i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

This made for TV movie was actually made to set the stage for a Babylon 5 spin off series, CRUSADE. In this movie, a huge showdown with the evil minions of the Shadows (the Drakh) is about to occur with the Earth. However, no one is aware of this and the only clues to the impending holocaust are weird dreams and visions that are experienced by Sheridan and two others who he has never met. One is the captain of an Earthforce ship, the other is an annoying and difficult to like alien named Dureena. Dureena is a thief "with an attitude" (quite the cliché) and I never warmed to her character in this movie or on the nine episodes she was in on the show CRUSADE. In addition to these characters, Galen (a reappearing character on CRUSADE) also makes his first appearance. Unlike Dureena, his character did improve over time--so the idiots producing CRUSADE decided to take him off the show. In fact, after this excellent movie with an excellent premise, it seemed like TNT (who produced the series) did everything they could do to kill it, such as moving the show about, alienating the head writer and not bothering to publicize it. It's a shame--in seeing this movie, you have a good idea of what COULD have been had the series continued receiving network support.Overall, this movie is quite watchable and exciting, but many of the familiar characters (Delenn, Londo, Vir, others) are absent. Plus I don't know if I am being too picky, but during the big battle with the Drakh, things seemed to really drag and take forever--this part could have been tightened up a bit and would have resulted in a higher score.

Nicely plotted, and working a good transition from B5 to the ill-fated Crusade spin-off not just in narrative but in mood - there's a general shift from politics towards mysticism (also adumbrated in Thirdspace, where the dream sequences were rather more powerful, even if they ultimately had nowhere much to go). This change of mood is underlined by Evan Chen's controversial scoring; personally I like his work for Crusade, but found his dry run here deeply mediocre.It's a measure of how Bruce Boxleitner's stature as Sheridan has grown over four seasons of B5 that he effortlessly and charismatically takes centre-stage here. Jerry Doyle's Garibaldi is equally assured but doesn't in the end have that much to do. Of the newcomers, Carrie Dobro is probably the only one who can match up to the old timers, though Tony Todd is his usual professional self. Opinion is divided about Galen. Specifically it's divided between me and other sensible people who think Peter Woodward should have been drowned at birth, and people who aren't as sensible as me. To be fair, he's not as dreadful here as in the early episodes of Crusade. Be thankful for small mercies.

I thought A Call To Arms was a superbly entertaining hour-and-a-half of television. Much, much better than Thirdspace, and far better paced and structured than the very good but very *flawed* In The Beginning.The much-criticised music was, in my opinion, excellent. It was perfectly in sync with the more cutting-edge, 'funkier' tone set by the visuals and script, both of which were noticeably different to B5's.Evan Chen certainly brings a new sound to the B5 universe, and gives ACtA and Crusade a whole new musical flavour. At times it was too intrusive, but that was partly down to JMS' tendency to always have the music too loud on the soundtrack. The casio-keyboard instrument was a bit irritating for a few seconds of the entire film...Generally, however, the music moved the film along wonderfully, giving it a very kinetic feel. This music has far more potential already than another classical score. As good as the Williams-Horner-Arnold scores are, do we really want *another* imitation?The B5/Crusade crew have tried something new. And it worked; not everywhere, but it worked. And it'll get better. And better.

...within the "modern-day" B5 context (which excludes In the Beginning, a prequel of sorts). Call to Arms leads neatly into the coming Crusade series, we're introduced to some of the important characters of that series (particularly the enigmatic Galen), we meet at least one other character who is played up but ultimately martyred, and unlike its two predecessors, Call to Arms gives us a menace directly out of the B5 "mythos." Boxleitner and Doyle take center stage for the final time. The pieces are in place - now we can look forward to the series itself.