclair is blamed.I was never a big Babylon 5 fan although I stayed with it for long stretches. It always seemed to me to be a slightly inferior Deep Space Nine. It doesn't help that it came out slightly after DS9. It felt always a step behind. The best idea from the pilot is the Battle of the Line. I found that battle to be mysterious, poetic, and full of possibilities. This pilot movie is a lot of expositions with a functional TV story. It holds the promise of a solid sci-fi TV show although it's not something extraordinary. Second season lead Bruce Boxleitner is superior to Michael O'Hare although I wish they kept Tamlyn Tomita around. I have nothing against Claudia Christian, and I can certainly understand the complexity of contracts and TV casting.
Xander Seavy (RiffRaffMcKinley)
The real shame of "The Gathering" is not in the bad acting, nor is it in the despicably shallow plot. The real shame is that it was far worse than the series it begun, even though it did have one main attraction: Takashima. I would love to see Laurel Takashima in a room with Susan Ivanova, even for just five minutes. She has that sarcasm, that wit, that double-edged personality that is at once volatile and lovable. Sadly, though, the "Babylon 5" pilot movie has an incredibly dull story involving assassination. Patricia Tallman-- who never seriously returned to the series until much later-- fortunately got much better with age as Lyta Alexander, who here is little more than a whiny, tiresome telepath. I shall leave you with one final thought-- why is it that Delenn looks like some sort of outer-space frog man (even though she is a woman)? Thank heavens for the way the Minbari looked later in the show.
Klaatu-18
Back in 1993 one of my co-workers, who knows I'm a science fiction fan, asked if I was going to watch the pilot for that new SF TV seriies. At first I didn't think I had heard of this before. Then I realized that this must be the show that J Michael Stracynski (JMS), the screenwriting columnist for <i>Writer's Digest</i>, quit that job to work on.I watched the movie and was instantly intrigued. Unlike many SF TV shows, the science was well done (with none of the technobabble seen in other shows). A valiant attempt was made to present a few totally non-humanoid aliens. (This resulted in the funny puppet aliens in a section that was edited out when the special edition was created)But what drew my interest was the fact that this movie had laid down plot threads for the proposed series. Unanswered questions about what really happened to the first four Babylon stations. And why had the Minbari suddenly surrendered at the end of the Earth-Minbari war when victory was in their grasp? What was the story behind Commander Sinclair's missing time at the Battle of the Line?Before the series itself aired I read an article in Cinefantastique which explained that JMS had a plan for an ambitious story arc that would take five years to complete. I was ready.
