Voyage of the Damned

[purplecat]

About halfway up the staircase I thought to myself "I rather like disaster movies, this will be good" almost immediately following that I got bored, as if identifying the genre immediately showed up all the ways it wasn't like that genre, or at least the enjoyable bits of that genre.


The key thing about disaster movies (and I realise I must be about the only person on livejournal who's never actually seen the Poseidon adventure) is a large cast, generally spread over a variety of dangerous situations, out of which they get themselves by a mixture of luck, guile and Sylvester Stallone's muscles shedding likeable grannies, Fred Astaire and token characters as they go. At the end of the film the survivors have "grown as people" - this usually involves healing family rifts. Voyage of the Damned had a small cast, all together in a small number of situations which they got out of mostly by the Doctor, the survivors appeared to learn nothing. Token characters were shed with enthusiasm, though, it has to be said.

Kylie, acquitted herself well, but her part was essentially a re-run of Rose which in and of itself seemed somehow stale and boring.

I don't really want to get into bashing the special, which I mostly quite enjoyed in a brain switched off kind of way, and most of the bashing I've seen just re-iterates the flaws of NuWho as a whole (plot lite, emotional journeys and themes that often fail to quite hang together, lots of crash, bang and wallop*) and its clear that those flaws are deliberately built in, by and large. At least the uber-plot in Voyage of the Damned made sense (even if almost nothing to do with the Host made any actual sense at all). The visuals were pretty; the acting was excellent (one of the areas where NuWho scores a clear win over much of the classic series); the characters were well-drawn and engaging; previous events were seen to have consequences without the show getting bogged down in continuity; the character of the Doctor continued to be expanded without becoming inconsistent; there was, in short, much to like. Mostly I was just a little disappointed that this wasn't a good disaster movie since it was perfectly good NuWho.

Perhaps of more concern to the production team than my indifference, was the indifference of my niece and nephew (avid Who fans). Niece was drawn back to the attractions of her new laptop almost immediately and nephew left the room with G. before the end to play elsewhere. The audience figures may have been impressive but they have a crucial problem if they are no longer engaging the pre-teens.

* though I find it particularly odd when classic Who fans criticise NuWho for padding stories with action - when classic Who generally padded terribly, mostly with people running slowly down corridors and capture/escape cycles. Yes classic Who had more time to fill, but even so.


As an aside, I always find it interesting to see the reactions of my nieces and nephew to Dr Who. 42, a largely unloved episode of last season, amongst both new and old fans so far as I can see, was a clear winner for them - and the sight of two six year old girls (and G - age four) all lined up in front of two eight year old boys chanting "burn with me" is actually quite scary.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how far the Doctor by himself deserves all the credit for saving the Titanic; unhappy as I am with the 'I'm the Doctor... Kasterborus... save you... save planet below' speech, it did underline that while the survivors of the explosion, and the human race, were for the most part saved, most of the people around the Doctor were inspired to acts of bravery which ended in their own deaths. The Doctor ends up furious that he can't save Astrid (that she is an echo of Rose, whom he lost and now won't talk about, effectively denying her by insisting that he travels alone) and Mr Copper's rhetorical question about having the power of life and death here adds a more sinister tone to the Doctor's frustration.

My cousins' boys, aged between six and nine, spent much of Boxing Day prefacing sentences with 'Information' which shows that the programme had some effect...

[purplecat]

I wasn't thinking of saving the Titanic specifically, but of the individual peril/escape sequences. Though even there I'm a little unfair, one is resolved by BannaKaffaLatta and the other by Phoon (sp?) though both sacrifice their lives in the process. However most are resolved by the Doctor talking to the Host, and in fact, there aren't enough environmental hazards to be overcome for a good disaster movie either.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

The disaster movie model being used is specifically that of The Poseidon Adventure, with one small group of survivors being taken through the stricken vessel, rather than the more diffuse The Towering Inferno. There's really only one set piece environmental hazard, as you say, at which point the model is rather left behind.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Well, RTD and the BBC and nuWho supporters in general keep telling everyone how much better NuWho is than Classic Who so, hey, we judge it by higher standards (i.e. the same standards by which we judge other contemporary drama.)

[purplecat]

To be honest I don't watch much contemporary drama (certainly nothing that isn't basically framed as Sci-Fi or Investigative drama or the West Wing though that probably doesn't count as contemporary any more) and I don't spend a lot of time listening to RTD or the publicity. I also wanted to judge VotD as a piece of NuWho rather than as a basis for critiquing NuWho as a whole and I think it succeeded as a piece of NuWho. I think its hard to compare it to most contemporary drama I'm aware of since its trying to be a family piece, which they are not, a niche it has re-invented and whose rules it has largely defined. I only watched one episode of the new Robin Hood and NuWho compares reasonably well to Primeval - these being the only other two shows I'm aware of which are trying for the same audience. Primeval, what I've seen of it, handles characterisation and themes more consistently but falls down badly in terms of basic set-up which makes no sense on a human/political level. As far as individual episodes go Primeval offers nothing as good as Blink or Girl in the Fireplace and its Pterodactyl episode is easily worse than anything NuWho has offered in terms of being just dull and stupid - well 42 is probably close.

In my opinion both Nu and Classic Who have their strengths and weaknesses. On the whole the strengths of the classic series play better to my predilections that the strengths of NuWho but that's largely a personal thing. I would have liked the classic series to have handled ongoing characterisation a little better (over the whole run rather than the individual places where the production team are clearly interested in this - broadly speaking early Hartnell and the McCoy years) which is the only place of interest to me where NuWho is at least aspiring to beat it but I feel NuWho often fumbles this and I'm not clear in my mind whether I prefer no ongoing characterisation to botched ongoing characterisation.

On the other hand I would like NuWho to treat plot as more than a thin excuse to move characters from emotional point A to emotional point B with plenty of action in between and sometimes it manages this, but more by accident than design it would appear. I'd like it to try and imagine strange new worlds and varying cultures but criticising and individual episode for failing to do this seems a bit pointless somehow.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

The difference between Primeval and nuWho is that the six episodes of Primeval are internally consistent, and nuWho isn't. Also, they are funnier, for the most part...