Time to beef up my geek street cred: I’ve finally watched the Caprica pilot! It’s out on DVD first, before it will be aired leading the rest of the series in 2010. By the way, don’t watch the “Exclusive Clip” on Amazon, somehow they managed to find the most boring 3 minutes of the film and put it out there as promo material.
The Good
Despite its slow, deliberate pacing the movie was compelling. The actors, cinematography, dialogue – everything was done very nicely and competently. Caprica takes place about 60 years before the extinction of humankind, and we finally get a peek into the larger history that lead up to the holocaust. Apart from the fact that we get another set of tales from the BSG universe, Caprica interestingly also depicts a society very much like our own and offers a glimpse at some of the problems we may face in the next few decades. Wrapped inside a SciFi opera we witness the birth of the first true AI, which is always cool.
The Not-So-Good
I loved the fact that Caprican society is technologically pretty much like ours (maybe 10 years ahead at most and except for the space travel thing) and as such we get to see many familiar gadgets in a slightly different format. However, at times the producers and set designers took the easy way out. I know, it’s so geeky of me, but: was it really necessary to have them use actual USB ports and other gadgets that are so specific to Earth? That was just not believable.
Another point: Some of the special effects were really bad, for example the robot fight at the end looked like it was screen-captured off an outdated FPS with very unconvincing graphics.
Downright Ugly
It annoys me that people in the movies never back up their hard drives. It’s a dramatic plot device, but it’s also really unrealistic that computer systems of the future can somehow just move and not copy data. In Caprica, it doesn’t occur to Greystone to make a frakking backup of the hard drive where his dead daughter’s brain is stored! It’s like he’s doing it to squeeze some drama out of the very predictable event when the only copy gets destroyed during an experiment 
Yawn. Not good.
Next: The religious angle has already been annoying me to no end in BSG, and the finale made it worse because it first verified the Cylons’ absurd belief system, and then hammered it into the viewers’ brains with a blunt instrument, just to make sure. Somehow they took it to a whole new level of badness in Caprica, because pretty much everything the characters do is somehow connected to religion. From the traditional hell-like V-Club at the opening (very American: sex, drugs and violence are apparently all the same thing), to the extremist suicide bombing at the center of the story, down to the very end when Adama and Greystone have their tired discussion about the divinity of the human soul. Like BSG, Caprica fails to acknowledge the existence of any kind of morality independent of a very literal concept of God(s). Double Yawn.
Now, buy it
Despite all that, I enjoyed Caprica. It’s captivating and nicely paced, with at times stunning imagery. With the imminent cancellation of Dollhouse and Terminator SCC, I look forward to a new series about artificial intelligence and trans-humanism.