When Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” arrived in the early 2000s, it changed the genre and was critically acclaimed on all sides. Then, as happens with many heavily serialised genre dramas from “Lost” to “Game of Thrones,” the ending proved highly divisive with some very vocal with their dissatisfaction of it.
Recently, Moore participated in an extended interview with Collider and talk of the series came up. One of the big reveals though was that the original cut of the three-part series finale was four hours long – almost 240 minutes as opposed to the 141 minute runtime of the three aired episodes.
It seems that when they started working on the edit, the original cut was very different in the way the story played out and Moore explains why it changed:
“The original cut was probably closer to four hours. There was a different structure in the script than what ended up on screen. The structure in the script was much less linear – it was very non-linear. I was doing flashbacks and current stuff and mixing up the flashbacks. You would see the end Laura’s story before you saw the beginning of it and then you’d come back to the present. Then you’d see another piece of Adama’s story.
It was really very challenging. When you read it…it was like ‘Wow!’ It was really a huge thing to wrap your mind around. Everyone got really excited about it. When you laid it out like that in film it was really hard to follow. As much as I wanted it to work, people around me were going ‘I’m not sure it works. Maybe you should make it linear’.
Then I started feeling like maybe you’re right. So it just became a more linear piece in that all the flashbacks lined up chronologically instead of doing them all the flashbacks out of order. Once you did that it changed the fundamental structure.
There were some scenes that worked and some scenes going too long. So that’s the difference between the four hour and the three hour was. It was really just changing the structure, tightening up, and making the usual cuts and edits you do on almost any piece of film to just get it down to its fighting weight.”
Moore says he hasn’t seen his original cut (which is unfinished) since that initial viewing, but confirms it does exist – as does a longer version of the introductory mini-series that was never seen. In the case of entertainment though, longer doesn’t always mean better.
Head over to Collider for the full interview which contains a bunch more.
