Long time, no rant folks! Hope you didn’t miss me too much! ... Because honestly, the feelings probably weren’t reciprocated…
So, Doctor Who. That’s certainly gotten quite a rise in popularity, hasn’t it? If you’re not in on the craze, I’ll break it on down for ya. So this guy, right? He’s not this ordinary guy though. He’s this time traveler, known as a Time Lord (they look like us, but they don’t age like us!). He travels in a police call box (courtesy of the 60’s!) with different companions through time and space. What do they do with this amazing power? Usually find all kinds of problems (by accident!) and solve them, saving said time and space. Many aliens and Dalek’s abound! After a certain point, when one actor’s run on the show would be up, they’d create a scenario where the character would be dying, only to have him regenerate into a whole new Doctor, with the memories of his previous self. A simple formula that’s more or less worked for the last 50 years! That’s right folks. This show is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. What began as a small, low-budget science fiction television series has now become a high-engrossing low-budget science fiction television series, with a fan-base comparable to that of Star Wars. Yes, it’s THAT popular.
What’s kept it going for so long? Well, to be honest, it wasn’t always doing so great. The first few years were pretty solid, with an excellent pickup by this guy in a long scarf in the 70’s. (You may have heard of him; Tom Baker’s pretty iconic now.) Things got a bit rocky in the middle, with arguable reasons as to what brought the show’s popularity down (*cough cough* the Colin Baker years *cough cough cough* Poor bastard *cough cough* He got the crap end of the stick for doing what the writers and directors told him to do *cough cough holycrapthatsalotofcoughing cough cough*). Once 2005 hit, the show was rebooted with surprisingly awesome results. The Doctors also became younger, which therefore brought about a ridiculous number of fangirls into the show. Said fangirls are also the reason I avoided even getting into this show until about a year and a half ago. If there’s one train I have no desire to hitch a ride on, it’s the ol’ HYPE TRAIN! Lucky for THOSE annoying people, the show is freaking awesome and I’ve been trying to watch it all to make up for lost times. What, how was I supposed to know the hype was actually justified for once!?
Flash forward to now, and we’ve finally got a big fancy movie to justify this whole shebang. The current Doctor (Matt Smith) meets with his former self, the 10th Doctor (David “Best Hair Evar!” Tennant) to get involved with a topic the show kind of danced around ever since the reboot began: The Great Time War! Yes, not only do we finally learn what happened in this war that caused every other Time Lord to lose their lives in it. (Not a spoiler by the way for those who don’t know Who! They say that almost right after the reboot starts!) Without going into too many other details (because believe me, there are a LOT of details I could go into), things get crazy pretty fast. Steven Moffat has been building up to writing this story for quite some time after Russel T. Davies left the mount, and boy was there a lot of ground to cover.
Something I should get out of the way is that this movie is NOT for new fans. Seriously, if you start with this, you’re pretty much asking for a grenade to go off in your head; that’s how fast it will explode over what you’re seeing on-screen (especially if you saw it in 3D!). There are a lot of plot threads that were touched on, with many many many many many many MANY more that can still be expanded onto. I can respect Moffat not wanting to go back to the material that Davies had left before passing on the torch, but I was hoping for at least a few more references to it. People expecting some kind of 10th Doctor/Rose reunion are going to likely come out disappointed, and even worse than that, David Tennant’s hair is no longer floofy!!! I want my floofy David Tennant hair back dammit!!!
Overall, the movie itself is quite good, plot holes be damned. You get what you came for: Matt Smith and David Tennant taking hilarious jabs at each other, a complex plot with an even more complex result, and all of the action that one would normally expect for this type of show. If you want more than that, then again, you may be disappointed. That said, I’m not sure what else you would have actually expected from this by now. I mean bro, do you even lift, ah, I mean watch the show!?
As much fun as I had with this movie (and believe me, I had a BLAST with it!), there are of course some issues. So now that we’re past the “OMG DOCTOR WHO IS THE GREATEST; BOWTIEZ FOR LIFE!” stage of this review; I can get down to my more personal and sexy thoughts. My beefs mainly go in line with Steven Moffat’s writing. The guy has a brilliant knowledge base of the show and uses it quite often to make little nods to the classic episodes, which is aweomsesauce. The problem is when he writes these plotlines with huge stakes, only to result in little actual repercussions of any of it. It was annoying the more he did it in the show, and it’s completely out of hand here. Fans of Russel T. Davies’ writing on the first four seasons will also be quite disappointed to see almost everything they loved about those seasons get more or less ripped out from under them. Some won’t care; in fact many won’t, based on some of the attention spans I’ve seen in the human race lately.
Maybe I’m just talking into thin air… Cyberspacey air at that, but it wouldn’t be one of my reviews without me letting out my deepest most inner thoughts… about a sci-fi TV series… Shut up, I’m NORMAL!!! X_X
So there you pretty much have it. It was fun, exciting, and left a whole new dimension of possibilities for what we can expect in the future. I wish it was done differently, but I’m not going to act like that made this a bad movie by any means either. Kudos for some of the nods to the show’s own trivia, like everyone’s pal Tom “The Mother-F@#king Scarf” Baker’s cameo, and the brief and slightly unexpected shot of the upcoming new Doctor, Peter Capaldi. Even if it was just a few seconds; that was the best “giving the eyebrow” face I’ve seen in years!
8 Regenerations out of 10 (Or should I say 11 for now? Hehehe… Clever. That’s what I am…)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go rewatch every old episode, so I can complain about how the stuff I liked was better than the stuff that’s out now. Hipster Deadpool has spoken! Face!
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