dana-163 Reviews

Altered Carbon: Resleeved (2020)

Dreadful

[5/10 · 21 March 2020]

Giving this a 5 for the beautiful animation style, only marred by kludgy movement. Action scenes were surprisingly good for animation.

The rest though, forgettable. Hamfisted, zero subtlety, everyone insists on re-iterating plot points out loud, and what's with the girl grunting every 30 seconds?.

Painted up to look like Altered Carbon, but missing all the good bits.

Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab (2018) Season 11, Episode 6

S11 reaches its stride, and it's really really good

[10/10 · 11 November 2018]

I will proclaim ignorance to the historical accuracy, but this cements S11's hitting what it should be.

Some seasons have been able to dive right into the best, others like S10 take the whole length of its run to really come through.

Loved this ep. So much of what I watch Doctor Who for. Sentimentality, Time Travel as actual Time Travel and not merely a vehicle for drama, epic aliens, and a story that had me thoroughly engrossed.

Doctor Who: Rosa (2018) Season 11, Episode 3

I didn't think Doctor Who would be a show to handle Rosa Parks well. I was wrong.

[10/10 · 22 October 2018]

This was a very difficult episode to watch. Not because of the production or story, but I was ready for a bit of pop culture flattening of historical people and events. I went in thinking DW couldn't possibly get it right.

I'm glad I was wrong. It left history alone to do its thing, it left the historical events to happen for the right reasons without having The Doctor ride roughshod over everything. Not that diving in and playing with history is always bad, it's something amusing, see the Elvis and Sinatra references, Pythagoras, and just about any other light hearted romp with a historical figure.

This time it treated with care what needed to be treated with care, and the story felt like Rosa herself was left with her agency intact.

Nice to see a little of the Time Lord fury poking its head up with The Doctor confronting Krasko like she did. His role seemed a little like a two-dimensional caricature of a space racist at first, but as race wasn't addressed as his hatred I suspect it's something else. I'm filing him away for now as a yet-to-be-told story that'll be fleshed out later.

Doctor Who: The Ghost Monument (2018) Season 11, Episode 2

Strong scene-setting episode.

[8/10 · 14 October 2018]

I liked this one a lot. Doctor Who works its irreverent magic best when it's playing with time, legend and history, and The Ghost Monument's origin delivers a good taste of that. I expect this is also a scene-setting episode to lay foundations for more episodes.

Fantastic locations, too.

It wouldn't surprise me to see one character established in this episode appear later in the series at the beginning of their timeline.

Didn't make the best use of all the companions, but to be fair it's been a long while since Who has had so many - the episode flew by with as much as it had packed in so I'm not sure how more would have fitted without sacrificing something else.

Quantum Apocalypse (2010 TV Movie)

I'm not precisely sure what happened but I don't want to do it again.

[1/10 · 20 April 2017]

There are cult bad movies with a redeeming unintentional feature or two that was entirely unplanned by production, but still hit a cultural point of interest. Entertainment through luck, not planning, but still brushing by the entertainment mark.

This movie didn't go *near* reaching that point.

Nothing mattered. Incomprehensible meaningless techno-babble, subplots about entirely irrelevant people and events, special effects that started and then objects stuck still in mid air because even the FX renderer gave up mid-scene. Then nothing mattered in the end because deus ex bomb or something. If it later comes out that the production team were given $2.5million and the script was no more than asking the actors to "do some acting stuff" during a weekend bender in front of a camera with the intention of creating something in post once everyone had sobered up, I'd accept that.

I can't even tell if there was good or bad acting, I'm unsure what anyone was trying to do.

Painful, 1/10