When I first heard about the concept of Stargate: Universe I must admit thinking that it was aiming for that old Star Trek Voyager drama. A crew lost in Space, bazillion light-years from home and forced to sort of survive in a Gilligan’s Island kind of way as they sailed across the deep and dark. Di-lithium crystals running dry? How about coconut husks? Alien scum blast a hole in the hull? Get the professor to patch it with a mixture of bird guano and Ginger’s hairspray.
But the creators of Stargate: Universe, Robert C. Cooper and Brad Wright seem to have an answer for my early cynicism. SGU will not be a Voyager/Battlestar clone. We posted the SGU Comic-Con panel from sunny San Diego but Scifiwire dug into it and came up with the truth about what we can really hope and expect from Stargate: Universe.
A quote.
“The fact is that if I pitch you a story about somebody getting lost and trying to get home, that’s a story that’s been told countless times throughout history,” Cooper said. “That aspect was not unique to Voyager. What’s very different about this show and Voyager is that it’s about us, in a contemporary sense of you and I beamed off out of our houses onto a spaceship. What are we going to do, and what are our concerns? We’re not in Starfleet. It’s not an antiseptic future militaristic happy place where everybody gets along. I don’t apologize for telling a story about people trying to get home. In many ways, that was somewhat built into the first season of Atlantis as well.”
Battlestar has set a new standard for what Sci Fi T.V. drama must accomplish. We won’t be settling for less. SGU will also demonstrate a new edge not just in story telling but in how the stories are presented.
“When SG-1 started, we could not have even thought of doing this style,” Wright said. “The cameras that we’re using that enable our camera operators to move around this way are HD cameras. The lighting style that we’re approaching is not something that our [directors of photography] or any DP would even have tried 12, 13 years ago. We couldn’t have done the visual effects the way we do now 10 years ago. You used to have to lock off the camera,and there’s your visual-ffects shot. The way we have a constantly moving camera incorporating visual effects at the same time is a new advent to film.”
Stargate: Universe will premiere on Oct 2nd at 10pm on the Syfy.
