2 out of 5

Director: Jonas Pate

Now I’ve watched a couple of webisode-collected “movies” before, so I understand that pacing is going to be a little different, with episodic beginning/middle/cliffhanger mini-structures occurring every however long – ten minutes in this case – but B & C, for the most part, works fairly seamlessly as an actual film, so I can imagine it being conceived as a whole and then shrunk and expanded where appropriate to find its stops.  However, the whole production reeks of fan boy jism (an image you’re totally jisming yourself over, I’m sure), the 2 year wait between Galactica’s conclusion and this mini offering enough advancements in affordable CGI to stuff the flick full of “awesome” flight and fight sequences with pounding music to counter the more reserved feeling of the series proper.  Almost every moment of Blood and Chrome has people shooting or swearing (because we’re also freed of TV limitations, so let’s toss some boobs and “shits” in there now) and almost no moment of Blood and Chrome has the subtlety or plotting smarts of the series.

We flashback to the original Cylon war, to Bill Adama’s first flight as a cocky rookie, where he gets sent on a seeming milk run which turns into a secret mission to deliver a mysterious passenger to some spooky Cylon-occupied territory for unknown reasons.  The eventual reveals won’t be too surprising, but the general pace of each twist is well separated episode per episode.  The acting and script are nothing remarkable but are by no means shrugged off, it’s just pretty obvious stuff, more of a typical sci-fi / enemy-of-my-enemy war story than any of the contemplative heights to which the series ascended in its best moments, or even the more sobering feeling of its boring moments.  As a regular movie, we would criticize the evolution of characters and story – Blood and Chrome absolutely expects us to carryover our interest for Adama from the series.  But this isn’t Adama, this is the shadow of the character, and the story offers nothing revelatory about his war experiences.

Well made, respectfully sequenced and produced for a web series, but pretty unremarkable.