Dave asks for a review of Battlestar Galactica: Razor and presto! We deliver the very next day. By this site’s standards, that’s practically blogging in real time.

But before I talk about the movie, it seems worth mentioning that I ended up going with the OpenSolaris T-shirt because it was a little thicker and warmer than the others. Also, worth noting is that we were first in line. When the group behind us got confused about The Menagerie vs. The Cage, who were the alpha geeks that set ’em straight? That’s right, us.

Oh yeah, the review. Two thumbs up! The feel-good movie of the winter!

Actually, this being a story about Pegasus, there honestly isn’t a whole lot of feel-good stuff (other than a couple of clever quips and a humorous scene with some old-style Cylons.) There’s a framing story set in the “present”, set when Lee Adama first takes over Pegasus, and a flashback story set ten months earlier, covering Admiral Cain and the first few weeks of Pegasus’s flight from the Scorpion shipyards.

The writers did a fine job balancing the frame story and the flashback story, and I think I can see why they structured it this way. If it had been a 100% Cain/Pegasus story, it just would have been a “oh, I guess it’s nice that they filled in some backstory” movie. Also, while I love Michelle Forbes and seeing her world, spending the full 1.5 hours there would have been a lot to take. Splitting the movie enabled them to tie it all back to the current story line, while still managing to pack in all of major historical high points (read: low points) that we already knew about Pegasus.

As a special bonus, we get to see how the Cylon hybridization project started. I had always wondered about how the Cylons went from pure “metallic” to their modern day state. Where did they get this biological material? I wonder if it was really gross? The answers are A) from captured humans of course, and B) yes, very.

Anyway, some fine acting all around, a couple of key additions to the mythos, and a well-structured story. Those of you in the VPX crowd should watch the movie carefully to see:

• how Eick and Moore get us back up to speed on the Pegasus’s history (answer: very quickly)
• how much time they spend on the “canonical” Pegasus history
• how much additional backstory they generate in order to give the canonical events more punch

Oh, and if you were complaining about not enough pew-pew-pew-LAZER action in Season 3, rest assured you will not be disappointed by BSG: Razor. In short, this movie bodes well for Season 4.