When I first heard about Battlestar Galactica coming back from the dead, like I do with most remake announcement these days, I rolled my eyes and uttered “Oh, please.”
Obviously, Ron Moore and company were able to significantly reinvent the franchise to where the new model Galactica became its own entity, and also reshaped modern sci-fi along with the Star Trek reboot.
Now, big surprise, there’s a Galactica movie in the works, and what’s making the news in the L.A. Times and Deadline is the writer – John Orloff – who wrote Anonymous, the new movie about Shakespeare allegedly being a fraud (which I had no idea was a Roland Emmerich movie, either).
That script was penned quite some time ago, but wasn’t made because it got knocked out of the box by Shakespere in Love. Orloff also wrote the movie about slain journalist Daniel Pearl, The Mighty Heart.
Details are scarce right now, as would be expected, except that Orloff is a big Galactica fan, and he promised the Times, “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna frak it up.” Orloff also told Deadline, “I have wanted to write this movie since I was 12 years old, and built a Galactica model from scratch out of balsa wood. I love BSG, and I would pass on the job rather than frak it up.”
Of course, a Galactica movie has supposedly been in the works for a decade, but now that producer Bryan Singer’s remake of Excalibur fell apart at Warner Brothers, he’ll have more time to concentrate on a Galactica movie.
As Singer said on Movieweb, “It allowed me to go straight into developing Battlestar Galactica – which I think will be really exciting.”
Whether it will continue the modern TV version, or reboot the ’78 TV show again remains to be seen. Still, as the site FilmsSchoolRejects writes, after Singer finishes Jack the Giant Killer, (his current project), “let’s get this frakking thing made already.”
