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Her latest novel, “The Road Home,” is concerned with the struggles of a widowed, middle-aged immigrant, Lev, who leaves his Russian village when the sawmill closes.
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By Tara Bennett
Updated: Aug 16, 2023 8:20 pm
Posted: Aug 16, 2023 8:19 pm
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.
Jeffrey Sinclair
John Sheridan
Susan Ivanova
Michael Garibaldi
Delenn
Stephen Franklin
Babylon 5: The Road Home is a worthwhile installment for longtime Babylon 5 fans that have been waiting nearly two decades for anything new in the canon. J. Michael Straczynski’s script stridently wears its heart on its sleeve, which will likely land for nostalgic old-timers but play a little cloying for those without prior investment. The standalo...
Review scoring
good
The animated movie Babylon 5: The Road Home gives fans the handsomest version of the beloved franchise and a nostalgic story that celebrates the classic characters.
Tara Bennett
May 21, 2007 · Rose Tremain. 3.88. 9,968 ratings940 reviews. In the story of Lev, newly arrived in London from Eastern Europe, Rose Tremain has written a wise and witty book about the contemporary migrant experience. On the coach, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving. . . .
- (9.9K)
- Paperback
Aug 26, 2008 · One of the best from the versatile Tremain, who keeps on challenging herself, and rewarding readers. bookshelf. shop now. amazon. A displaced European’s Candide-like progress through contemporary London is charted in this ambitious novel from the Whitbread Award–winning British author ( The Colour, 2003, etc.).
The Road Home was positively received by critics. Lesley McDowell, in a review for The Independent, wrote that Tremain consistently and accurately captured the isolation of Lev and other immigrants. [1] .
Jan 23, 2011 · Review. The Road Home. by Rose Tremain. Two months after its publication, everybody ought to be talking about THE ROAD HOME. It ought to be the book of the year, and it isn’t. It’s my book of the year, though. I dreaded an uplifting parable of the Immigrant Experience.
The film was shot immediately after Zhang Yimou's previous film, Not One Less, and was released to strong reviews in China in fall 1999. [1] Plot. The Road Home is the story of a country girl and a young teacher falling in love, and the teacher's death many years later that brings their son back from the big city for the funeral.
