Transcendence writer to pen the Battlestar Galactica movie

Yes, there's gonna be Battlestar Galactica movie. But it will focus more on having its adaptation based on the original 1978 TV series. Over two years ago, Bryan Singer was circling a film adaptation of the 1970s TV series Battlestar Galactica with John Orloff (Anonymous) set to write the script. For those unfamiliar with Battlestar Galactica, it centers on a war between humanity and a race of machines called “Cylons”.  Since 2011, word on the film has gone quiet, Singer has moved on, and it looked like Ronald D. Moore and David Eick‘s excellent Sci-Fi TV series would be the only adaptation.  However, Variety is reporting that you can’t keep a good cylon down, and that Universal has brought on Jack Paglen (Transcendence) to write the screenplay.  Original series creator Glen Larson is still on board to produce. [hit the jump to continue]

Here is the synopsis for the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica:
In a distant star system, the Twelve Colonies Of Mankind were reaching the end of a thousand-year war with the Cylons, warrior robots created by a reptilian race which expired long ago, presumably destroyed by their own creations. Humanity was ultimately defeated in a sneak attack on their homeworlds by the Cylons, carried out with the help of a human traitor, Count Baltar (John Colicos). Protected by the last surviving capital warship, a "battlestar" called Galactica, the survivors fled in any ships that were available to them. The Commander of the Galactica, Adama (Lorne Greene), led this "rag-tag fugitive fleet" of 220 ships in search of a new home. They began a quest to find the long-lost thirteenth tribe of humanity that had settled on a legendary planet called Earth. However, the Cylons continued to relentlessly pursue them across the galaxy.

The era in which this exodus took place is never clearly stated in the series itself. At the start of the series, it is mentioned as being "the Seventh Millennium of time", though it is unknown when this is in relation to Earth's history. The implication of the final aired episode, "The Hand of God", was that the original series took place after the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 (as the Galactica receives a television transmission from Earth showing the landing). The later Galactica 1980 series is expressly set in the year 1980, though it is also claimed that the voyage to Earth took 30 years which contradicts the Apollo moon landing transmission which was only 11 years earlier.

Larson incorporated many themes from Mormon theology into the shows.