What if pilots were in a movie?

[winegums.livejournal.com]

Yesterday we talked about how we'd deal with pilots if they had only one season to play out their story instead of four, and today I'd like to discuss another way of telling their story in a compact about of time:

how would you write pilots in a movie?

(sure, we have plenty of movie scenarios we'd love to place pilots in - everyone should check out reelpilots, if you haven't already - but how would you deal with having to write pilots with just two hours of screentime? Sure, the miniseries was something of a movie intro to pilots, but how would you write a pilotmovie if that was all we got?)

  if this was a movie, there would most certainly have been outmaking after this scene  

PS: even though it's the end of the week, Meta Monday is still running, so if you have any pilots-related thoughts you'd like to expand on, or meta you feel like writing, please share it with us!

Comments

[ninety6tears.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it would depend on what kind of movie I want it to be. If they're a not-entirely-angsty subplot in more of an action film, I feel like it would basically work as a version of the miniseries where they actually manage to knock out most or all of the cylons by the end, complete with last-minute rescues or fake-out deaths, and the reunion in the hangar deck would have kissing involved of course. But if it actually went as more of an Atonement tragedy-of-missed-opportunities route, for some reason I think the story could work really well in a non-linear structure told in different "chapters," one being Kara and Zak's story, another one being Kara and Lee's story, and then one focusing on Zak and Lee growing up together, maybe also showing some of Kara's childhood, eventually circling back to the war in the present with some kind of arty subtly suggestive parallels about the damage that violence does to people's ability to love or their children's ability to love, etc. As for how you'd summarize the K/L history in little over half an hour of a longer film...LOL, I don't know, I feel like there are moments in fanfic that could capture that better than any period in canon and it might actually be better for a film to just show them the way they around around Scar, very worn and obviously desiring each other but with more of an unspoken complication that's keeping them apart.

[winegums.livejournal.com]

yeah, the miniseries is a bit like an expanded movie but pilots are a couple that really benefit from having extra time and the 'little moments' to establish their relationship (though they're obviously complicated and epic and that's made evident in, like, three scenes in the mini). And I agree that Scar captures the layers of their relationship pretty well, if we're looking at a tight time-frame to do it in.