![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenBut how the hell does anyone think a Doctor Who movie would ever be a good idea? I don't even mind that aborted thing that was the Eighth Doctor's one and only screen outing, but still. Not. A. Good. Idea.
This part worried me especially:
"Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch," he said.
Translation: If they can make shit up and get viewers, so can we! Also, you should be worried when people say they're going to put aside that which they admit is fantastic. (Just saying.)
I just don't believe Doctor Who works as a movie. For starters, the show's running gags (new people goggling at the interior of the TARDIS for the first time, say) couldn't be pulled off with quite the same level of fun. The show (old and new) often struggles to stretch out a given episode's mysteries to fill forty-five minutes. How the hell would you draft a Who-plot that can go upwards of two hours?
More than that, who the hell wants to see a Doctor unconnected to his previous lives? Part of the meta-fun of Doctor Who, for me, is the sense that like its fictional hero, the series has been around, in one guise or another, for longer than I've been alive. You tend to jump in midstream or get hooked at certain easily accessible time points (at the beginning of a new Doctor; with the start of new-Who, etc.). And that fun continues with knowing that the show will go, building on what you've seen before. New-Who does this and it's a lot of fun when they do. Individual episodes are fun, but they're almost incalculably more so if you know a little of what's come before. (There was a Baker-ized voice thing and a bit about jelly babies in an episode from the last season of new-Who, and I giggled like a mad person. My sister, not knowing anything of classic-Who, didn't get the joke.) No one wants to start again. Bad as the Eighth Doctor's movie was, I prefer he not be excised because he appeared in something inconveniently awful.
What surprises me most is that, given the track record of Who movies, anyone thought this might be a good idea, no matter who's involved...
This part worried me especially:
"Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch," he said.
Translation: If they can make shit up and get viewers, so can we! Also, you should be worried when people say they're going to put aside that which they admit is fantastic. (Just saying.)
I just don't believe Doctor Who works as a movie. For starters, the show's running gags (new people goggling at the interior of the TARDIS for the first time, say) couldn't be pulled off with quite the same level of fun. The show (old and new) often struggles to stretch out a given episode's mysteries to fill forty-five minutes. How the hell would you draft a Who-plot that can go upwards of two hours?
More than that, who the hell wants to see a Doctor unconnected to his previous lives? Part of the meta-fun of Doctor Who, for me, is the sense that like its fictional hero, the series has been around, in one guise or another, for longer than I've been alive. You tend to jump in midstream or get hooked at certain easily accessible time points (at the beginning of a new Doctor; with the start of new-Who, etc.). And that fun continues with knowing that the show will go, building on what you've seen before. New-Who does this and it's a lot of fun when they do. Individual episodes are fun, but they're almost incalculably more so if you know a little of what's come before. (There was a Baker-ized voice thing and a bit about jelly babies in an episode from the last season of new-Who, and I giggled like a mad person. My sister, not knowing anything of classic-Who, didn't get the joke.) No one wants to start again. Bad as the Eighth Doctor's movie was, I prefer he not be excised because he appeared in something inconveniently awful.
What surprises me most is that, given the track record of Who movies, anyone thought this might be a good idea, no matter who's involved...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 09:04 pm (UTC)That said, a series that routinely hand-waves away explanations as being too "timey-wimey" to sit down and explain (i.e. "We have no idea, just shut up already") is going to be a hard sell for a movie audience that doesn't go along with such things when there isn't a promise of another "episode" the next week...
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 12:25 am (UTC)I'm not entirely against it. Moffat/Davies had some really good ideas for epic stuff if they'd only had the budget for it.
I'm just afraid it will end up as a big budget version of the End of Time. Short bits of brilliance with long, long, long undramatic dramatica in between.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 03:47 pm (UTC)They can't alienate the base, because the non-base isn't coming. The base is going to be difficult to appease because we're starting 12 soon, so if the movie wants to be separate, 13 is the only place to go, and doing that wrong will drive the fans insane. They could introduce some mechanism for him to go beyond 13, of course, but fans are even more likely to go insane if it isn't perfect.
If I were them, and I *had* to do this, I would forget about the separate thing, and do a movie about the Time War, having it end (somehow) with 8 becoming 9.