Babylon 5: The Road Home is available now for purchase on Digital, 4K HD & Blu-Ray.
You gotta feel for the Babylon 5 fandom. While Star Wars, Star Trek, and even Twin Peaks fans have been fed well with continuing stories or revivals, the B5 loyalists have been sucking space dust. But series creator J. Michael Straczynski recently won the game of licensing chicken by outlasting the unnamed Warner Brothers exec he blames for blocking new Babylon 5 projects for decades. With the greenlights now glowing, the first new entry in the franchise since 2007’s Babylon 5: The Lost Tales is the animated nostalgia fest The Road Home. The beautifully rendered, 79-minute movie celebrates not only Straczynski's patient fanbase, but the returning cast from the original series. Unabashedly sentimental, romantic, and a bit corny at times, The Road Home plays it safe by appealing to contemporary appetites for universe-hopping stories, but uses its deep bench of memorable characters very well.
With nearly two decades of downtime between The Lost Tales and The Road Home, the morbid reality is that some actors from the original cast are no longer with us, including Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar), Mira Furlan (Ambassador Delenn), Jerry Doyle (Chief Michael Garibaldi), and Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin). But those characters can live on with new voices in animation, which affords The Road Home the special distinction of being the only way Straczynski could make a new B5 project that allows him to use his full ensemble of characters without restrictions or recasting. And he clearly does that with a lot of joy, if not a tremendous amount of originality, because The Road Home is essentially a multiverse traipse through President John Sheridan’s (Bruce Boxleitner) life.
Two years after heroically ending The Shadow Wars, Sheridan hands the keys of Babylon 5’s command to Captain Elizabeth Lochley (Tracy Scoggins) and accepts a statesman role with the 12 World Alliance. While he frets about his place in the universe, he has no such qualms about his love for his beloved wife, Delenn (Rebecca Riedy). Straczynski uses the depth of their relationship as both the movie’s emotional spine and its grounding tether, as Sheridan is turned into a tachyon-triggered time jumper due to a random exposure event.
For the bulk of the film, he bounces to his past, his future, and alternate timelines which provide opportunities to reconnect with characters of note within the B5 canon, or revisit moments in and around the life-changing events of The Shadow Wars.
Yes, it’s an effective means to an end in having Sheridan essentially walk down his own sci-fi memory lane. But it’s not a terribly original way to go, considering that multiverse stories have been so terribly tapped out as of late. While just about all sci-fi franchises resort to time travel cliches at some point in their storytelling, it’s a little surprising coming from Straczynski, whose original sci-fi writing for B5 was one of its distinguishing hallmarks. Yet, considering there are no guarantees in Hollywood, it’s also not a mystery why Straczynski uses this particular trope to facilitate an affectionate look back at everything that’s come before.
The ho-hum of the premise certainly doesn’t take away from how Straczynski reframes and uses his cast in the scenarios Sheridan bounces into. Boxleitner slips right back into his role with a welcome world-weariness and a holster full of Earth-centric, dad joke-esque references. Paul Guyet also gives the film a lot of pep with his very funny take on Zathras, who returns as a key player in deciphering and fixing the quantum physics mess made from Sheridan’s chaotic jumping. It’s also nice to hear the growl of Claudia Christian’s Susan Ivanova, the empathy of Patricia Tallman’s telepath Lyta, and Bill Mumy’s still often confuddled Lennier. Kudos to all of the new voice actors who do a great job embodying the characters they step into with wit and/or gravitas, as needed.
What makes The Road Home stand out the most is how it lives so well in the animated medium. Director Matt Peters and supervising producer Rick Morales, both long-time WB Animation veterans, bring such energy to the project that you wonder why an animated version of Babylon 5 wasn’t tried decades ago. The movie’s mix of 2D and 3D animation infuses new life into the familiar space station, the classic spaceships, and the alien species – especially the bug-like Shadows, who are much scarier now. Unhampered by the restrictions of a live-action budget, every aspect of the B5 world benefits from the glow up that the animation provides. The battle scenes have more stakes, the worlds look more lush and impressive, and the likenesses of the characters to the actors who played them is just the right mix of authentic yet stylized.
As a reintroduction to the world of Babylon 5, The Road Home does a solid job of catching us back up with the mythology and characters. As a standalone film, it’s more interested in looking back than forward, which might be disappointing for those champing at the bit for new adventures. As a nostalgia piece, it shines a satisfying spotlight on the classic B5 characters and gives President Sheridan an emotional story tied to his love for Delenn, which is a fitting for their arc. It also leaves the door wide open, in an unexpected way, for more classic Babylon 5 stories to come.
