Alien Nation to be remade by TIM MINEAR on SyFy

Also it was earth based with few of the normal SF gadgets which the Star Wars generation would collect and play with.

 

Why remake crap?

I will admit I never gave the TV show a chance because the movie was so bad.

 

I had many friends who got out of Vietnam on a boat. The inspiring event for the alien society back story. For TV the ideal was fleshed out a real alien culture was being built when the show was cancelled. Its been a long time since such a mass immigration has happened so that knowledge of people going through what SF is portraying would be lost to the new production.

Why remake crap? How many seasons did NuBSG provide?

 

BSG wasn't crap, BSG 1980 was however.

 

Let's just agree to disagree on this point.

 

Don't forget The Sentinel which was set in "Cascade, Washington."

 

Or the movie "Trouble in Mind" which takes place in "Rain City." (Seattle.)

 

Fortunately the tv series is a hundred times better than the movie which I've never been able to sit all the way through on.

 

Then you have no business calling the show crap.

 

Thank god people never applied that reasoning to BUFFY . . . !

 

Because at its core Buffy was nothing more then cute girl in few clothes fighting. Alien Nation on the other hand was an original concept which was wasted in a big bug hunt. The Tv series came and rose up to the potential of the ideal. Even if they did drop stuff like humans wearing hats and long sleeves in Los Angeles because of the depeleted ozone layer.

 

It is a concept that could be done again well... but looking @ the new V makes me very nervous and it has hot firefly whore as the Lizard Queen!

If there were a new alien series, it would be much more interesting if it were setup with the aliens crashed on the Moon or Mars, and our two races should have different atmospheric requirements, etc... AKA HIRE a SCIENCE ADVISOR you bean-counting assholes, the deep alien backstory was what let Ken Johnson build a first rate series, off an alien buddy-cop premise. We need to let the premise expand further this time. Let's go FULL ALIEN! Let them make the new show their own.

RDM did it well with BSG, but have you seen any of the Bionic Woman remakes, or the last sad attempt at a Twilight Zone?

 

If you make them to alien then they are almost an off screen presence. Sort of like the Vorlon on B5. It can work but the show IMO was about aliens assimalating into human society while trying to hang onto their native culture.

 

^ Exactly, like the Vorlons, where all we see is an Encounter suit, and CGI pictures of them outside of the suits on the viewscreens most of the time. You are on the right track sir!

I want sort of a crashed city-ship on the far side of the moon, with slightly better tech, Vorlon'd up alien nation. I'll even let salt-water be acid for them. How funny it would be, if the best high-tech weapon of the 21st century was the super-soaker AK-AN47! Comedy Gold, with cool CGI-FX on the aliens, once the bullets penetrate the encounter suits. Flamethrower like FX.
MICHAEL BAY WANTS MORE!!! MAKE THEM MELT LIKE HUMANS IN STARSHIP TROOPERS!!!!
woah there...

 

They didn't play that enough in the series. Even though stronger and able to withstans extremes the human couldn't any kid carrying around a water pistol with salt water was suddenly as lethal as a gangster with an AK-47

 

I like the concept of them being familiar and similar to humans in many ways, but also exceedingly dissimilar is a better concept. The interaction between humans and newcomers is so incredibly important to the show.

 

Eh, I see her as more the Keanu Reeves type of actor - she's in a role that is so locked down emotionally that the fact that she has the right looks for the role is far more important than the level of talent she might possess. It won't be a complex or challenging role - cardboard bwahaha baddie has got to be the easiest gig in the acting world. There's another character in the mix who's also one of the lizards, and I suspect that person will be the "complex" alien role while Queenie just struts around and says bitchy things.

It's everything else that's going to determine that show's success. They already have a roster of great actors to draw upon. The challenge will be to come up with a way of making the premise non-repetitive, assuming that they will be taking the show to series if/when the miniseries is a hit.

 

She is just fine for the role ;p - but the V 2.0 trailers did little for me. I loathed, the giant ships as flat-screens in the sky bit... but the guy who cuts the trailer doesn't make the film, so I'm hoping I will enjoy it. I loved the original when I was a kid, even Final Battle, but there is no series.

 

I hated the movie, loved the series. The series is absolutely classic SF, so this new show had better be good. God, I hope it's good. It's gonna be hard to capture what Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint did without, you know... Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint.

I'll give it a shot.

 

The series was great. Goofy at times, but there were some fantastic episodes. It was like Star Trek, it did episodes that explored social problems in a fantasy setting. Episodes dealt with racism, the role of the sexes (three alien sexes are required to procreate, leading to some awkward moments in human culture), what it means to be a man (men carry babies, causing crises for alien males trying to assimilate into human society by asserting their "manliness") Nazi-hunting (an old alien targets and murders the alien "overseers" who enslaved them), love, sex, voting rights, aging, and a myriad other issues.

FWIW, Ken Johnson, who developed the TV series, also hated the movie. Before the new series premieres, I suggest checking out the original series on DVD. Ken Johnson does a really good commentary for the pilot where he talks about why the movie didn't work for him at all and what changes they decided they had to make for the series.

My fear is that the new series will be a lot of cop action with cool FX at the expense of character development. That was Johnson's main criticism of the first movie. In fact, I think Johnson once said the only scene in the movie he really liked was when George says goodbye to his family and Johnson said something like, "Wait a minute, who are they? Tell me about them!" Then the scene is over in seconds.

I know nothing about Tim Minear. Hope the guy "gets" Alien Nation.

FWIW, here's some footage of a cast get-together at Ken Johnson's house where everyone reminisced about the series. This is from the Alien Nation movie collection DVD set.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wEn7OlCYsc&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-eCNryMrnA&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CyLlZ96bFE&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3yaliaOU6E&feature=channel

It's not going to be easy to capture this kind of chemistry without this cast.