Well that sucked.

Remaking Battlestar Galactica was always a risky proposition under ideal circumstances. But these circumstances weren't ideal due to a series of seemingly arbitrary changes that eliminated a lot of the good will of the original fans.

By arbitrary I mean making Star Buck a girl. Making Boomer a girl. Hey, if you want to have girl power, put in new characters. The biggest arbitrary and I believe ultimately disastrous change was making the Cylons creations of the humans.  Look, by the time we have that kind of technology, I think it's safe to say we'd be pretty damn careful about making them not turn on us. And if we're too stupid to keep that from happening then sign me up as the first Cylon slaveling. Good grief. It's been done.

But alienating the original series fans is only the beginning of this show's journey to drek. Let's list off the things that help make this show a fraction of what it might have been...

1. Terrible directing. The camera work is awful.
2. Unlikeable characters.  Star buck in the original was a funny and charming character. The new one is a bitch. Apollo was a good hearted soul. The new one is a spoiled kid. Boomer was a confident solid figure. The new boomer (now a girl) is just weak.
3. Ruining the Cylons. Whether it be their ugly ships or their change of the infamous red signal light sound effect zipping back and forth (except on the ships) the Cylons suck. But having human like Cylons really takes the cake. Human enough that one could have sex with one and not know it? Think about that when you watch it. The Cylons apparently have technology to essentially create human beings and yet they're firing missiles. MISSILES.
4. Bad science. The new show's creators bragged about how they wanted to be more realistic. The problem is that when you do that, you can't just pick and choose. This is especially bad when the parts where they attempted to be "realistic" make the combat scenes far less enjoyable.  For example, gone are the great dog fights because they wanted to have the "asteroids arcade game" type affect where little thrusters have to be fired to maneuver a ship. They also pick and choose which sounds we get to hear in space. This nonsense that there's no sound in space is foolish because it all depends on your perspective and your definition of what is "sound".  A whole article could be dedicated to that but let's bear in mind that piddly things like no sound in space (so battles are largely soundless and thus boring) are chosen while ignoring that we have ships traveling through interstellar space seemingly beyond the speed of light using rockets (next week we get to see "Hyperlight" apparently).
5. Arbitrary choices of bad science.  So when there's an opportunity to make use of science to explain a bad special effect or a boring action sequence, they take it. But bear in mind, they have artificial gravity under control apparently. And the thing about that is, once you have artificial gravity, you might as well just toss out feeling obligated to put micro thrusters on ships for maneuvering. You can just channel gravity and move ships in precision dog fighting in space just fine. At least it makes things interesting.
6. The story was incredibly plodding in pacing while jumpy. Bad editing?
7. The ships are terribly ugly. One of the best things about the original was how massive a battlestar looked. The new one looks crummy. The ships are generally fairly crummy looking too. They should have stuck with the originals rather than making them look so video-game-ish.

All that said, if they had not called it Battlestar Galactica, I would say it's a decent, those mediocre sci-fi drama.  But when you have such excellent source material to work with, there's no excuse to have such drek as the result.

I would give this 2 stars out of 5.