Battlestar Galactica & Category 6: Day of Destruction

This article first appeared in the Age on February 12, 2005

If you want to see the difference between a good and a bad mini-series, this weekend is instructional. Put simply: Battlestar Galactica - The Mini Series, good. Category 6 - Day of Destruction, bad.

Michael Rymer's (he made Angel Baby) remake of Battlestar Galactica began last night, with the final installment running this evening (Channel 10, 8.30 pm). A television series is soon to follow. I didn't watch the original, so can't compare, but this version is gripping, whether your a Sci Fi fan or not. While set many centuries in the future, the series is played like an old-fashioned war movie. And though the effects are state of the art they don't overwhelm the story, which is strong on characterization.

The plot is a kind of morphing of I, Robot and Star Trek. Cylons - robotic creatures who rose up and declared war on their masters, then disappeared forty years ago - have returned and in a sudden, devastating strike, lain waste to the colonies. The attack forces Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos) to call into action his museum-piece warship, the Battlestar Galactica. Fleeing genocide, the Galactica leads a rag-tag fleet of survivors on a quest to find humanity's fabled 13th colony - a planet known as Earth. It's your classic mythic journey, complete with angst between the Commander and his son, Captain Lee 'Apollo' Adama (Jamie Bamber). Apollo completes the Freudian twist by also lusting after his (dead) brother's wife, Lieutenant Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) the fleet's cigar-chewing gun pilot (who was, in the first series, a man).

Category 6: Day of Destruction (Sunday/Monday, 7.30pm, Channel 7) is, on the other hand, little more than weather porn, complete with close-ups and money shots. If you are into kind of thing, The Day After Tomorrow, Perfect Storm and Twister do it better. As is usually the case with porn, the plot is stupid - it's as if a tornado tore through Hollywood sucking up every cliché in its path. There are dysfunctional families, a shoot out in a bank, and a woman giving birth. Not to mention three enormous weather systems that are about to collide over Chicago, creating the worst super-storm in America's history. At the same time, privatization and ensuing corprotization means that the national power grid is collapsing, making it impossible to warn anyone about the impending disaster.

One of the problems with this series is that it is all a bit too close to the bone. Instead of spinning our fears of climate change into something fantastic, it is in fact remains less engaging than the news most nights - because that is as far as you need to go if you want stories of extreme temperatures, hurricanes striking with increasing frequency and ferocity or tsunamis. Heck, you only had to lie in bed at 3.00am a week and a half a go wondering if the rain would ever end, to find this uninspiring television.

Like The Day After Tomorrow - but less effectively - it gestures towards political analysis. The city's residents have been asked to reduce their energy consumption and politicians are ignoring the fact that the outdated national power grid could fail at any moment, There is much talk about conserving power, and the corporations are crazed and evil. But even if you support recycling you have to giggle at the discussion about putting out your bottles two women have as their apartment is about to be blown to oblivion. Category 6 is more likely to inspire nihilism than anything resembling hope.

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