Doctor Who - Smile

Future cities, The Doctor likes taking his fresh companions to future cities so it's no surprise that Bill gets the same treatment from Number Twelve in her first proper Tardis outing. Viewers have already seen that all is not well in the apparent paradise they find themselves in and it doesn't take the time travellers long to suss this out for themselves.

Swarms of flying nano bots are apparently linked to emoji-faced base-station droids, and their insistence on happiness from human occupants of the city would add sinister overtones to everything if it wasn't so reminiscent of both The Beast Below's 'smilers' and the 'this is a kindness' robots from The Girl Who Waited. I wasn't a huge fan of Frank Cottrell-Boyce's first Doctor Who script (In The Forest of the Night) and am not entirely convinced by this follow up. 

I do, however, like the intention of making it largely a double-hander to more fully embed Pearl Mackie into the role and into public consciousness but there is a danger of straying too far towards the late excesses of Tom Baker's time at the helm when wordy exposition regularly supplanted action. Not to worry, action does happen once the duo begin to integrate with the robots and the newly awakening citizens of the colony.

It's a morality tale disguised as a thriller, just like Cottrell-Boyce's previous fare: the robots have achieved a degree of sentience that entitles them to be considered a new species. Not only that but, as they have constructed and maintained the city out of themselves (literally, they form the buildings and break out of the walls only to deal with crop necessities or damage control) the city is arguable more theirs than it is owned by the emergent humans.

Yes it is true that damage control to these new life forms somehow translates into killing off unhappy humans but once The Doctor turns them off and on again (I'm still hoping the Kris Marshall rumours are untrue and that Richard Ayoade can be persuaded to take over when Capaldi regenerates) they have no memory of that unpleasant murdery business and seem willing to tend to the needs of the newcomers. Peace in our time.

In the bigger scheme of things this is all about as likely to affect the story arc of the season as little as Rose's first trip with the newly regenerated Doctor Ten affected season Two's grand narrative but buried right at the start of the episode an exchange between Nardole and The Doctor may prove more meaningful. Whatever vow the time lord has made to stay on Earth and guard the mysterious vault in the basement of St Luke's, Nardole appears to be integral to holding The Doctor to his promise. He also appears to be crap at his job and easily distracted with tea making errands.

Bill continues to ask the questions nobody ever seems to have asked. She continues to get few direct answers but that's ok as we love it when companions work stuff out for themselves. I'd now like to see both her and The Doctor given a meatier story to chew on: we've met her, we like her, it's time she was thrown properly into the deep end. London frost fairs anyone?

Doctor Who -The Pilot

Doctor Who is back. Peter Capaldi's final season kicked off with a new companion, a fairly rubbish alien lifeform, a robot other companion who has robot alopecia, apparently, and some bonus stuff thrown in for the fans. Well, it wouldn't be Easter without Easter eggs, eh?

The fan stuff included Daleks fighting Movellans (very Fourth Doctor); photos of River and of Susan on display in The Doctor's office (he has an office now, offices are cool); many sonic screwdrivers; montage of Bill's days echoing the montage of Rose's life before she met the Ninth Doctor in the first episode of the rebooted series; Leela running around naked in the background.

No, that last didn't happen but I wasn't sure you were paying attention.

Reboot. An interesting concept. Effectively Steven Moffat rebooted Doctor Who for the second time in five years in 2010 with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy meeting in her garden when she was a tiny. And now he's once again provided a season opener that could serve as a kicking off point for brand new fans. There is often a hint of the new every time a fresh companion hooks up with our favourite time travelling nutjob and through Bill we get to remind ourselves how out of this world the Doctor truly is. 

Only Bill isn't quite like most of the other newbies we've met down the years. No, I don't mean because of her ethnicity or sexual persuasion, those are just her being her. I mean the questions she asks that somehow nobody has quite got round to asking in 54 years of the show. Like, if he's from another planet why does the acronym which gives his time machine its name work in English, not Gallifreyan? No, you can't go back to the real first ever episode and say Susan came up with it because that ignores the fact that every Time Lord we've ever encountered refers to the machines as Tardis too. Tardises? Tardi? 

Bigger questions not yet answered mostly revolve around why Doctor Twelve is loitering with very obvious intent at St Luke's college. There is a vault he's guarding in the basement. What's in it, why is he guarding it and why did he locate it at the university (if indeed he did)? Will the answers to such questions have anything to do with Hartnell style cybermen or double incarnations of The Master/Missy later in the season? 

As I said, this week's alien was pretty rubbish, a sentient puddle that took on the form of a girl Bill fancied in such a way as to remind me of the scary aqueous life forms in The Waters of Mars from 2009. The aliens can often be lame when the season starts with a new companion being bedded in (Prisoner Zero was fairly shit, the Adipose were terrible, The Judoon looked scarier with their space helmets on). The big bads come later. The more we get to know a companion the more we truly feel the jeopardy their travels with The Doctor place them in.

For now we have a madman with a box, a robot Matt Lucas whose purpose has yet to be defined or justified and a crazy-haired new girl. And all of time and space. Good enough for me.

Ghost In The Shell

This is a much anticipated live action adaptation of the hugely acclaimed cyberpunk manga by Masamune Shirow, it has also gained a fair amount of attention for its casting of caucasian Scarlett Johansson in the lead role amid accusations of ‘whitewashing’

Well Johansson plays ‘Major’, a woman, who’s brain has been placed into a cybernetic body, and against the wishes of her Doctor/Designer Dr. Ouelet (played by Juliette Binoche) now heads up a combat unit for Section 9, dedicated to tracking down cyber terrorists, most notably the mysterious ‘Kuze’ who is rather busy making scrambled egg out of the brains of Hanka Corporation employees involved in a mysterious project 2571 , the very company that built Major…. Da Da Daaaaaa!

Much chasing of Kuze with sidekick Batou and unit boss Chief Aramaki ensues, more Hanka peeps get turned into breakfast bites, and Major discovers that she is not who she was conditioned to believe she was before her fantastic drastic plastic makeover. As she delves deeper into the motivations of Kuze’s beef with her makers, apple carts get upset, truths get exposed, mums get met, and nasty corporate bosses get even nastyerish.

This movie is a near future cyberpunk flick, so you don’t need Sherlock to deduce it’s fairly big on the CGI, but there is nothing groundbreaking in its look. The influences such as Blade Runner, Fifth Element, and under-appreciated Tarsem Singh movie ‘The Cell’ are worn pretty heavily on the old sleeve. It looks good without wowing ya, but on the plus side it’s not so busy that it makes you boss eyed, but instead allows you to take in the view, which compared with some recent fare (Latest instalment of resident Evil a prime example) is a blessed relief and gives me hope I will not develop celluloid induced epilepsy anytime soon.       Script and pace are pretty sound and overall Rupert Sanders filled the directors chair ably.

This is not a great movie. If I had to categorize it I would say it sits somewhere between Okay and good, but it is a must see. Why you ask? Well I will tell ya, and you are not gonna believe it kids! Put the whitewashing guff to one side. Scarlett Johansson was cast in this movie because she was able to convey the very basic theme of the movie, and that is asking the question ‘How far do we embrace technology before we stop being human?’ Scarlett Johansson showed us in the Indy flick ‘Under the Skin’ that she is able to physically convey un-humanness to a spectacular degree, and that is why she was cast in this movie. Miss J is truly unnerving in this film. The way she walks, her posture, the way she interacts, are all infinitesimally ‘off’ to the extent that you don’t notice it at first, but it kinda pulls you in and subtly freaks you out over time. This is an actor doing what they do at the top of their game, and it’s worth the ticket price for that alone.

The persona of Johansson’s ‘Major’ absolutely dominates this movie, to the extent that few others manage to really get a look in, but Juliette Binoche, and Takeshi Kitano as ‘The Chief’ both manage to give their characters some depth.

If like me you are into the Ghost in the Shell lore, you are more than likely to find this a strong(ish) addition to what has gone before, otherwise it’s a fairly entertaining watch that will leave you slightly weirded out by an actor with alt-human bones….