We Are All Cylons Explores Deeper Side of Battlestar Galactica Fandom
- By Angela Watercutter
- April 25, 2011 |
- 6:31 pm |
- Categories: movies, sci-fi
Sci-fi franchises from Star Trek to Stargate have inspired legions of rabid fans over the years, but in new indie documentary We Are All Cylons, some fans’ love of Battlestar Galactica goes further than simple devotion to a TV show.
The documentary, which premiered Monday at the Sci-Fi-London film festival, shows how Ronald D. Moore’s reimagined Battlestar Galactica series actually has the ability to transform some fans’ identities.
“I know a few very serious Star Trek fans but I have never noticed a gleam in their eyes the way I do when I speak to BSG fans,” filmmaker Ilana Rein said in an e-mail to Wired.com just prior to her film’s premiere. “One fan told me how she wanted with all her heart to be Starbuck.”
Clearly, some fans take it further than others. Some devotees wear casual Viper pilot gear, while others actually refer to themselves as Cylons. One fan told Rein he believes human brains are “living computers” (see preview clip above) and that it wouldn’t be a leap to suggest that some humans actually have Cylon DNA.
[Warning: This post contains BSG spoilers. Read at your own risk.]
The blurring of lines between television and reality doesn’t just affect the show’s fans, who reveled in the never-ending struggle between humans and cybernetic Cylons during the space opera’s four seasons. The show ended in 2009 after some surprising revelations about the “Final Five” human-looking Cylons, who were able to blend in among the spaceship Galactica’s crew.
During filming of the documentary, Michael Hogan, who played Col. Saul Tigh on the Battlestar Galactica series, told Rein that finding out his character was a Cylon was like discovering he was “born of your enemy’s blood.”
“I created my film to appeal to fans of the show, of course,” Rein said, “but also to appeal to people who have never even heard of BSG but are still interested in issues such as artificial intelligence, rapidly advancing technology and the malleability of identity.”
The identity question even extended to the filmmaker, who spent only about $8,000 to produce We Are All Cylons. Rein claims that during the editing process she began to think the way she believed a Cylon would. This influenced her musical selections and led her to do things like use TV static to make scene transitions.
“I allowed the possibility that [BSG writer and executive producer Moore] created a show that sent a signal — quite like the “All Along the Watchtower” riff that activated the sleeper Cylons — to people like me in order to ’spread the message’ that we are in fact all Cylons,” Rein said. “So part of my creative process was to begin thinking of myself as part Cylon. A lot of the edits I made were what I imagined a computer would do.”
We Are All Cylons will be coming to Baltimore in July, Rein said. Other screenings are in the works for New York, Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Angela is a reporter for the Underwire, Wired.com's pop culture blog. She is also a senior editor of Longshot magazine. Follow @WaterSlicer and @theunderwire on Twitter.
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