Look at that promo pic. Look at that damn promo pic. Roslin, I love you, but you were in this movie for ten goddamn seconds, get the hell outta here.
So today marks the eighth anniversary of Razor, a BSG "telefilm" that premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel during the agonizing wait between the third and fourth seasons. I'm a big Battlestar fan, and yes, I enjoy the latter material just as much as the earlier stuff. I have my reasons, and I'll be glad to get into 'em if requested, but that's not what this is about. This is about serendipity; namely, I rewatch my favorite shows whenever I have the chance to introduce them to local friends who'd never seen 'em, and I've been doing a BSG rewatch with my best friend since July, and we were up to Razor tonight, and we watched it. And then I remembered that today is its anniversary, so my tired mind went, "well then you'd best make a damn NeoGAF topic on it. God has a plan, JeffZero."
Thanks, Gina.
So. Razor. Let me start by acknowledging its fatal flaw, but with a caveat that it was nigh-unavoidable. Razor is a slog. It is an absolute slog. The extended cut improves the film considerably by adding enough weight to scenes which during the broadcast run felt rushed, so it's a bit ironic that no matter how you slice it -- the broadcast version was not exempt from this problem -- it's a slog.
What holds it down so much? Why, the flashbacks, of course. The pacing of this movie is unique across Battlestar history in that every eight to ten minutes, the viewer is treated to another eight to ten minutes of flashbacks. Kendra, the film's newly-introduced main character whose past aboard the Pegasus plays a crucial role in her present, needs all that material for the rest of the picture to work, but to get there, director Felix Enriquez Alcala brings the poor woman to Goku-is-charging levels of ridicule. The most grievous example comes from a scene in which present-day Kendra fiddles with a radio, flashes back, fiddles some more, and then flashes back again.
Remember when all the kids used to collect BSG action figures that looked more like badly-used voodoo dolls than proper figurines? No? Me neither.
We've gotten the elephant in the room locked up tight, so I'll focus on the good parts. Razor does, in fact, have good parts. In fact it has quite a few. For starters, Kendra herself is an interesting character. The directorial decision to plague the pic in flashbacks is not without its boons, and for her, those boons mean we as an audience get to see her develop from a spoiled young woman who regards her upcoming posting on the Pegasus as an unfortunate stepping stone into a capable weapon with a seriously screwed-up past. And we get to see it all over the course of two hours, as the film tries its damnedest to also tell the story we'd previously never gotten but many of us had always wanted -- Lee Adama in full command of his short-lived war-torn state-of-the-art flagship.
It sounds like a messy effort, trying to tie this stuff together, and truth be told it kind of is. Jumping back and forth between Kendra Shaw's first day aboard the Pegasus and the subsequent Cylon surprise attack on Scorpius Shipyards (props to this scene, by the way; everyone knows it's coming, but the abruptness of it got a jolt out of me even now) and Lee speaking with his father about the present-day burdens of command can be jarring. At times, Razor feels like two separate episodes. But sometimes it works, too. Kendra is rediscovering herself; Lee is rediscovering himself. Kendra is reflecting on the Pegasus' dark past; Lee is struggling with the potential for dark decision-making as he steps into shoes that thrice in the span of two months had to be replaced.
And then the plot kicks in midway through the movie and it's a little cumbersome to suddenly, finally have a driving force but you realize who cares because you're treated to this craziness:
Flashback!Adama is wrestling with something while free-falling to a planet's surface! What is he wrestling with?
Why, a 1978-homage Cylon Centurion, that's what! Holy Glen Larson, this is awesome!
Razor then proceeds to establish that William Adama, thanks to what he discovered in that final day of the First Cylon War, has always known the Cylons were committing horrible experiments on human prisoners. I remember having issues with this when the film originally aired, because it made it seem like he'd always been more in-the-know in the first three seasons than I could reasonably believe. But in retrospect I think it's fine. He was never told what was going on; all he saw was a Little Shop of Horrors. If anything it makes his humble "maybe humanity's a pack of demons too" style speech in the miniseries a bit harder to swallow.
About that plot, though. So there's this separate faction of Cylons led by the first hybrid and we as viewers already know what hybrids are thanks to Baltar's third-season escapades but the fleet is pretty new at this (sans Athena!Sharon, obviously, who pops up for even less time than Roslin) and this first hybrid is a particular brand of batshit and they've taken a recon team hostage and a plan is launched to rescue them. Simple stuff, but filled to bursting with fanservice; one of the old Centurion models straight-up says "by your command" and it's like "which version am I even watching here?"
Kendra's flashbacks keep going and going and going. She was there when Cain killed her old XO! Check. She figured out that Gina was a Cylon! Check. She got a crazy Darth-Patton-sounding speech about becoming a razor from Cain! Check. But we see the infamous incident aboard the Silia, too, whereby Cain ordered parts and personnel taken and stripped from a civilian fleet and a riot understandably ensued and families were murdered in cold blood by Pegasus troops. What we don't see 'til near the end is that Kendra fired the first shot, killing a little girl with a point-blank bullet. It's horrifying stuff, and it makes rewatches all the more rewarding when you know the extent of the darkness she's carrying.
And then this old guy in a milky, murky bathtub starts narrating gobbledygook for five minutes about how four will soon awaken and a fifth will seek redemption and the entire fanbase has a eureka moment as they realize he's talking about the third season's shocking Cylon identities twist and we're fangasming over the identity of the fifth and my friend starts shouting at the TV that obviously Kara is the fifth to the point that I have to rewind my Blu-Ray for him because he talks over the battle with the Centurions and this old guy keeps spouting gobbledeygook and aaah. And then Kendra, wounded from the fight, stays behind to manually trigger the nuke that naturally got its automated circuitry fried and this old guy tells her Kara Thrace is the harbinger of your destruction.
Anyway.
Kendra dies and the Adamas have a heart-to-heart about it and we all walk away two hours richer on Cain's greatness/madness duality complex and how incredibly badass William Adama was when he was 23. It's a slog and it's got dire pacing issues and it doesn't really gel with itself. But somehow it's still a good time. When the camera flashes to reveal that Kendra pulled the trigger on a small child -- that's powerful. That's a big, big moment in a series that helped usher in the so-called Golden Age of Television.
I could never recommend Razor to a non-fan, and not just because it's part of a serialized show. To the rest of us, though? To those of us who remember BSG as a flawed gem, a hallmark of good space opera with some real wrinkles, but a gem nonetheless? Well... maybe Razor is a microcosm for all that. Maybe Razor is the ultimate example of the good and the bad of Battlestar Galactica, and maybe, just maybe, I'm not ashamed to say I love it, warts and all.
Au revoir, Kendra. We barely knew ye.
