42 Battlestar Galactica

SCI-FI 2003-09

When you remake a classic, there is nowhere to go but down. The smarter play is what happened here, when Star Trek vet Ronald D. Moore transformed a corny late-Seventies Star Wars rip-off into a gripping sci-fi allegory about 9/11 and the never-ending

War on Terror, where the religious fundamentalist killers happen to be robots (like Tricia Helfer’s vivacious but multifaceted Number Six) who can pass for human. Cool space battles peacefully co-exist with grounded character stories, played by a superb cast led by Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell. The new BSG proved to be such a revelation that there’s already another remake in the works, which brings us back to the warning in this blurb’s first sentence.