Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing is apparently blown away by at least the first half of the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

See here

And here

I'm a little surprised that this was something she'd be interested in, but having done most of the Channel's own coverage of the show so far, I was getting the sense that this might turn out to be pretty good. For a while I thought I was the only one, given the incredible bitching and moaning from the fan base about the female Starbuck and how they're redoing it from a modern perspective instead of just picking up the old show like it's twenty-five years later and here's what our heroes have been up to. Someone even wanted the late John Colicos to reprise Baltar through edited clips from the old show. Christ.

If there's a main point that's come out of all the interviews I've done with the people behind the show, it's that they don't talk about SF movies when they need to make some comparison, they talk about war movies, Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down. Even more obscure ones in the case of screenwriter Ron Moore like In Harm's Way, in which John Wayne and a very flawed Kirk Douglas fight back with a battered Navy after Pearl Harbor.

This version presents a very gritty take on the material, in some ways a kind of post 9/11 Galactica. The one thing I was most doubtful about in the early draft script I've read was the use of multiple split screen in battle sequences to knit together a lot of different perspectives of what's going on. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt though and see how they handled it. The limited glimpses I've seen in commercials so far don't include any of that, so I don't know if it's still there or not.

But overall, early word of mouth appears to be very strong indeed. Regardless of your thoughts on the Channel and the way it handles its franchises (cough**Farscape), you might want to give this one a shot.