tymbus Reviews

Hammerhead (1968)

Never has the Swinging Sixties seem so sordid

[7/10 · 18 August 2019]

NAILED IT!

Despite having bought a ticket for Quentin Tarantino's new movie, I felt out of sorts and decided to veg out watching TV which is how I came to see Tarantino Presents The Swing Sixties on Movies4men and, more importantly, that night's pick, Hammerhead, a film that I had not seen since I was 13 .

Hammerhead is a British spy thriller, 'Hammerhead' being the name of the villain and the title of the first book in a series featuring the art loving adventurer Mr Hood written by Stephen Coultier under the pen name James Mayo. I first saw the movie by accident when I went to see 'No Sex Please, We're British' with my class mates for my thirteenth birthday. My parents were not wise in the ways of cinema and my Mother, who was chaperoning us, was blissfully unaware that 'Hammerhead' would be shown as a 'b' feature.

To say that 'Hammerhead' came as a shock is an understatement. Even today, the film received a rating of 15 and Tarantino noted that it was the most controversial film in his selection. All I remembered was that one scene was so scary that the even the class thug ended up holding my mother's hand.It turned out that scene was the film's opening which features a 'happening' or piece of performance art featuring the exploding or melting heads of wax work women, nude cellists and a police raid.

The rest of 'Hammerhead' is barely comprehensible. In tone the film is an Austin Powers's adventure filmed with the sensibility of an episode of the hard boiled British series 'Callan'' , although a big budget version of the Sixties TV series 'The Saint' might be the closest comparison. Anyway, the film's narrative is rambling to the point of incoherence, although not so bad as other films of its ilk such as Puppet on a Chain or the Eiger Sanction.

The film does contain a veritable whose who of British action series including the marvelously villainous Peter Vaughan as Mr Hammerhead, Patrick Cargill, David Prowse as Hammerhead's enforcer and a ride-on part for Kenneth Cope of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) as an un-named 'motorcyclist'. The female cast is also top-notch Sixties: Judy Gleeson plays a good girl mixed up in the whole mess while Diana Dors provides God tier slutty menace as Kit, the madam of a brothel.

Special mention should be made of Beverly Adams, the star of 'How to Stuff a Wild Bikini', wife of Vidal Sasoon who she met while filming 'The Torture Garden'. Adams plays Ivory, Hammerhead's reluctant squeeze and eventual doom in a clever but out of nowhere climax. Adams spends most of the movie acting as if her character were on some kind of amazing drug.

Halfway through the TV screening, Tarantino pops up to discuss why the protagonist Mr Hood let's the film down. Hood was played by Vince Edwards star of Ben Casey, but makes zero impression on the Big Screen. Tarantino gleefully points to Hood's terrible dress sense. Where Gleeson's clothes are on-trend Carnaby Street, Edward's costume is a hopelessly mis-matching blazer and trousers and, shock, a short sleeved shirt. Tarantin observed that the shirt alone made Hood look like a post office worker rather than a suave art collector and suggested there might have been many sequels if only they had cast someone like Robert Culp in the central role.

My theory is that the British production actually despised its American star. I thought this right from the moment Hood makes tea for Geeson. After a dramatic close-up on a tea bag, she dismisses dismisses tea bags as a "nasty American habit". When Geeson learns of Mr Hoods true vocation, she utterly contemptuous, "Oh God you're a spy! I was hoping you rally were an international jewelry thief".

Despite all that's wrong about 'Hammerhead' somewhere buried among the beautiful Portuguese locations, the hard core violence and the absurdly beautiful eye candy there actually is an intelligent sub-text. The film is a very Sixties celebration of bodily pleasure in the face of an up-tight establishment. Mr Hammerhead's belief that the Art establishment should not cover-up the sensual, erotic nature of female nudes chimes with the counter-culture's rejection of arid intellectualism and Establishment norms. The film underlines its message with a climax that inter-cuts a formal piano recital with another 'happening' on the beach.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

Bore of the Planet of the Apes

[4/10 · 16 July 2017]

I have never felt so out of step with popular critical opinion, but I found War for the Planet of the Apes dreary to say the least. If you are going to call a film " War for.." then It is best to actually stage a war rather than a battle for sympathy. As much Disney's Incredible Journey as anything else, WFTPA follows a group of apes led by Caesar in a mission to scout out an advancing army of humans only to find the rest of their ape kind have already been captured in a battle that we don't get to see. A poster showing apes charging towards troops in bogus Barnum and Bailey hucksterism ie a lie.

All the positive reviews have focused on the pixelated puppetry of motion caption and the CGI rendering. Yes it is excellent...to an extent. I was totally convinced human actors bought these characters to life. The apes are so real that it just drew attention to the way the virus that give them intelligence also made them act out of character. Gorillas, for example, are not aggressive killers, orangutans aren't wise old men and where are the bonk crazy Bonobos? (They never get a look-in in the Apes movies - too busy shagging I guess)

Woody Harrelson plays a psycho human supremacist fighting to eliminate a mutation in the virus that is making humans speechless. But, only minutes in to his performance, I realized that since Donald Trump's election, I was tired of watching aggressive, racist Americans. Harrelson's character is just another of the many clichés of which the film is entirely made.

There are some very specific quibbles: the aged 'Bad Ape' isn't the comic relief the makers think. His back story is confused and his former home : a zoo, quarantine center, prison looks nothing like any of these. Since when were zoos just big cages? The concentration camp is strangely under populated with human guards and those that are there fail to spot hundreds of apes vanishing down all too conveniently already made escape tunnels.

There's no emotional investment in the human vs human conflict and the climax (spoiler alert)in which everyone bar a few chimps is wiped out in an avalanche is unexpected and narratively ridiculous. It is as if the writer couldn't think how to resolve the established conflict. More to the point it undermines the mythic story arch - that's how most of humanity died? In snow? Perhaps the 'white out' was supposed to be satirical but it is unlikely. Even the building of a wall (to keep out humans) fails to resonate.

So what we are left with is a human family revenge drama in ape form. Not even the nods to the original Apes movies raise this film beyond a character piece. Again this focus on family is incongruous. Chimpanzees in the wild are promiscuous. So not only have they developed the ability to speak and think, the Apes here have also mutated into middle class family units. And again, the reality of the rendering calls attention to the unreality of the fictional universe. In a way, the original prosthetics and performances were better because they called attention to the satirical intentions of many of the scripts (particularly Planet and Escape).

Taken as a whole, this film is just dull. CGI rendering and motion caption may have progressed, but story telling remains in the past.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

Terminator: Revylation.

[6/10 · 11 July 2017]

If I had a time machine I'd go back and stop myself reading the bad reviews of Terminator: Genisys. The movie is an acceptable action romp largely let down by the quest for a young audience. This probably accounts for the lack of menace, although nothing can explain the tired reworking of set pieces reminiscent of scenes in films made over a decade ago.

The plot sees Kyle Reese send back in time to protect Sarah Conner from a Terminator send back by Skynet to destroy her. So far, so familiar. But just as Reese his sent back, he witnesses John Conner (who you may recall is Reese son) being grabbed by an agent acting on Skynet's behalf. One result is a whole new future is created, one in which Skynet has disguised itself as a multi-platform 'killer app' . Science fiction fans will easily cope with such space-time shenanigans although perennial questions that dog such tropes remain. For example, if you knew the exact date a lethal computer programme would come on line would you choose to arrive years earlier or wait to the very last moment. I mean, nothing can go wrong with the latter plan can it...?

The film's opening act provides the most fun for Terminator fans as Arnie gets to fight his younger self and the T-1000. Nostalgic violence ensues as scenes from the earlier movies are recreated and expanded. There's also an awesome recreation of Judgement Day. Science Fiction/Disaster movies set in San Francisco can be divided into two types: ones that destroy the Golden Gate Bridge at the start and ones that destroy the Golden Gate Bridge at the end. This film does both.

The casting is a bit odd, particularly Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese. In the first Terminator movie, the role of Reese was cast to contrast with Schwarzenegger's physique. Michael Biehn was bugged out and wiry. Here, Courtney looks like a young Schwarzenegger. This has to be intentional and was maybe done to remind audiences of Schwarzenegger's youthful persona - now aged and grey haired and nicknamed 'pops' (credits list him as the Guardian not even as a terminator). Jason Clarke has what might politely be called a distinctive appearance and looks more comfortable as a business executive than leader of Earth's resistance against the machine. Matt Smith gives appropriately smarmy life to the anthropomorphised Genisys operating system

Back in the day, I think a lot of fans felt Terminator was 'their' discovery. I know I did. The film was a low budget affair. Director James Cameron was a relative unknown and, despite box-office success as Conan the Barbarian, Schwarzenegger had yet to cement his position as the mega-star he would become. It seems that the Cameron- Schwarzenegger pairing is what fans really want. Personally, I loved a lot of Terminator 3, but audiences rejected it as they've rejected this movie.

Forbes on-line has listed negative reviews as a key reason for the film's box-office flop but I'd like to add lack of imagination to the mix. There's a stunt involving the characters trapped in a school bus that is only a slight reworking of a scene in Jurassic Park: The Lost World, except there a trailer is dangling off a cliff and menaced by dinosaurs which, as it turns out, audiences are much keener to see than homicidal cyborgs on the loose.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever an Avenger can

[8/10 · 3 July 2017]

One of the aims of the new Spiderman movie is to work the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Guest appearances by Tony Stark and his shell-headed alter ego, Iron Man, ease the process and succeed in a way a similar attempt with Doctor Strange didn't.

However, there is a price. Marvel comics used to respect the different qualities of their characters and for decades Spider-man was seen as too much of an outsider to join a team. That said, the gee-whiz gadgets are a fleeting addition to Spidey's costume and he does eventually turn down an offer to join The Avengers.

I wasn't really taken with the felt like quality of the red material on Spider-Man's costume, or the indistinct design elements. Oscar winning costume designer James Acheson got it more right in Spider- Man I to III. And I liked Rami's idea that Parker produced his own webbing as part of his mutation. However, no movie has resolved the problem that when fully masked, the audience is left staring at an emotion free bucket over the hero's head.

The risk with integrating everything into the MCU is everything becomes an iteration of an Iron Man movie. Spider-man has a large, unique cast of his own. Here we get the Shocker, The Vulture and even The Tinkerer (!). Homecoming is an assertively multi-ethnic take on The Spider-Man cast. It works well although fans of the comic book like me may find the new Flash Thompson - a bullying geek rather than a sports jock - takes time getting used to.

Tom Holland is a great take on Spider-Man, funny, endearing, sincere. Although this isn't an origin story, the film traces his personal development as a super hero, pratfalls and all. Michael Keaton is perfectly cast, although I wonder at the way Hollywood casting works "Hey he was a Birdman so why not a vulture!" . In the end Keaton provides the film with gravitas, nuance and intensity. By the movie's end, I just wanted him back as Batman (come on, honestly, have any of his successors really been better?)

I wasn't keen on the battle armored look of the Vulture, it reminded me too much of the Rhino in Amazing Spiderman2, but the character really was a comic book creation and couldn't survive a literal translation to the big screen without appearing ridiculous. Homecoming works The Vulture into the Marvel Cinematic Universe via The first Avengers movie. Toomes (AKA The Vulture) is keen to salvage and use alien technology left on Earth by invading aliens.

My only quibbles are 1) the final fight between The Vulture and Spider-Man is barely readable thanks to the editing presumably covering up animation difficulties. 2) Since the movie is called Homecoming it would have been good to stage a climax during and at the actual homecoming party.

I enjoyed Rami's take on The Spider-man story, recasting it in a cinematic language borrowed from horror movies. Even in the messed up Spider-man 3 this allowed the alien Venom a credible entry into the Spiderverse and delivered a great take on The SandMan as a Ray Harryhausen monster. In the comic, Spider-Man combined the schlock 50's horror with gangster villains who echoed Dick Tracy's rogues gallery. Homecoming redresses the balance away from sci-fi monsters towards gangsterism.

I don't grasp what went wrong with Andrew Garfield's version of the character but Brit Tom Holland really nails the teen hero. Next: The Scorpion. I can't wait.Actually, I can.

Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls (2017) Season 10, Episode 12

A Shot in the Back

[7/10 · 2 July 2017]

Moffat doesn't know when to stop being clever and, as a result, is more likely than the Master to shoot himself in the back. The last episode had a fantastic, poignant cliff hanger that ended with The Doctor confronted by Bill who had been waiting for him to save her. Bill shed a tear as The Docttor realized his most heartfelt companion had been turned into a Cyberman.

Tremedous. Heartbreaking. Except this episode revealed none of that was the case and our emotions were misplaced. This episode revealed that The Doctor didn't know that the cyberman was Bill, Bill didn't know that she had been turned into a cyberman and it wasn't even her tear. Ha! Made you feel unnecessary feelings! Aren't I clever! No, Moffat you are a smug g*t.

So it is left to Missy to tell the Doctor Bill is a Cyberman, The Doctor to reveal to Bill that a mental block means she has failed to realise that she is a Cyberman(retreading Clara's reaction to being turned into a Dalek) and a cyborg girl from the Pilot to tell Clara that her tears are a computer simulation.

The moral philosopher Mary Midgley would have a field day with the climax of the story which rested on that ultimate mad male scientist dream that the best form of life is pure computer programmed mind.

On top of this, Moffat wanted us to believe that the Cybermen were stupid "Monkey Brains" . Some how they had failed to realize that they were on a space ship and so couldn't work out that an exploding fruit was actually rupturing fuel conduits.

I find Moffat's bi-polar see-sawing between the categories of 'stupid' and 'clever' utterly exhausting. It is a highly personal cultural tick of his that infects his statements about his work and the work itself.

Some of the references produce arresting images but lead no where. So hahaha for the girl bearing an apple bomb. Very biblical but the reference to forbidden fruit didn't go anywhere so I won't bother to explore it further.

Other references were OK, particularly one to Grant Morrison's silly comic book story that posited the Voord from Keys of Marinus were unevolved Cybermen. The field of Cyberscarecrows was, again, visually striking and scary but since Cybermen don't experience fear they weren't likely to be scared away.

And yet, after a struggle, I really enjoyed this episode - just not as much as I wanted. By the time the first Doctor turned up, I was hooked for the Christmas special. This (Spoiler alert) is some kind of reverse It's A Wonderful Life, with the Doctor seeing what will happen if he doesn't regenerate. I'm not convinced that it won't turn out to be an imaginary story or Pilot generated virtual reality given Bill will be back.

But these caveats aside there was lots to enjoy here. Nardol came into his own and given his own love interest. And The Master fancying himself was a better exploration of polymorphous perversity than last episode's let's talk about Timelord sex cringe.

It was good to see what has been a great season going out on a high note although Capaldi is around for the Christmas special so now isn't the time to reflect on what a truly wasted talent the Embarrassing Dad Doctor has been.

And the BBC need to wake up about the death of scheduling. I was among many Dr Who fans who had to beg time off to catch this episode going out live. Some had even organized parties. TV on demand may spell the end of the traditional TV form itself, but that end has not happened yet. If EastEnders and the News deserve fixed places in the schedule so does Doctor Who.

Doctor Who: World Enough and Time (2017) Season 10, Episode 11

Masterfull

[9/10 · 25 June 2017]

It is hard to disagree with critics describing this first part of the season finale as among the best Dr Who has offered, so I won't. Yes, some of the humour was labored (Moffat loves winding up fans by calling The Doctor 'Doctor Who') and much of the story was taken up by standing around chatting (between Bill and a 'Mr Razor' who was played by an unaccredited Mark Gatiss).

But,apart from the above, this episode was chill filled and came with some nice science fiction ideas. The TARDIS crew lands on a spaceship trying to escape a black hole. The ship is so long that time is running faster at one end than the other.At the rear end nearest the black hole, enough time has passed to allow the creation of the cybermen in their Tenth Planet form.

I think Moffat himself noted his love for that incarnation of the creatures and has observed that their faces looked bandaged. Here that interpretation is actualized as we meet wards full of patients, their faces masked in bandages.

Moffat deftly mixed his own motifs with classic suspense moments such as an elevator full of as yet unknown creatures ascending to greet the hapless time travelers. Stand out moments included the realization that Bill had literally had a hole blasted through her and a scene in a hospital ward where she turns up a speaker system and finds that the 'patients' are crying out terrible pain.

Moffat is always contrived ( a single, blue alien was just a plot device to have someone on board who wasn't ripe for conversion into a cyberman) but some of those contrivances work. Missy parodying the Doctor embarking on an adventure made me laugh out load. And Moffat balanced humour and horror in equal measure.

I spotted all of the twists before they happened but that didn't make them less entertaining. I have only deducted a star because the conversations around sexuality and gender have become totally forced over the length of a season. And there was an awful lot of standing around. Ark in Space remains the unchallenged best stuck in a room on a spaceship story.

It is going to be a real shame to say good bye to a cast of characters that finally found its footing in this final Capaldi season. Word is that he isn't in much or any of the Christmas Special and with the story opening with The Doctor kneeling on an icy landscape it looks like rumors of an appearance by the first Doctor are likely to be fulfilled.

Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light (2017) Season 10, Episode 10

Eat My Light!

[6/10 · 21 June 2017]

I have only been moved to write this review because of the misinformed ideas that suggest that gay Romans did not exist and that the conversation between bill and some legionaries was totally anachronistic (which it was but not in ways suggested). As a story, this lacked the interest and even sophistication of 'Survival' own Munro's first story for Doctor Who and the last in the classic TV series.

Survivor was a fascinating exploration of masculinity and femininity , particularly the idea of conceptualising and admitting a famine, a primal anger. This was juxtaposed with male aggression in the form a youth group. I watched Survival being filmed on location and reported on the making of the story so have a person investment in the story in a way I don't have for many Sylvester McCoy outings.

Sadly, it was a time when, for me, Doctor Who was being made far too much on the cheap and location filming with video cameras didn't help anything look convincing. The story editing was also disjointed to the point that even by today's brief episodes looked sketchy and ultimately incoherent.

Returning to the recent adventure, Munro's script was enjoyable in a kind of kids' TV romp. However, critics finding the albeit contrived conversation about sexuality don not seem to have researched homosexuality in ancient Rome.

The fact is that homosexual relations were a norm. However, they were morally regulated - and not in ways we would approve of today. Mainly homosexual acts were between dominant adult males and young slave boys (12 to 20).

The Romans also linked sex with violent conflict. Conquered armies and communities were fair game, and rape was common.

In fact the most unlikely bit of Munro's script was that a soldier was executed. The death sentence was rare for free born Romans.

Doctor Who: The Pyramid at the End of the World (2017) Season 10, Episode 7

Pyramid at the End of the Budget

[8/10 · 28 May 2017]

The Pyramid at the End of the World was a particularly Moffat era invasion of Earth; no hordes of Daleks vs Cybermen but a focus on desperate emoting and talk. Fast talk replaces action.

The twist here was that the Monks had to be passionately invited to conquer our world in the name of love. Cue a fairy tale like sequence where military leaders pleaded for our planet but whose motives were found wanting and so found themselves turned to dust.

Part of the story echoed Michael Creighton, again - Smile's nano swarm being reminiscent of the author's novel 'Prey'. This time I was reminded of 'The Andromeda Strain' in which human fallibility nearly unleashes a mutating virus from a laboratory. In this Doctor Who story, we were invited to believe one scientist's party life style and another's broken glasses contributed to a life destroying bacteria being unleashed on the world.

Despite a lot of the set up being contrived, particularly The Doctor's blindness, and a laboratory not using a swipe card or touch pad door system (?!), the contrivances did pay off in a tense episode that was certainly better that its predecessor. I actually bought into The Doctor's dilemma, trapped in an air-locked room with a combination lock that he couldn't see. And Pearl Mackie one again really sold the scenario with her impassioned portrayal of Bill.

Moffat's dramatization of World Politics was less convincing - much like that Silurian story where whoever happened to be at hand got to begin negotiating world piece. I can't honestly see Donald Trump allowing The Doctor to be President of the World. And the Doctor accessing secret databases by touching a screen and his temples just underlined a worry I often have that Moffat treats SF with contempt rather than familiarity.

Cappaldi again gave a glimpse of what might have been if his previous seasons had been better written, although why Moffat clings to the electric guitar prop I have no idea other than he forgot to give this Doctor a character so the prop must stand in its stead. It was, in this story, a mercifully brief lapse. Instead we were given a dramatic count down to destruction, creepy monsters and some striking if dodgily realized visuals.

I don't know how the figures stack up, but CGI effects took a real down turn with Moffat's arrival. At time's Doctor Who has once again had the feel of a program at the end of the BBC's budget.

Doctor Who: Extremis (2017) Season 10, Episode 6

Hit and Missy

[7/10 · 22 May 2017]

It seems a bit odd reviewing what unexpectedly turned out to be the first part of a multi part story, but there were in-episode story lines and a kind of closure to some of them which made events intelligible and some kind of evaluation possible. Unfortunately, massive spoiler alert, the closure to one was that most of what we had been watching was all a dream or rather the SF equivalent, a virtual reality; a trope so common that Marvel's Agents of Shield is currently (in the UK) plowing the same furrow.

Flashbacks revealed how the Doctor came to lock Missy in a vault (although maybe she has regenerated while in there). Moffat's imagination really seems to have been caught by the opening moments of the Doctor Who TV Movie. He has already recreated the Dalek council and now stages another execution for The Master, this time at the hands of The Doctor (except, of course, he chickened out at the last moment). Why The Doctor felt sorry for Missy was unclear particularly when, the next moment, it is revealed that the Doctor is responsible for so many deaths members of a race devoted to killing other races run away from him in terror. It was a funny moment by throws The Doctor's ethics into question.

A second story line involved a mystery torn from the pages of Umberto Eco's The Name of The Rose. In the Vatican, priests are committing suicide after reading a book called The Veritas meaning The Truth. The truth turns out to be that everything that we have been watching post opening credits is a series of virtual worlds created by aliens in order to study the Earth before invading it. So this was a New Who take on the Classic Who story The Android Invasion in which aliens recreate a picturesque English village on an alien world (the Kralls seemed to be fascinated by English pubs and maybe longed to try out real ale and a plowman's lunch).

Extremis refers to a situation of danger and to the moments before or point of death. Of course none of these simulacra of the characters were actually alive, but as they gradually learned the truth of their situation it was hard not to be drawn in to their moment of existential horror.

Moffat's story had his usual visual tropes; things lurking about at the periphery of vision, spooky beings creeping up on characters. But the camera work and pacing didn't deliver the shocks quite as well as usual. In fact the pace of the story was more leisurely, an entirely good thing. I must add that I am not at all interested in the Doctor's blindness and couldn't make head nor tail of the sonic glasses vision shots.

That said, there was one stand out hilarious moment in which Bill reassured a potential girlfriend that there was no need to feel guilty about her feelings only to find an entire bedroom full of Catholic priests including the Pope. I laughed out loud.

I can only hope part two delivers a good story when the crimson shrouded mummy's launch their invasion with the help of an Egyptian pyramid or something.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Broken promise

[6/10 · 16 May 2017]

This is the second prequel to Ridley Scott's Alien and a sequel to Prometheus. Rumour was that Scott wanted to make a Prometheus follow up and a separate Alien movie but this seems to blend both projects again to the detriment of the Alien franchise.

The certificate (UK 15) should have been the give-away. This was never going to be a horror movie. There is one moment, where the android David comes face to face with a quivering pink creature that seems straight from a Del Toro movie but like all the other moments of terror, the director cuts away quickly before the horror can really be ramped up. A shower rape by Alien scene is scarcely longer in the film than it was in the trailer.

Other set ups resemble the structure of computer games in which specific threats must be confronted and overcome in specific settings before moving on to the next level. There's the escape the alien foetus back-buster in the quarantine room and the fight off the dog-like pink aliens in the Wheatfield field. Ah yes, chaff, the perfect metaphor for this movie.

Alien was once described as a giant Boo! In space but there are no real surprises here. Scott treats his subject matter with as if it were sacred scripts rather that the endlessly reworked and entirely predictable characteristic themes that define science fiction. Will we find that Man's creation will turn on the creator? Yes we will. Will we find that when two identical looking robots meant, one will replace the other? Of course, and although this feels like a massive spoiler it has actually been given away in trailer.

Some critics have seen this as a good half bad half movie but I did at least find it consistently engaging. I admit some of that was just sheer incredulity. I mean the first half, which critics like, is a stroke by stroke remake of Alien. That said, I watch the movie with a real Alien fan who bemoaned the departure from the time scale with which the Alien metamorphosizes from facehugger to adult alien. And CGI still doesn't deliver the extraordinary presence of mechanical effects, the Alien Queen (in Aliens) was a never to be repeated triumph of costume and puppetry.

It would probably be best if the Alien franchise ended here. Alien 3 was compromised rather than enhanced by the demands of Sigourney weaver's burgeoning sense of stardom, Alien 4 too cast and creatures into the realms of gurning French grotesquery and while The dark Horse comics were great , the Alien vs Predator stuff just did nothing that good.

What further moves could there be?Scott has endowed the creature with a soul and revealed its creator. I guess I'll have to go back to waiting to meet mine because I can't see this movie series going anywhere good.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Babes and bonnets

[3/10 · 16 May 2017]

I was told that Mad Max: Fury Road has had excellent reviews although an early one that I saw gave it only two stars. I can see why. Its a vast empty road with a desert at its heart. When the end credits rolled the wacky names of characters hinted at a more enjoyable movie but, like The 300 and other heavily stylized action movies, I was just left with a headache. And the frenetic editing makes 'Crank II' look like The Bridges of Madison County.

There's plenty to watch on screen and some sly nods to Star Wars, Dark Crystal (of all things) and The Cars That Ate Paris. But Mad Max barely emerges as a character (in this version he really does have mental health problems) and is hardly heroic. As for the rest of the cast, their appearance has to do much of the work of characterization as this is a film where punches, hackings and gun fire serve instead of dialogue. Explosions are the new social network.

An early shot lines up pursuing cars as if they were entrants in that old cartoon series Wacky Races but there's nothing as fun as that here. The post apocalyptic desert world is well realized but even in the future Aborigines have been marginalized. I got the impression that White Australian audiences just don't want to have to look at them, or perhaps hope nuclear war will resolve any lingering problems from colonialism.

Unbelievably (actually all too believably) a blogger has ranted that Mad Max: Fury Road is a leftist feminist plot on behalf of Hollywood. The blogger burbles "This is the Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insist on the trope women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic. And this is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, further ruining women for men, and men for women."

I can barely understand the reasoning here: women and men only exist for each other? Equality ruins men and women? But the fact is that Fury Road's depiction of women conforms to number of established types and rarely strays from soft porn imagery of virginal hotties, gun toting babes and nurturing mothers. The audience laughed at an amusing scene where Max looks up from the dusty desert floor to see a group of young scantly clad women hosing themselves down. It is all very knowing, but is knowing sexism any different from actual sexism? Anyway, the women are needed here because, like the female gladiators in Gladiator, they stop the whole film becoming madly homoerotic.

The film is excellently designed drawing on top Brit pop cartoonist Brendan McCarthy who produced a brilliant run of covers for Shade: The Changing Man and the fably mad Rogan Ghosh a dimension spanning Hindu deity cum Jerry Cornelius figure who exuberantly captured sci- fi's new wave for the Nineties in a way the current craze for Steam Punk doesn't.

The trouble is Fury Road is so highly stylized, so frenetic, it just left me cold .Frankly two stars seems just about right, but I'll give it three just to be generous.

Doctor Who: Smile (2017) Season 10, Episode 2

:-/

[5/10 · 15 May 2017]

Smile is the first Doctor Who story that I have liked because of its colour scheme although the story itself has paled over time.

The Doctor selected Bill to tutor because he noticed that she smiled in his lectures when she didn't understand what he was saying where other student's frowned (bonkers but there you go…). So it was particularly tricksy of Moffat to follow The Pilot with a story in which the Doctor's and Bill's lives depended upon them smiling.

In a far future Earth colony, the only aspect of our language to survive is emoticons or emoji. I can already hear young people groaning at this get-down-with-the- kids conceit. (Next season, aliens will no doubt seek to mesmerize humanity via flip fidgets). Nevertheless, the idea produced some funny moments when we got a rare insight into The Doctor's feelings in situations and a few scares when the travelers tried to stop their true feelings being displayed on emoji that had for some contrived reason attached themselves to their backs.

The threat came from pedantic robots and their nano bot companions which had been sent to create a threat free environment for the human colonists. Except the terraforming had gone too far and the robotniks had decided grief was a threat to humanity. Unfortunately, humans have a lot of unhappiness in their lives so cue big bins full of human skulls, the remains of those whose emotions didn't live up to the new world's requirements.

Literary science fiction buffs such as myself will have spotted the significance of the name of the colonists' space ship 'Erewhon' ('nowhere ' geddit?), which was the title of Samuel Butler's 1937 Utopian novel of the same name (utopia also meaning no place btw). In Erewhon, people who are criminals are treated as if they were ill and, pertinent to Smile; people who are ill are treated as criminals and duly punished. Erewhon lacked machines because of the perception that they might develop a life of their own through Darwinian selection. This, of course, is what happens in Smile.

Research tells me that 'The Vardy', as the new nano life forms were called, take their name from Andrew Vardy, a professor of swarm robotics at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I think his work might also have informed Michael Creighton's book Prey in which a swarm of nanobots form a literal swarm much as they did here. I was strongly reminded of Creighton's novel (not one of his best) as the story unfolded.

So Smile was not short of a literary history or of serious ideas. The trouble was that each and every one of these ideas had to be spelled out in great chunks of dialogue during which my mind, and body, began to wander. During a climactic moment in which the Doctor apparently pressed a reset button I found myself washing dishes in the kitchen.

For the most part, Smile was a bold two-hander between The Doctor and Bill. Nothing really developed their relationship and Bill was mostly confined to the time honoured role of the Doctor Who companion, asking questions and feeling threatened when the answers became too belligerent. But the two actors make a very watchable team and their run-around escapades certainly helped show off City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain where most of the episode was shot.

A triumph of location and post-production colour treatments over dramatic structure Smile was rarely less than watchable. But given the limitations of the current format, writers are going to have to avoid having the Doctor download large gobbytes of information that, in the end, leave me totally buffered.

Doctor Who: Oxygen (2017) Season 10, Episode 5

Who's Afraid of the Walking Dad?

[8/10 · 15 May 2017]

My fears that Peter Capaldi would go down in Doctor Who history as the Embarrassing Dad Doctor were born out by a young customer at my local comic shop who asked me what I thought of the new series, revealed that Matt smith was "his" Doctor being the actor he mostly grew up with (gulp) and noted that the problem with the latest incarnation is that he tries too hard to appeal to kids. More episodes like Oxygen might just turn that around as, freed from the restraints of an electric guitar and located among a cast of adult characters, Capaldi was allowed to talk in a mature, unhurried voice. The result was as good as Moffat new Doctor Who has got.

The script by Jamie Mathieson who wrote that mummy on the train one. That story was a so-soish Agatha Christie meets 'Horror Express' adventure that was hamstrung by the season's army soldier motif.

Oxygen saw miners on a distant space station apparently being turned into zombies by their own space suits. If I were still a child, I would have found a lot of this show absolutely terrifying although the direction (perhaps wisely) didn't dwell too long on the real horror moments, notably a scene where Bill is stuck to the floor, the zombie crew are lurching towards her and The Doctor's plan depends on her being killed (which she duly is).

Matheson also shoe horned in some political commentary. The "I'm not a racist, you're the racist" exchange between Bill and a blue alien was flatfooted but the somewhat on-the-nose critique of capitalism was an interesting take on the Zombie genre.

Zombies have often been used as surrogate members of The Working Class, ready slaves for the owners of production in films such as 'I Walked with a Zombie' and 'Plague of Zombies'. However, many of today's Zombie movies, beginning with Night of The Living Dead , are really a kind of Robinsonade, being reactionary tales of a few chosen survivors, the last bastions of civilization, versus a largely undifferentiated mob of 'others'. In this form, the Zombie movie has provided the structure of feeling for the 21st century West.

So the Oxygen returned Zombies to their cinematic Working Class roots. The Doctor summed the situation up nicely as another instance of workers vs 'Suits', a metonym for the ruling or managerial classes. Unfortunately, like all the stories this season, pressures of time mean what should exist as a dramatized sub text gets blurted out as rather too explicit dialogue.

Those who complain that science fiction shouldn't be political don't understand the genre nor Doctor Who's roots in the work of H.G.Wells. And Doctor Who has addressed political themes in the past. 'The Daleks' and 'Death to the Daleks' can be read as critiques of Nazism although really they just display Nation's fascination with a fascist aesthetics (the Daleks are often read as Nazis but in 'The Daleks' it is the Thals who fit the Aryan ideal and the Daleks the Nazis hated intellectuals. Writer Robert Holmes notoriously vented his frustrations with the Tax system in the semi comedic 'The Sun Makers' but the under rated 'The Carnival of Monsters' was a more convincing critique, that time of forces morally censuring Doctor Who's violent content.

It was Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks who, through stories aimed squarely at children, brought Doctor Who into an engagement with contemporary Green politics and Feminist social liberalism. However, old Who had hours in which to effectively dramatize these ideas and present social criticism as grand guignol for the kids. 'New Who' has less than 40 minutes if you take away the credit sequences and cliff hangers.

And that is biggest criticism of the current crop of otherwise good stories. No matter how good the ideas, the acting and the plotting – there's just no room for them to breathe.

Doctor Who: Knock Knock (2017) Season 10, Episode 4

Who's here!

[6/10 · 8 May 2017]

I imagine part of the appeal of this story's title for the Grand Moff TARDIS is that it echoed that old joke; knock, Knock; Whose there?; Doctor; Doctor Who?; that's right!. Fortunately that was the only creaky part of this story, the fourth episode of the new season, which continued a run of entertaining and unambarrassingly watchable stories.

The Doctor has only occasionally mined the haunted house horror trope. Notable examples include The Chase episode Journey Into Terror, Image of The Fendahl, Ghost Light and, more recently, Hide, a nod to Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape and one of the better Matt Smith escapades. No one does scary like Moffat, so much like Thin Ice, Knock Knock had scary set ups but they never really delivered on the sheer terror of, for example, Listen, that one with the creature lurking in a child's bedroom that, come to think of it, ends up banging on the door of a far future space ship.

Knock Knock reminded us, as Moffat produced stories often do, that the Doctor's companions have a real life that runs parallel with their adventures with the Doctor. It is one of the key ways in which Moffat's seasons play with time travel. This time we follow Bill and her pals as they search for student accommodation. The kids were well cast, engaging as individuals and also as types. David Suchet, gaunt with age, played a spooky landlord that made the friends an offer they should of refused, cheap accommodation in a rambling mansion with turrets, and shadows and no electricity or heating of any kind.

The story itself was a kind of grim fairy tale that bore a lot of the hallmarks of the Moffat reign. The menace turned out to be alien wood lice just going about their business and a doomed relationship kept alive by their ability to turn living matter into...er...wood. A lot of my friends have been left screaming at the screen that it is OK for aliens to be monstrous and evil. I mean would Frontier In Space have been quite as much fun without the Ogrons, the Master or the Daleks? The answer that you are looking for is 'No'. But really aliens for Moffat are just dues ex machine. They are shoe horned in with powers precisely designed to deliver particular settings , ambiances, and moments that he wants on screen.

Mark Bartlett's script nicely caught the themes and ambiances that have (barely) held Moffat's seasons together with a nice nod to Doctor Who's past. Bill calling the Doctor 'Grandfather' could not help but recall Susan and the first Doctor's granddaughter/grandfather relationship. At least it is better that Capaldi's Embarrassing Dad Doctor and despite Bill's embarrassment he got on fine with her pals.

There were standout moments including the first appearance of a human preserved in wood and one of the students largely absorbed by the wood but kept alive by a stuck record. The wood lice themselves (named Dryads after wood nymphs) were a little over familiar in form and movement. I may be doing programmers a disservice but I got the impression that their CGI moves were governed by a 'plug in' responsible for the scarab beetle's movements in The Mummy series.

Bartlette fitted a lot into the show's scant running time. It was a triumph of acting and plotting that we cared about the student's and their driven landlord scared by intimations of mortality (another Moffat theme from a show runner who seems to live in fear of his own death). We even got a PS in the form of a return to the vault. I was mildly interested in what was contained there in but it now seems certain to be Missy (or perhaps the Master?). The Sixth Doctor was the only incarnation to play piano and the first Doctor wouldn't be reveling in children being eaten so there's one of my theories out of the window.

Knock, Knock was familiar but neither creaky nor wooden. I would welcome the return of cliff hanger endings but I am more than happy to return next week for a run in with zombies in space suits with a life of their own.

Sully (2016)

Risky business

[8/10 · 8 May 2017]

Late in the day, my thoughts have returned to Sully, Clint Eastwood's engaging movie that tells of US Airways's pilots Captain Chesley Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles who successfully landed their plane full of passengers on the Hudson river after the plane's engines were disabled by hitting a flock of geese. The passengers lived but the geese and their kith and kin were not so lucky as the accident precipitated a cull of the dastardly, life threatening feathered fiends.

Sully became a popular hero, but the communications and data gathering Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System lead to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board which used computer models to suggest that Sully should have followed instructions and headed for a near by airfield. Here, Eastwood draws on themes from science fiction, pitting human 'gut feeling', experience and decision making against the apparently inescapable logic of the machine.

Sully himself is presented as a distinctly American type of hero, an average type of guy who you know would make a good neighbor. In Hollywood, this type is often contrasted with 'egg heads' ( in this case the investigators with their computer projections) and suspect bureaucratic types. Even his nickname 'Sully' suggests an amiable sort of guy. In Britain Sullenberger would have been nick named 'Sullen' or some sort of derogatory reference to beef burgers and made fun of until he actually became sullen (or obese from being driven to comfort eating fast food).

It is worth noting that the inquiry is just one area where Eastwood has used artistic license to create a dramatic conflict. In reality, computer models failed to predict a successful landing at either of the two available air fields. And Sully and the NTSB raised concerns about the way the film depicted the investigation as an adversarial process. But having just watched The Andromeda Strain, I can tell you a dispassionate investigation makes for boring viewing and, even though we know the outcome, Sully is never less than gripping.

What gives Sully a lot of its emotional power, is the film's up front echoes of 9/11. The safe landing is good news from the skies above New York. I did found a scene where Sully imagines his plane crashing into a tower a little on the nose, but this film is all about healing the psychic wounds of that terrible day in September. No one conveys a quietly troubled mind better that Tom Hankes, staring out over the New York skyline while waiting to appear before the investigators.

So a lot of narrative work has gone into dramatizing what would seem an already dramatic situation. We are not watching reality in the raw. And nowhere is the film more fictionalized that its treatment of risk. Miy mind kept turning to Tom Wolfe's book 'The Right Stuff' that explores the culture of test pilots flying some of the most dangerous planes ever created, prototypes of the jets and rocket engines that eventually helped Man journey to the Moon. These were planes that were so experimental that repeated failure was a likelihood and yet the pilots saw accidents as the result of a failure of pilot competency.

Sociologists have found that a similar culture exists among middle aged men who turn to motorcycling. Objectively, motorcycles are inherently dangerous where as cars are safety cages on wheels. Yet motorcyclists continually attribute accidents to errors of judgment on the part of the cyclist. What this means for the film Sully is that audiences become trapped in an unrealistic either or scenario in which the outcome is entirely dependent on Sully's decision making and skill. Either he was a rogue pilot incompetently defying his orders to land at an airfield and putting the lives of his passengers at risk or he was a highly competent and skillful pilot who drew on years of experience to save the lives of passengers by achieving a safe land few if anyone else could.

But there's a third possibility Luck. By chance, on this occasion everything turned out well. But it needn't have. And Sully's skill might not have been the deciding factor. A whole host of other things were. But that's hard to take on board. Not least because this powerful human drama plays to our deepest bias, so deep it is called Fundamental attribution Error. We want the world to be under our control even when events are the outcome of the situation.

And with well made, well acted, well scripted films like Sully it is hard to be a nay sayer.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

Just can't stop the music, but you'll wish that you could

[5/10 · 4 May 2017]

The Guardian's of the Glaxy is a film so in love with its own cuteness that it forgets that the audience might want something more than laughing along with a CGI tree stump dancing across the Guardian's opening battle with a big pink monster.

I welcomed the first movie as new space opera to stand along the Star Wars and star Trek universes but the focus of Vol2 is on character relationships and another Hollywood take on men with Daddy issues. Chris Platt's Star-lord is troubled because he never knew his father, who exists in his memory as a David Hasslehoff look-a-likee. These feelings of loss run so deep that they are given one line of dialogue in which they are established.

Cue the arrival of Kurt Russel as 'Ego' Star-Lord's biological dad. Comic book fans will recognize the name from 'Thor' where Ego, as here, is a living planet no less and one of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's cosmic 'God figures'. Needless to say, the family reunion doesn't go as planned.

I desperately needed to take a leak after scoffing a large piece of coffee cake (oh the joys of diabetes) and chose the films climactic battle to leave the room. I didn't feel I missed much. By then, the film had undercut any involvement by relentlessly using bathetic humour to undermine almost every scene.

The script feels afraid that the audience will lose interest in the film if it isn't laughing at itself. This becomes a weird self-fulfilling prophecy. Post the God versus Guardians punch up, we are suddenly asked to engage with the profound revelation that it doesn't matter who your biological dad is, your real father is the man who brought you up (in this case Yondu, the blue finned gang boss who took a paternal if not exactly unselfish interest in Star-Lord and taught him in the ways of ravaging). Now, I am adopted and have met my birth father so I should have been moved by this. I wasn't. Because it was too much to ask me to engage in any depth with characters who had only been taken seriously as straight guys setting up quips, put downs and jokes.

The sister-act between Gamorah and her angry sibling Nebula would fare better than the Peter Quill/Ego conflict because at least the two women are treated seriously. However, audiences forgive me, I couldn't remember who the heck Nebula was or what role she played in the last movie. A quick scan of Nebula's comic book history reveals that I have managed to miss her appearances in the comics. That at least explains why my mind kept confusing her name with Nebulon, 'the celestial man' (sic) another cosmic character. Except that, stop the boat, the film may play with this confusion too because the star beast the Guardian's fight at Vol 2's opening looks a bit like the non-human form of Nebulon – go image search it.

The wider conflict is between a race of haughty golden people called the Sovereign race who are first helped then scammed by The Guardians – well by Rocket Racoon actually, who takes offense at their upper crust ways and snobbish attitude. Cue a space battle played out as an arcade game, a joke that wears thin even as it is being told, but in case you missed the gag the film tells it again.

But never mind the plot what about the music? A consideration deemed so important to the film that Marvel's plot outline here promotes it to the first line of its synopsis. Sure, this collection of big, bold but ultimately banal songs helps while away the time and helped me forget the film is only ever moments away from slipping to just the wrong side of terrible (THAT terrible side being the god awful Star Trek V (pun intended). But this is no Tarantino movie sound track. In his films, the music sets up all sorts of frissons. Here, the pop tunes just make the ride pass easier exactly like a tape mix in a car's cassette player (does anyone remember Eight Track?).

If, after the next Avengers movie, there is a Guardians Vol 3 I can only hope that it takes time to developing its wider fictional universe and has the courage to take that universe a little more seriously- by that I mean respectfully. One of the five in-credit sequences reveals a cocoon containing Adam Warlock, one of my all- time favorite characters, and I want a better world for him to be born into.

Doctor Who: Thin Ice (2017) Season 10, Episode 3

All the poop on Thin Ice

[9/10 · 30 April 2017]

Thin Ice (episode three, latest season) was one of the best episodes that I have seen recently partly because the story was actually coherent even if, as a a friend remarked, Doctor Who episodes are so brief these days that it feels like you are watching the notes for a story rather than the story itself.

Thin Ice was set in 19th century London during a Frost Fair on the river Thames. The river would infrequently freeze over during what has been described as a mini ice age, although the frozen Thames was partly the result of the arches of the old London Bridge damming any ice and stemming the tidal flow of the river. See, Doctor Who historical adventures can still prove educational except that here the frost fairs are explained by a big energy converting fish chained underwater by the Sutcliffe family. Don't go with this explanation in your school essays kids!

The period was nicely evoked while challenging audience expectations of the past. I raised an eyebrow at the prevalence of Black characters, but that, it turns out, was my ignorance. If memory cheats, the memory of History deliberately over looks (a 1769 magazine estimated that there were 20,000 'Negroe' (sic)servants in London. So Bill fitted right in. Except when she failed to know her place and the Doctor felt the need to punch out Lord Sutcliffe in a rabble rousing blow for anti-racism. The sentiments were anachronistic, and, as historians would note 'Whigish' but The TARDIS ,The Doctor and chums are built for the pleasures of anachronism.

There were also echoes of fictional London. A gang of pick pockets(brought to life by an excellent child cast) worked the crowd and hats off to the writer for not over playing the parallels to Fagin's gang of child thieves in Oliver Twist . I have a feeling that the monstrous fish was supposed demolish London Bridge as it fled the scene (which would itself have ended the frost fairs) but the CGI was, to put it politely, indistinct at that point.

Sarah Dollard's script back grounded a lot of the plot mechanics so we are told a lot about the scenario but she avoided the info dumping that spoiled 'Smile'. The fish's poo turned out to be amazing fuel for the furnaces of the Sutlicife family's factories and mills, blah, blah, blah.

Instead a lot of time and space was given to developing the Doctor and Bill's relationship through Bill coming to terms with mortality, again unlike 'Smile' in which the characters mostly exchanged quips. It is sad news that actress Pearl Mackie is leaving the season at the end (will Bill die?). She is a real asset to the show and her character has left her awkward origin story well behind to strike up a relationship with the Doctor that can be, by turns, fun and deep.

The story didn't deliver the creepy unease that Moffat manages although there were scenes that should have delivered that even for adults like me: the huge human eye of the monster and the children being sucked beneath the ice by matter transporting parasitic fish which announced their presence with green bio luminescence. But I value a clear plot with scene to scene continuity more than flashy dialogue, scare moments and great imagery that makes not one jot of sense.

Thin Ice delivered a well crafted tale that had plenty for fans. For some it is a special thrill to see the Doctor & Co. adopting clothing contemporaneous with the period the TARDIS visits. For the mind rather than the eye, there were themes and sub texts (parallels between the enslaved fish and slavery ran just beneath the surface) and nods to the more superficial pleasures of the season arc.

What or who is locked up in time vault? Some guess The Master, some Missy and some the first incarnation of The Doctor (played by David Bradly) who is due to come back in the season finale and Crimbo special.

After three enjoyable stories, I actually seem to care about the answer.

PS.Having read other reviews here, I want to directly address the bonkers claims that the BBC was pursuing a left wing agenda by including a Black cast and that had they wished to do a story with Black characters they should set it it in Africa! (I visibly paled with shock on reading that). Where the script was a little crass, was in calling History 'a Whitewash'. This drastically simplified debates around History as too often the story of Great White Men.

What is the case is that London has been an ethnically diverse melting pot for hundreds of years and this diversity does not usually get reflected in representations of the past on mainstream TV or the popular imagination. A real eye-opener for me was 'The Jewel House', Deborah E Harkness's account of Elizabethan London that points to the contribution immigrants to London made to science through the development of crafts and technology.

There are complex issues around recovering lives that have been hidden from history e.g. the lives of the working class, people of colour and women. But the ethnic diversity of London, now and in the past, is not an agenda. It is reality. Live with it.

Doctor Who: The Pilot (2017) Season 10, Episode 1

2:2 for Doctor Who

[5/10 · 18 April 2017]

The Pilot (first episode, new season) took a while to hold my attention but became one of the better stories of late. Actually, when I say " of late" I mean since well over a year ago when the BBC or Moffat fitted the show around whatever else that they felt like doing. I have no memory of the Christmas special (oh no, it has just come back to me...).

The Pilot opened with a shot of the Doctor's empty office at a University where he was working as a lecturer . The layout of the office recalled one of those clocks where mechanical figures appear and disappear through doors to mark the passage of time. It was as if the cast had arrived late, much like the series.

The opening scenes set up the new companion, Bill. We meet her working in the University canteen. But where Russell T Davies would have been happy with that, Moffat's obsession with being clever meant that Bill had to be secretly super bright and capable of getting As in quantum physics. No Cole Hill School for Moffat. Only university is good enough for his companion. The Doctor kept looking at a desk photo of Susan. Was he regretting that she dropped out of school and never got a higher education ?

The scenes with the Doctor lecturing were up there with crap lectures in film and TV cf The Da Vinci Code. Moffat strove for post modern meta narrative stuff by having the Doctor wibble on about the way Space and Time were like frames of film, whatever that is anymore. Anyway academia is so over postmodernism so only first year students will be writing about the uses of postmodern pastiche in Moffat's Doctor Who. And, believe me, the essays won't be very good.

The plot itself presented a choice for the new companion- travel as a passenger with a soulless AI, the pilot of the title, or travel as a companion with the Doctor. Neither option seemed to open the doors to an intimate relationship for the new Lesbian character. Moffat was really pushing his personal envelope as a writer. He struggles with any kind of emotional attachment except to his own fragile ego.

The whole back story to Bill was twaddle. When the Doctor asked what was she doing crashing his lectures,Bill waffled around and admitted that she hoped an explanation would emerge. It felt like one of those moments a writer makes his own creative process explicit.The story should have been, and sort of was, that Bill was bright but lacked confidence or money for University, the Doctor spots her and mentors her right through to getting a degree- not a first tho' as no one likes a swot. The trouble is it is a great idea but it is unworkable. How would Bill enroll? What would her other classes be? And what the heck would her degree be? Doctor Who Studies ? Like the skeletal Cybermen in water tanks, Moffat has a great image, can't get it to make sense and just blusters through to the other side. Fortunately what emerged was what Moffat does well, which is to create genuinely scary moments and imagery. This time, he borrowed from the tropes of Japanese horror cinema with a nod to The Prince of Darkness in a scene where a hand teaches out from within an extra dimensional puddle.

I also liked the way the Daleks and Movellans were just chucked in in a few throw away battle scenes. One thing Moffat has done has been to integrate various races into a single universe that can be dipped into at will and casually - although budget restrictions may have helped this along. Moffat, more than RTD, has come up with new ways of using monsters and new kinds of story in which to feature them.

I don't know if we've seen the last of elements in The Pilot. The scorch marks left by a space ship recalled those left by the Dalek ship in Remembrance of the Daleks and the ship's voice sounded like Davros to my ears and the hand reaching up through the puddle looked like his, but that might all be a red herring.

I don't know what Mat Lucas has to offer as the other companion . I can't recall his character, and camp squealing isn't a welcome addition to dramatic scenes. Then again I honestly don't think Capaldi, the embarrassing Dad Doctor, has brought anything that great to the role.

However, Pearl Mackie WAS great in the role of Bill, transcending the script's guff. I wasn't remotely convinced by Bill's story of making a crush fat but I was convinced by the way she persuaded an alien space ship in human form to let her go, which is exactly what is required in Doctor Who. I don't hold out too many hopes for character development. I have no doubt that Bill will have crushes on all manner of female things from out of space but I bet we see less of her using her Time Lord awarded A in Space Time relationships.

I am at least prepared to stick around to see how things develop. Although, I am sorry your Grand Moff TARDISness, The Pilot still wasn't as great as the 1963 pilot which I used to screen in my lectures. Next week, deadly but cute looking robots. Again.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Less Flash Gordon more R2-Daesh

[8/10 · 16 December 2016]

Ignore today's nit-picking newspaper reviews, Rogue One: A Star Wars' Story exceeds expectations and delivers fans everything The Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens wasn't. The movie wrenches the Star Wars franchise away for its fairy tale past and relocates it on the contemporary battlefield that audiences will be familiar with from TV news. Gone, for the most part, is the landscape of Disneyland princesses and evil emperors to be replaced with a conflict between an all too recognizable alliance of resistance fighters, rebels and assorted na'er-do-wells. The result is less Flash Gordon and more R2-Daesh.

In effect an elaborate example of fan retconning, filling in new past continuity from the point of view of the present, Rogue One takes no prisoners when it comes to the fine detail of the Star Wars universe. A lot of the significance of the locations and plot elements all but sailed over my head. I struggled to recall that, as Wookepedia tells me, Jedha is the spiritual home moon of the Jedi knights or that it is also the source of Kyber crystals that power light sabers and the Death Star alike. Desperately trying to recall dim and distant continuity, my mind jumped a track, merged Samuri Jack and the first season of the Clone Wars and left me imagining that I had already seen Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) in cartoon form. But don't despair. Even fans get it wrong. So, Wookepedia also tells me Jedha is a frozen desert world. It certainly didn't look like that.

Nevertheless, you will need a basic familiarity with the plot of Star Wars: A New Hope. Rogue One deftly takes all the cards in the Star Wars game and adds a booster pack of its own. There's enough nods to scenes and dialogue from Episode IV to bring a smile to the those familiar with that film, but Rogue One adds characters and space craft that are totally new but feel that they belong.

British audiences of a certain age will not similarities between Rogue One and Blake's 7 in which a small group of assorted outcasts are, through force of circumstance united against an totalitarian 'Federation'. And a climactic scene of heroes climbing a radio transmitter tower reminded me of Blake's 7 creator Terry Nation's script for Genesis of the Daleks. But the Blake's 7 was itself created in the wake of Star Wars and drew on the legend of Robin Hood so it's all pretty generic stuff. But Rogue One also has a similarly doom laden - no-one-gets out of- here-alive vibe that resonates more with British dystopian taste. From the outset you know that most people you are seeing on screen never made it to Episode IV. It is remarkable that the film makes you care for a fictional cast who we follow, in the case of Jyn Erso (felicity Jones) from childhood to her untimely end.

Although sandwiched among the other Star Wars movies, Rogue One plows its own course. The music, for instance, cleverly recalls various established themes but veers off in unexpected directions while remaining true to Lucas's vision of a World War Two movie in Space. As the Rebels attack a portal to the world of Scarif, where the Death Star plans are stored, Michael Giacchino's score pays homage to the theme from 'The Dam Busters' (1955).

Some resurrections aren't so happy. Peter Cushing is dug up as the Grand Moff Tarkin thanks to CGI but the effect for me was just creepy- and not in a good way. As was the surprise appearance of Carrie Fisher before the drugs. It won't be long before an entire movie is made of departed Hollywood stars brought to life by photo realistic animation. I am still not ready for it.

But a greater sense of unease was caused by the all too plausible desert city under occupation scenes, particularly where a young girl is caught in the cross fire. The original Star Wars trilogy stood at the threshold of celebratory recollections of World War II heroism and the nightmarish threat of nuclear Armageddon. As such, its breezy representation of warfare was all too easily assimilated into the ghastly fantasy of Reagan's so-called 'Star Wars' defense program. Today, with the Syrian refugee crisis and the evacuation of Aleppo still front line news, I felt reluctant to fully engage with a film that is still a glorified war as entertainment story. At least Rogue One doesn't end with medals all round.

Snowden (2016)

Stone plays it safe

[6/10 · 14 December 2016]

If truth be told, I found Snowden a little dull. It is hard to make tapping keyboards dramatic, although director Oliver Stone does well to avoid the sci-fi visual melodrama of, for example, Blackhat. But there were too many occasions where I barely understood what was going on.

Stone reigns back on his own directorial flourishes- exemplified by Natural Born Killers - to tell the story straight. Some critics have unfavorably compared the movie to Citizen Four, a documentary. Although I haven't seen that, I can't say such a comparison is meaningful. Snowden is a film through and through. Stone explores Snowden's past and his present, including much that couldn't be shot by the documentary crew. Stone brings Snowden's secret world to life.

Stone uses the filming of Citizen Four as a framing device. There are 'artistic' touches - Snowden is often represented as walking alone into the distance, distorted by reflective images and white light. But my favourite directorial moment comes just after Snowden has seen field ops hack a lap top and surreptitiously turn it on to record a young woman in her hotel room. Stone cuts to Snowden making love to his girlfriend. Then, without really calling attention to it, we become aware of Snowden's own computer lurking on a wardrobe.

I felt Stone lost the plot with JFK and Snowden redeems him a bit in my eyes, although Snowden a less compelling film than JFK - it is easier to be melodramatic when you are confusing your audience with lies. One thing Snowden does do is cast a shadow over the Obama presidency when mass surveillance of everyone was the norm.

But then there had been 9/11. If you were president, what would you authorize to keep your nation safe? The answer I guess is that what is being protected is liberty and freedoms of thought , word and deed. If you loose those in the name of security then there is little left worth protecting.

Still, with UK Prime Minister Theresa May's snooper's charter being enacted in 2017, life is set to become more Orwellian in the UK. The internet is about to become the government's spy in your living room.

In fact, if the events in Snowden are true - and they are - much i have written above may well have started red flags flying in a tiny corner of the inter-web. Worrying. And, like walking down a street bristling with CCTV cameras, after watching Snowden I don't feel safe at all.

Arrival (II) (2016)

Enough of the suffering, more of the suffrage!"

[4/10 · 16 November 2016]

Arrival is science fiction cinema for women.

The film shifts science fiction cinema's preoccupation with re- enacting colonial conflict and discovery as "a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores" (Malcolm, Jurassic Park) to a relationship drama played out between linguistics expert Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner).

'Arrival' refers to the appearance of twelve enigmatic alien spaceships on Earth and to the yet to be born the birth of Banks's and Donnelly's baby girl , who we see as an infant and as a young adult in the film's opening moments. As memories of a life that has not yet occurred unfold for Banks, so does her ability to understand the Aliens' purpose in visiting the earth.

So 'Independence Day' this isn't, thank goodness. Arrival is, instead, a wistful, dreamlike exploration of the meaning of human suffering. At the same time, it explores the way reality is gendered by culture and the categories by which we perceive reality. Differences between masculinity and femininity are sometimes expressed in the opposition between 'hard' and 'soft'. On the science fiction literary scene 'hard' or even 'radically hard' SF is characterized by its focus on engineering, the physical sciences and humanity as little more than meat.

In contrast, Arrival knowingly foregrounds the soft (humanistic) science of linguistics, communication and emotion. The hard sciences are represented by Donnelly (a physicist. But SF cinema's masculine focus on war, conflict, and destruction is relegated to a threatening backdrop against which Bank's and Donnelly's relationship and Bank's attempts to communicate with aliens are played out.

In place of quantum physics the film explicitly references socio- linguistics and, in particular, the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis', that language shapes or even determines our perception of reality. As an aside, it was Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf who was responsible, in an article 'Science and Linguistics', for spreading the academic urban legend that Eskimos have anything from four to a thousand (!) words for snow. Whorf's main legacy is a linguistic relativism that posits language determines perceptions whether that be perceptions of the alien (here, the film utilizes the time honored convention of representing the alien 'other' as a kind of squid) or of men and women. In a culture where gender difference is a fundamental way of categorizing the world, time itself can be gendered.

Masculine time is characteristically linear, goal directed and enacted in the public sphere, feminine time is cyclical, marked by repetition and enacted in the domestic sphere. Fundamentally, feminine time is organized around child birth and child care. While this will strike some ears as over generalized and prejudicial, what way time should be spent forms part of the core of sexism (and racism) in, for example, women's experience of employment. Whorf himself used a study of the Hopi to exemplify the way conceptions of time can be culturally relativistic. He, contentiously, argued that the Hopi have no concept of time and that the Western concept of time as flowing smoothly from the past to the present is culturally specific. In Arrival, the Aliens work with a cyclical (feminine) conception of time.

The cyclical way the Aliens live in time is represent by the aliens' language – which consists of circles of ink and by the name Bank's gives her child – 'Hannah', a palindrome that can be read forwards and backwards. The Aliens' purpose on Earth is reciprocal – they are here to help us so that in three thousand years we can help them. Or should that be we have helped them so they would help us? As Bank's learn the Aliens' language so her experience of time changes and past and present become one. Here family memories turn out to be memories of the future – if we cling to the model of linear time.

While Arrival seems to challenge confining stereotypes of cinema science fiction, appearances can be deceiving. My first disappointment was that the film argues that only by working together can humanity secure a better future. But, despite the appeal to the Chinese mark place, the script balks at collectivism and returns to an all too familiar appeal to one man making a difference or, in this case, one woman with the help and protection of a couple of men.

But more troubling there seemed something insidious about the film's world view. It does address an audience of women and it does place as center stage much of what the Sci-Fi genre leaves behind. And cultural feminists have argued that what liberal feminists see as discriminatory stereotypes are actually real lived differences between men and women that are to be honored and valued.

By advocating acceptance of the inevitability of life and death, the absolute already determined past and present the film also feels like it is advocating acceptance of the way things are, including gender difference. No room for protesting here, or for radical rethinking the nature of gender. What will be, will be. What is, is. The birth and death are for women to celebrate and mournfully embrace.

Arrival, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis around which it is built, encourage predetermination. The result, replicated in this review, is a conflation of linguistic categories with lived experience. Whether positively or negatively valued, those categories of masculinity and femininity are constraining.

There's no place in Arrival's world of the inevitable for the collective action of women now demonstrating on America's streets against male determination of their bodies and their future. What is needed at times of change is another, more open construction of time in which time's arrow and cyclical time are both replaced and remade as something new. Now is again the time for less acceptance of suffering and more embracing of suffrage.

Doctor Strange (2016)

Not Strange Enough

[5/10 · 26 October 2016]

The Doctor Strange movie is OK but doesn't benefit to being seen on the small screen my cinema allocates to 2D screenings (It's hard to believe The Odeon, Brighton, UK once had the biggest screen in Britain!). I should have brought binoculars.

The movie combines a lot of kaleidoscopic effects with a few nods to the work of comic book artist Steve Ditko who defined Dr Strange universe. In a way the film is a triumph of visuals over plot which actually mirrors the comic book. Marvel has never used Strange to explore existing magical systems or Christian demonology instead relying on a few nonsense phrases penned by co-creator Stan Lee. Lee himself admitted he never expected to have to actually explain where the Many moons of Majipoor were or who was The Vashanti. As a result, Dr Strange's 'magic' has tended to involve firing magic bolts at his enemies . The movie's concept of magic is some gobbledygook about spiritual manipulation of quantum physics, with a bit of Harry potter thrown in in the form of a semi-comedic cloak of levitation that switches from a cute puppy to a rottweiler, beating one of the villain's hench people to death. The downside of this comes with some laugh out loud dialogue (Sling Rings anybody?) and when Strange finally has a heart to heart with his mentor, The Ancient One, it plumbs unforeseen depths of banality. A lot of the audience got really restless at this point. If the movie is like an hallucinogenic drug, this was its come down.

Benadict Cumberbatch certainly looks the part of Dr Stephen Strange, the arrogant but brilliant surgeon who turns to mysticism to heal his hands after they are wrecked in a car crash, Tilda Swindon (a bizarre casting choice) plays The Ancient One who teaches Strange that there's more to life than luxury apartments and a draw display of rotating watches. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Mordor The ancient One's star pupil until Strange comes along and reveals that his mentor is not all she seems.. As a Doctor strange fan, I was happy to see references to the character's slim mythology and a surprise appearance by Dormammu, ruler of the Dark dimension. As a throw away gag, some of the human villains are transformed into Mindless Ones as they are swept up into his realm.

In contrast, I didn't welcome the continuity tie in dialogue that positioned the heroes as Earth's supernatural Avengers. Perhaps a different director (Del Toro?) would have got to grips with the magic stuff. Since Thor and family have been retconed as aliens, I don't see, as an end credit sequence suggests, is a supernatural threat. Similarly, if the good Dr's magic is simply the manipulation of the quantum universe, I don't see how he can claim the title of 'Sorcerer Supreme'.

The origin by numbers story construction didn't deliver anything narratively special. Strange's character was basically Tony Stark in a frock.

As it stands, Dr Strange felt a bit too familiar.

Suicide Squad (2016)

Suicide Squad far from painless

[17 August 2016]

I don't normally walk out of movies but I did walk out of Suicide Squad. It was when I realized that I had missed a plot point and that instead of being enlisted to fight the supernatural villains of this movie, The Suicide Squad were actually rescuing a VIP. The prospect of another 40 minutes watching the Squad go through more fighting of blobby head transformed human soldiers was more than I was prepared to tolerate.

This really is a mess of a movie. True, it begins with the formula proscribed by William Goldman - use the opening twenty minutes to introduce your characters back story because no one will care when you are rushing to your stories conclusion - although this doesn't stop Suicide Squad continuously flashing back to intimate moments of love and death between the Joker and Harley Quinn. The trouble is, the Squad are filled with characters that are unlikable, and unlikable in pretty much identical ways.

The film has polarized audiences. Even fan critics hated it yet it has proved a box office hit. I think part of this is related to what kind of storytelling gives people pleasure. Conventions of storytelling in cinema change over time. As I have noted elsewhere, some Seventies mainstream movies are almost incomprehensible today. Television drama has changed even more dramatically. The careful spelling out of action, plot and motivation is becoming passe. For me Suicide Squad has the feel of Mad Max IV Fury Road in its breakneck story telling on the move. The two films are also market by a bleak emotional tone that I find hard to sit with in the cinema theater.

There's an anger in Suicide Squad that says more about a section of America than the film's fictional world. The film has been praised for its ethnically diverse cast but I felt most of the characters aspired to be gangstas. I longed for Caesar Romero's Joker because Jared Leto's take (a soulless meth head gang boss) seemed to create a vacuum on screen where a character should be.

The music score follows in the wake of Guardian's of the Galaxy. Like the latter, Suicide Squad relies heavily on rock music. At times I though that I was watching a 'best of' album in search of a plot. And the choppy editing gives the film an MTV feel. there's a loving recreation of the 'Mad Love' comic book cover by Alex Ross featuring Harley Quinn and the Joker dancing. It is just a throw away scene for those in the know but scenes like this, and the repetition of Diablo flaming down his enemies don't cohere in any conventional way. Montage is reborn as life style.

I like the music, I like comics, i like cinema but this wasn't the combination for me. And perhaps that's for the best. I am in my fifties after all. Youth deserve their youth. I'm just not sure they deserve Suicide Squad.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

Ahahhhahahhherrmmmmmmm, maybe not..

[5/10 · 20 July 2016]

The new Tarzan movie is an interesting take on the character but lacks the spark of the remake of Jungle Book. Creator Edgar Rice Burroughs was probably inspired by Kipling's Jungle stories to create the pulpish hero Lord Greystoke, who is brought up in the jungle by apes (Kipling opined the Tarzan books were deliberately badly written by Burroughs to see what he could get away with in print).

Burroughs himself was self-effacing. When academic Queenie Leavis wrote to him for her investigation into fiction and the reading public, he confirmed her worst fears by admitting his work did not aspire to great literature. Tarzan also draws on mythology (e.g. the legend of Romulus and Remus bought up by wolves), racist ideology - a white man lording it over a jungle kingdom (seen again in The Phantom comic strip). and ideas about the duality of human nature. The new movie intelligently places Tarzan in his historical context. Unlike the Jungle Book movie's weirdly decontextualized Jungle, here we are firmly in Belgium occupied territory, the colonial context that would later provide the setting for that other adventurer, Tintin. the look of the film is painterly, particularly the Jungle scenes which recall the work of Frank Frazetta while the ferocious fight between Tarzan and his ape brother recalls the dynamic work of Joe Kubert on the Tarzan comic strip.

All the right elements are in place, Alexander Skarsgård makes for a convincing Tarzan, but the story structure falters . The final act pulls a Belgium battle fleet out of the hat and the sudden arrival of Tarzan's army of animals too closely recalls Jumanji. It also smack of over kill - the villainous Léon Rom (Christoph Waltz) is eaten by an entire bask of crocodiles. A dramatic need for commentary, exposition and dialogue means Tarzan is saddled with an American envoy, George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson). Jackson's character allows the movie to address issues of colonialism and slavery but I found him anachronistic and his interjections intrusive.

The cinema where I saw the picture was almost empty, a nostalgic reminder of cinema going in the Seventies, a time when Tarzan was still on TV screens (I grew up with a fear of quick sand which seemed all pervasive in TV's Tarzan and Western shows). But while this latest adventure may not be the Summer blockbuster that was hoped for, it is a creditable take on the hero. Burroughs wrote 27 sequels. This movie seems to draw some of its inspiration from Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. However, I doubt we'll be seeing any more adaptations for a while.

Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)

Ghostbusty!

[6/10 · 13 July 2016]

There's an hilarious moment in the new Ghostbusters movie when the all woman team are presented with suggestions for a new corporate logo by 'Kevin' their himbo receptionist. The first is a female ghost with a frilly skirt and large breasts. The design doesn't meet with approval, so Kevin suggests that he could make the breasts larger.

The gag is typical of the knowing, self-referential humour of this new movie which even pokes fun at internet reaction to the news that this remake would have an all female central cast. Only the most glum at heart could nay-say this remake of the now 30- year-old original. Ghostbusters movie. A smart comedy adventure, it revamps the original movie and has its own feel good mood that left the audience that I saw it with in fits of laughter. Ghostbusters hooks you in with some nice one liners - a haunted house from old New York is said to come with an authentic anti-Irish fence

The central cast comprising Melissa McCarthy,Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinno spark off each other and keep the action bouncing along. The plot is sort of new and although the central villain, a hapless janitor, lacks the interest of the originals geek and Gate-Keeper pairing of Rick Moranis and Sigorney Weaver, the film holds the attention with fun references to the original - the new team can't afford the rent on the fire station HQ of the original team so have to settle on rooms above a Chinese take-away: cue running Wan Ton Soup gags. Some commentators have found the film restrained but if that means there are less fart jokes then so much the better. There is a point where action takes over from humour - a Thrilleresque dance routine involving the Mayor and the emergency services is cut and moved to the closing credits presumably to better feature the accompanying promotional song and not bring the climax to a jarring halt but it seems like a waste of a spectularish set piece. The cast have taken misogynistic criticisms with surprisingly good humour. And now the film's actually on release, they are gaining a better press. This is the feel good movie of this Summer go see it and prove you ain't afraid of no girls!