Have ya heard? Bryan Singer is taking on Battlestar Galactica as a feature film — though no one seems to know what the hell that means. It could be some sort of prequel or sequel or sideways-quel to the Ron Moore reboot that just wrapped on Sci Fi/SyFy (and which will continue, prequel-like, with Caprica next year). It could be a completely different reboot, going in a completely different direction. It could be, I dunno, Battlestar Galactica: The Next Generation, a continuation of the story from the ’70s series.

No one knows yet, or no one’s talking yet. Which leaves us plenty of room for some geeky speculation.

Now, I’m a big fan of Singer’s — I even liked his Man of Steel reboot, Superman Returns, a few years back — but I don’t see how BSG can work again, in a new incarnation, so soon. As Drew McWeeny at the HitFlix blog Motion Captured notes:

Despite the amount of critical love that was displayed for the show during its run, I wouldn’t call Moore’s “Galactica” a phenomenon. It was more like a very enthusiastic and vocal cult audience.

And he thinks that’s why there’s room for a new feature film. McWeeny is right that Moore’s BSG was culty, but it’s because it was only culty that it’s probably not the smartest idea to give that universe another go: Anyone who was eager to see more Battlestar Galactica was watching the Sci Fi series, and if there weren’t that many fans like that to start with, there won’t be many eager for a feature film either. That doesn’t mean that whatever Singer wants to do with the franchise couldn’t be good — it means that it likely wouldn’t be popular.

It’s not as if there are millions of good little geek boys and geek girls clamoring to know what happened to Boxey, or to see Starbuck as, you know, a buck again. This ain’t Star Wars, after all, no matter how hard that ’70s series tried to be.

Which means, I fear, that any feature film called Battlestar Galactica that — in the mind of Universal, which is producing the film — can hope to be a hit is one that doesn’t look much like BSG at all. Oh, I’m sure there will be characters called Apollo and Adama, and there will be enemy robots called Cylons, and there’ll be some sort of pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo for characters to talk reverently about. But it’s gonna look like just another generic space movie, I suspect.

I’d love to be wrong about that. If anyone can prove me wrong, it could well be Bryan Singer; after all, he turned the let’s-kill-Hitler flick Valkyrie into a pulp fiction comic book of the highest order.

But I’m not getting too excited about this one yet.

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MaryAnn Johanson is still not a secret Cylon at FlickFilosopher.com. (email me)

Tags: battlestar galactica, bryan singer