Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers (DVD)

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Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers (DVD)

The Rangers, an order of warrior-priests, have wandered the darkness between the stars for over a thousand years, protecting a hundred worlds from invasion and destruction. But now a new alien threat appears on the event horizon of the Interstellar Alliance, a force more ancient and powerful than anything previously encountered. The only obstacle in the way of this new race: a single, broken-down Ranger ship, under the command of David Martel (Dylan Neal), whose sole orders were to escort Ambassador G’Kar (Andreas Katsulas) to an interstellar conference. Alone, barely armed, they must defeat an enemy unlike anything they have seen before.

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Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers is a two-hour television movie created by J. Michael Straczynski (original creator of the Babylon 5 series) for the Sci-Fi Channel. The telefilm takes place in 2264 after the wars are over and a new age of space exploration has begun. Science-fiction fans are notoriously hard to please, and few have anything good to say about The Legend of the Rangers, produced in 2002 to introduce a spinoff of the popular Babylon 5 TV series. The naysayers have a point. Few elements of this 90-minute pilot, subtitled "To Live and Die in Starlight," will likely be memorialized among the genre's golden moments; the dialogue is often clunky and on-the-nose, the acting is less than stellar, and the effects work, while pretty good, doesn't live up to the standard set by Stargate, Farscape, and others. Nevertheless, there's a reasonably compelling story here, involving the elite Rangers (made up of humans and aliens alike, including the Minbari, who sport "head bones" instead of hair and whose cute little ears are placed on the sides of their necks) and the threat posed to the universe by a mysterious new foe known as "the Hand" (these are some seriously bad dudes, a race that has lain dormant for many years but is now back with a vengeance). Front and center is human Ranger David Martell (played by Dylan Neal). Court-martialed for choosing to save his crew rather then lead them to certain death (in violation of a code mandating that "we do not retreat, whatever the reason"), he's put in command of the Liandra, a ship that's not only funkier than Han Solo's Millennium Falcon but haunted to boot. Of course, as events play out, Martell and his pals end up as the last line of defense against the Hand, not only pitted against these implacable enemies but also dealing with a traitor among the good guys. The themes (honor vs. expediency, dark forces arrayed against peace-seekers, human impetuousness tangling with ancient alien wisdom) are familiar, and the outcome is far from unpredictable. Still, there are a lot less entertaining ways to spend 90 minutes than with Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers. --Sam Graham