Tom Salinsky

My Oscar quest begins in earnest with a trip to see Les Miserables.

Director Tom Hooper has come in for some stick in some quarters, with some grumps regarding The King’s Speech as too safe, too stagey and too limited in its scope to be a reasonable Best Picture nominee. But compared for example to the horribly TV-like An Education (also nominated, remarkably), Tom Hooper’s direction does I think elevate the material. A tyro in the Fincher, or Boyle or Tarantino mode he may not be, nor a true original like the Coens, David Lynch or Soderbergh, but he’s rather more than a plodding journeyman.

And he certainly made life difficult for himself here, taking on a beloved stage property – a musical no less – and then getting his cast to sing the whole thing live instead of miming to a pre-recorded track. (Not the very first time this has been done – among other obscurities, I believe this technique was used on Billy The Kid And The Green Baize Vampire which is worth putting on if you can bear to see yet another musical-snooker-horror-western.)

So let’s have a little chat about musicals. Once de rigeur, the form has fallen into disuse, if not total disrepair roughly since Hello Dolly and many contemporary directors are concerned that modern audiences won’t accept the conceit of characters suddenly bursting into non-diegetic song – possibly correctly. Various techniques are available to help sugar the pill. You can shoot the whole piece in a very stylised way, so that the scenario never seems to be taking place in the real world (Sweeney Todd, Moulin Rouge). You can relegate the song-and-dance numbers to a fantasy world and shoot the rest normally (Chicago). Or you can just shoot the movie like any other and hope no-one notices that people keep singing their thoughts (Mama Mia).

None of these options is really open to Hooper, shooting a story on film which is told almost entirely in song. There are a few snatches of recitative but no real dialogue to speak of. He should be thankful there’s (almost) no dancing. So, having got through the production company logos in tasteful silence, we are confronted with the absurdity of dramatic singing right from the outset.

It helps that the opening shots are absolutely spectacular, entirely cinematic and matching the energy and drive of the music perfectly. It also helps that the first person to do any real singing is Hugh Jackman, whose Jean Valjean is at first weakened and feral, slathered in grime, then genial and sleek in fine clothes, later pinched and haunted and finally emptied out by everything he has endured. It’s a masterful performance and Hooper’s approach is not simply to capture it but to let it pour out of the screen at us. The first big number, Valjean’s Soliloquy, is played out almost entirely in a moving close-up shot as Jackman flings himself in and around the bishop’s house. The live singing technique is incredibly valuable here, allowing Jackman to act with his face, body, voice and soul. Hooper hasn’t entirely rid himself of the visual tic of framing people in the lower left or right corner of the screen, but it’s less pronounced here than in The King’s Speech I’m pleased to report. He’s determined to have the actors sing to us, the cinema audience, and the huge close-ups in which so many of the big numbers are photographed mean that many performance subtleties are possible which would simply be invisible in a large theatre.

But this approach also leaves nowhere to hide, which is great if you are as accomplished as Jackman – or for that matter Samantha Barks as Eponine or lustrous Anne Hathaway who seizes this opportunity and in about 15 minutes of screen time creates an absolutely indelible version of Fantine, motivating everything Valjean does from that point on.

With Russell Crowe, it’s another matter. True, his singing can’t match those I’ve just mentioned, but to be fair to him, he never goes full Pierce Brosnan either. But although on paper Crowe is excellent casting as the relentless Javert, the liveliness of the score leaves him looking stiff and stolid. He somehow never manages to mate his own brand of driven intensity to the kinetic power of the music and his rendering of the part is amazingly limited for such a well-regarded actor. There’s so little depth here that when he eventually commits suicide by plunging himself into a weir (spoiler, but to be fair it’s a 25 year old musical of a 150 year old book) it looks less like the psychic collapse of a man whose moral framework has been shaken to its foundations and more like one of those robots in bad sixties sci-fi films who get confused to death when somebody gives them an insoluble riddle.

There are other problems too. I’m apparently in a very small minority when it comes to the performances of Borat and Mrs Tim Burton. Mrs Tim Burton, I suppose is bearable, but Borat has been allowed to indulge himself to a baffling degree, with constant face-pulling, demented gesticulations and a wandering accent which virtually makes him into a one man production of ’Allo ’Allo. I never found him funny and his mere presence undermined the drama of several key scenes.

But it’s in the barricade sequences that the wheels really come off. On stage, this is often when the production becomes most epic, but in the movie version, the art director seems to have gone off for an early lunch, leaving the second unit to shoot most of the footage in somebody’s back bedroom. It really does look cheap and poky and artificial, clearly a set, erected on a modest sound-stage and worlds away from the epic scope of the opening shots and the earlier location work.

By the end, of course, as Hugh Jackman’s life finally ebbs away, and Amanda Seyfried (fine) and Eddie Redmayne (fine) try and comfort him, I start to get a lump in my throat. The power of the story and the impact of the music are undeniable – save the new song “Suddenly” which is entirely inessential.

And that’s really the achievement here. This was never a project for a firebrand director to put his or her personal stamp on. Tom Hooper has been lucky enough to be given a beloved property which after 25 years of careful development is pretty much flawless. His challenge was to demonstrate that he had the skill, the care – above all the taste – not to fuck it up. By and large he succeeded. Crowe is limited, but no doubt his involvement helped get the film made. The revolutionaries look like escapees from a minor British public school, but making them a bit wet and spindly also makes their merciless execution in a hail of musket-fire all the more affecting. Borat and Mrs Tim Burton are apparently amusing to some. But Anne Hathaway’s rendition of I Dreamed A Dream, Hugh Jackman’s version of Who Am I and Samantha Barks singing On My Own are reason enough to make this film and reason enough to see it.

If you like that sort of thing.

To The Hobbit last night, in the relatively luxury of a Vue cinema, where I found (as I generally do there) comfortable seats, ample leg room, a decent rake with good sightlines, a nice big screen with accurate masking and an enthusiastic sound system. This all compares very favourably to, say, the modest wardrobe with a small screen in one wall which whispered The Master at me at the Panton Street Odeon.

That aside, the big question of course is can you make a film version of a 250 page book run as long as the film version of a 1200 page book without major compromises? Well, it won’t be possible to definitely answer that until late next year when part three of The Hobbit is released, but on the evidence of the first instalment, An Unexpected Journey, my answer is… maybe.

While not a Tolkein scholar, I did think it worthwhile reading The Lord of the Rings before seeing the movie versions. I had enjoyed The Hobbit as a child (book and ZX-Spectrum text adventure game) but had never got through the first of the sequel’s six sections. Having read the literary version (except for all that doggerel poetry obviously) I actually thought that the movie versions short-changed two of the most successful elements of the books – the growing affection between Legolas and Gimli, overcoming their natural antipathy, a relationship which is in some ways deeper and more affecting than that between Frodo and Samwise; and the scouring of the Shire, without which the whole adventure has no context and few ramifications.

So if nine hours of screentime isn’t quite enough to encompass the whole of Rings, maybe, just maybe, it will suit the far more slender and simplistic Hobbit quite nicely. Certainly, after an opening 30-40 minutes which is a little on the sluggish side (two prologues?), Jackson never lets the pace slacken, throwing incident after incident at our merry band of dwarves. As they ricochet from trolls to orcs to goblins, the only potential problem is whether the film will ever stop and pause for breath. When it does, first in Rivendell and then, most successfully of all for the famous Riddles In The Dark sequence, it’s arguably at its most effective.

It helps that there’s a marvellous gang of character actors essaying the dwarves and managing to give each of them a distinct attitude and characterisation, while also providing them a unity as a pack. As well as Ian McKellan as Gandalf, we also have a host of Rings actors returning for an extended curtain call – reprises from Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, Christopher Lee and Cate Blanchett are all fine I suppose, but none adds much to the story. The introduction of Radagast the Brown, played by Sylvester McCoy is more welcome, turning a brief mention in the book into a memorable character in the film (although McCoy needs to learn that his trick of going cross-eyed isn’t as amusing as her thinks).

Shouldering almost the entire burden of the film though, is Martin Freeman as fussy hero Bilbo Baggins. It’s a marvellous performance, drawing on all the actor’s strengths from his other famous roles in The Office and Sherlock but managing to find something new as well – a sort of unassuming steeliness which is absolutely fascinating to watch.

It’s not perfect. The humour is a little too broad at times, and the effects work is so effortless now – it’s so easy to transform a live actor into a CGI avatar seamlessly – that the temptation is to keep ramping the action up and up and up. I had my doubts as to whether anything made of flesh and bone could survive the ride on the stone giants, but that every dwarf could have escaped intact from the goblin’s hopelessly precarious underground city absolutely beggars belief.

It’s also worth mentioning that I watched the movie in the HFR 3D format. My thoughts on 3D are available elsewhere. Here it’s largely used fairly tastefully and it wasn’t a distraction. High Frame Rate is another matter entirely and this has caused a good deal of confusion, so let me try and clear things up…

When a movie is shot using a traditional film camera, film is advanced through the mechanism, brought to a stop so that one frame is behind the lens, then the shutter is opened to briefly expose that one frame, the shutter is closed and the film advanced another frame and so on. Clearly there are some physical limitations to how fast this can be achieved, since if you yank the film on too quickly and stop it too suddenly, you will start to shred the celluloid. The “shutter” by the way is usually a rotating disc with one missing section, generally 180 degrees.

When the movie is projected, a similar system is employed to show one steady image every 24^th of a second. This is just about fast enough for persistence of vision to take over and for the succession of still images to be perceived as a moving picture, especially if each image is shown twice so that the rate of flicker goes up to 48Hz (48 times per second) which is standard.

Returning to the filming process, some of the time, when the shutter is open, the camera will be recording an object which is moving and this will result in a blurred frame. This blur is something we are used to seeing when watching a movie and generally we think nothing of it. In fact, we are more likely to notice it when it’s missing, as when footage is sped-up to give it more excitement or when stop-motion animation is combined with live action (think of those Ray Harryhausen skeletons fighting Jason and the Argonauts). Some directors will also create this strobing effect deliberately by using a camera shutter which is open for less time, 90 degrees, or with very fast film, even less. Think of the Normandy Landings sequence in Saving Private Ryan, shot with a 45 degree shutter.

Video is another matter entirely. Wanting a flicker rate of around 50Hz (which is also conveniently the usual mains electricity frequency, at least in the UK) but not having physical film which must be held still and then briefly exposed, standard video recording exposes a whole new frame fifty times a second, with the result that there is less motion blur – the images have a smoother and more fluid look. (This is a slight simplification which ignores interlacing, but we don’t really have to worry about that for the purposes of this explanation.)

Devotees of vintage television will remember that the standard model for filming both drama and comedy in the seventies and eighties was to shoot on location with 16mm film cameras, one set-up at a time. This allowed for better lighting, more dramatic angles and so on, but it was slower and more expensive and so tended to be kept to a minimum. This location footage would then be combined with studio footage, shot with three or four or five cameras all following the action as it unfolded like a play. This often meant blasting the studio sets with light to make sure that the actors could clearly be seen by all cameras and in all positions. This flat, over-lit, smooth video look became associated with cheapness. The bigger your budget, the more location filming you could afford and the more cinematic your show seemed. But switching between film and video created a jarring shift in image quality and texture which some viewers and some directors found offputting and so in the late eighties and early nineties, it became more and more common to take video cameras out on location too, to ensure that everything looked the same.

But the film “look” was still felt to be more prestigious, to have a more high-quality “feel” to it, so with digital post-processing it was possible to “filmise” video footage, artificially transforming footage shot on video tape to give it movie-like motion. At around the same time, researchers were discovering how to add extra computer-generated frames to make film footage look like video, in order to restore old episodes of – you guessed it – Doctor Who, which had been originally shot on video but now only existed as 16mm film recordings, back to how they would have looked on transmission.

So, when watching The Hobbit in 48fps, we are undeniably seeing more detail. Twice as many distinct images flash before our eyes watching the HFR version as opposed to the standard version. And there’s no lack of quality in these images, captured as they are with the very latest Red Epic cameras, shooting preposterously high resolution. So this way of shooting is far more like how our eyes perceive the world – there’s no celluloid in my skull and no shutter in my eye-socket, and so therefore no motion blur. But it’s also true that The Hobbit‘s smooth motion, lacking the motion blur associated with the prestige of film, tends to remind older viewers of video tape and younger viewers of video games. Indeed, during the first prologue I could have sworn the image was speeded-up, but of course I was just seeing the lack of motion blur.

This then is the crux of the matter. Is a preference for 24fps cultural, due entirely to decades of having been exposed to prestige material shot in this format, compared to less fancy material shot at higher frame rates? Or is there something about a lower frame rate which is intrinsically more appealing? My subjective response to The Hobbit at 48fps is that I didn’t hate it, but I did notice it and when I noticed it I found it distracting. But who’s to say that sixty years from now, 24fps footage won’t look like black-and-white does to us – or worse?

It’s Oscar time once more. Seth MacFarlane has revealed the shortlist and once again it is my mission to watch all the Best Picture nominees – which in a way is disappointing as there are quite a few films coming out in the next few weeks which I am keen to see and which the Academy has not so blessed.

One of these was The Master which I watched over the weekend, which certainly has not gone unnoticed by AMPAS but which failed to get a Best Picture nomination. It is up for three acting awards however, and that’s pretty fair as this is an actors’ movie in every sense.

The story, such as it is, concerns Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an ex-Navy man finding it increasingly hard to adjust to civilian life and who falls under the influence of charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Both are nominated for acting awards and both fully deserve it – Phoenix seemingly in constant discomfort, his body bent and buckled under the weight of his frustration and confusion, dealing with his angst by imbibing paint-thinner or by finding things to hit. Hoffman is outstanding, grinning fatly behind a blond walrus moustache and genially attempting to crack open the psyches of his devout group of followers, through a technique which is part Freudian fantasising and part Meisner (the acting technique famed for its use of repetition).

Early on, the narrative is lean and sleek, cutting years at a time to propel Freddie into Dodd’s clutches, and throughout the camerawork is poised and careful, capturing the performances whole rather than creating them or amplifying them via cutting or framing. Amy Adams (also nominated) does well with very thin material and it’s nice to see Laura Dern, although she is criminally underused.

In the middle section, the details of Dodd’s environment and Freddie’s position within it are sufficient to sustain the interest, bar an ill-judged scene in which A Sceptical Onlooker confronts Dodd with The Voice Of Reason and gets a tomato thrown at him by Quell for his troubles. This scene didn’t work for me, not because it was didactic (although it was) but because it stopped me seeing Dodd through Quell’s eyes, and made his continuing support of Dodd more pitiable than relatable.

Like Dodd’s own bizarre crusade, the film itself fatally runs out of steam in the final third. The story design demands that Quell and Dodd continue to come into conflict, but Quell can’t be allowed to heal since that would imply that the cult healed him, which clearly would be unacceptable to writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (and probably me too). But if Quell becomes his own man and abandons Dodd then that also seems to give the cult too much credit, and so the two men are shackled together – Dodd obsessing over Quell on the flimsiest of pretexts – until suddenly they aren’t any more because it’s time for the film to end.

A very negative reading of the film is possible. From what we see of Dodd’s techniques, it seems that by confronting the subject with endless pointless tasks, often the same task over and over again, eventually the subject, rather than the cult, is forced to provide an epiphany to fill the void – and the same could be said of this story: if we watch these two people locked together in enough demented activities, eventually we will be forced to imbue the proceedings with meaning. I’m not quite ready to level that charge, but Anderson asks a lot of his audience when his story has so little in the way of a climax.

Meanwhile back to the Oscars. Once again, we have nine nominees (between five and ten is now the rule) of which I have seen only one – Argo. Here’s a quick note of what to look out for.

• Amour – a film that definitely wasn’t on my list. Two old people clinging to their love for each other when one of them suffers a stroke. Clearly, the better-done this is, the less enjoyable it will be to watch. A total lose-lose situation.
• Argo – as noted elsewhere, an extremely able piece of true-life storytelling, which may now find itself outgunned.
• Beasts of the Southern Wild – very much the dark horse, although, as I understand it, one of two stuck-on-a-raft-with-wildlife movies out this year.
• Django Unchained – who could resist? Tarantino’s assault on the Academy continues, although no nod for him as best director.
• Les Miserables – I’m a sucker for a good musical, so of course this was on my list anyway, but Tom Hooper fails to capitalise on his success with The King’s Speech and like Tarantino is not nominated in the directing category.
• Life of Pi – one of a recent spate of “unfilmable” novels which have recently made it to the screen. If they make a movie of Finnegan’s Wake I’ll be impressed and if it’s nominated for Best Picture, I’ll eat my copy.
• Lincoln – this is it, the 800lb gorilla at this year’s awards. Expect it to carry off a fistful, including best picture.
• Silver Linings Playbook – I watched the trailer for this before I knew anything else about it and for the first two-thirds I thought “ho-hum, standard issue quirky rom-com”. Then they started dancing and I decided this was a movie which had no idea what it wanted to be. To see it nominated for eight Oscars, tying with Les Miserables and behind only Life of Pi and Lincoln is utterly confounding. Clearly I’ve missed something.
• Zero Dark Thirty – I’ve got a lot of time for The Hurt Locker. This movie could be half as good as that and still better than most of the films on this list (and all the films on last year’s list).

So, already a much more promising batch than 2012 offered, but I’ve got my work cut out to see them all, while hopefully also cramming in less-essential fare such as The Hobbit, Flight, Jack Reacher and Seven Psychopaths. If you’re the betting type, put your money on Lincoln to stroll off with Best Picture and probably win the night. Daniel Day Lewis, Steven Spielberg, Sally Field, Tony Kushner and John Williams all have excellent chances and it may very well pick up awards for things like cinematography, editing, costume and sound as well. Only Tommy Lee Jones, up for best supporting actor has got real worries, up against Alan Arkin, Robert de Niro, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christoph Waltz. That’s a tough category to call this year.

I have neglected my post shamefully and will try and rewatch the episode soon to give some more cogent thoughts, but here are some quick observations…

• New title sequence and music seem to lack focus and drive, although the glimpse of Matt Smith’s face is welcome and stylish.
• Moreorless everything in the set-up is great – Jenna-Louise Coleman acquits herself splendidly, and Matt Smith is excellent as this darker, more lonely version of the Doctor.
• The nods to the Patrick Troughton Yeti stories are lovely and to have Ian McKellan and Richard E Grant is almost spoiling us
• Welcome returns too from Vastra, Jenny and especially Strax
• Don’t like the new TARDIS much. Too small, too boxy. I thought the previous version was the best since the series returned and possibly the best ever. I remember hating the Eccleston version when it debuted and I got used to that, so maybe this will grow on me too (mind you, they did adjust the lighting when Tennant took over).
• Fantastically bold to actually kill off Clara, although the storytelling was a bit wobbly there. If she’s dead, kill her off. If she’s not dead yet, then give her a line or two at least.
• Resolving the plot with “tears at Christmas” is almost unforgivably nonsensical and rather makes me wonder if the resolution to the Sherlock cliff-hanger will be that Watson closed his eyes and wished really hard that Holmes wasn’t dead.

I’m shortly turning this blog over to movies and especially The Oscars, but before I do a quick word about the New Yes Prime Minister which began on Gold tonight. As a writer myself of a satirical play about the, and called Coalition, I was duty-bound to take in the recent stage version of the venerable 80s sit-com which I found very disappointing. Trapped in a single set and playing out in real-time did the storytelling few favours, but worse was the way that the elegant wit and supple characterisations had desiccated over time, becoming hack imitations of their former selves. Naturally, the new actors couldn’t help but be compared to their progenitors, but the writing never added anything new, while simultaneously failed to resurrect glories past, and the plotting was glacially slow, and rarely managed to raise the stakes appreciably.

Putting this new incarnation back on the television seems scarcely wise, but I was stunned to realise that the first half hour installment is essentially the first thirty minutes of the play, with all attendant faults and compromises, and several jokes made appreciably less funny in the minimal rewriting. Too see such good actors as Henry Goodman and David Haig struggle with this third-rate material, while spectres of Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington loom over their shoulders is a very discomfiting sight. I shan’t be watching any more.

For various reasons, I was recently put in mind of an exchange of Facebook comments which spun-off the interaction I had on Quora with one Zoletta Cherrystone (which you can see archived here). I copy-and-pasted the Facebook interaction at the time with the intent of putting it up here, but I never got around to it. Here then is a lightly edited account, with some of the conversational cul-de-sacs removed and some of the spelling and grammar tidied up. As I haven’t asked the other party for their permission, I have protected their identity behind an obvious pseudonym. There are also some references at the bottom should anyone be interested in further reading.

Here we go…

References

California (missile) contrail

• News coverage
• Explanation

Rendlesham Forest

• General site containing a variety of information
• Wikipedia entry giving a detailed account
• Site including the entirety of the Halt tape and documents released under FOI
• Skeptical site which analyses the main claims
• Ian Ridpath’s site which includes the airmen’s statements made at the time

Happy Christmas everyone!

Here’s quick run-down of some recent productions I’ve seen. Be warned, as these reviews are quite late in the day, I’ve been generous in my provision of spoilers…

Five Go To Rehab

To complete my reviews of Comic Strip films, I sat down to watch Five Go To Rehab with some trepidation. The first Comic Strip film, Five Go Mad In Dorset, is as good as anything the team is capable of but the sequel, Five Go Mad On Mescalin, produced just a year later, managed to tarnish the memory of the original, rather than add anything significant to the corpus. With the sole exception of Four Men In A Car, everything from Red Rose of Courage has ranged from disappointing (The Hunt for Tony Blair) to ghastly (Wild Turkey) but the idea of the Famous Five reunited in late-middle-age is a very good one, so I was prepared to enjoy this production for satellite station Gold.

Performances, in general, were great. All four leads look a little chunkier, a little puffier than before, but French and Saunders are as great as ever, Richardson essays a fine line in pop-eyed dementia and Edmondson, given the lion’s share of the plot to shoulder, does a truly excellent job (although his character has been subject to even further revisions since Mescalin when he already bore little resemblance to the person in Dorset).

The execution, as ever, was the problem. The script seems very uncertain about where the comedy lies, alternately presenting fake adventures with real ones, and lazily making not one but two of the main characters secret alcoholics, holed up at the same bizarre rest home. While it’s a pleasure to see Robbie Coltrane reprise his role, mere nostalgia isn’t enough to sustain the running time when the plot is as ropey as this. The appearance of Daniel Peacock at the end re-energises the story considerably and the betrayal of his own children is a great ending, but leaving the Rik Mayall / Felix Dexter storyline dangling is lazy and pointless. Another minor misfire, although not without its incidental pleasures.

Looper

One of the most eagerly-anticipated films of recent years, with a delicious high-concept premise fleshed out by two wonderful stars. Bruce Willis is Joseph Gordon-Levitt from the future and they’re trying to kill each other. Who wouldn’t want to watch that? Sadly, the end result is a somewhat of a mixed bag. I don’t object to Rian Johnson’s cheerfully inconsistent view of time-travel, especially when it produces scenes as heart-stoppingly gruesome and astonishing as Frank Brennan’s horrible demise. Time travel never makes sense anyway, so complaining that it doesn’t make sense in any specific way is slightly pointless, even if a movie is flagrantly breaking its own rules. What’s less forgiveable is the way the movie abandons its delicious premise about half-way through for another movie entirely, one which is rather less interesting and lumbers the plot with double mumbo-jumbo, albeit blessed with two lovely performances from Emily Blunt and six-year-old Pierce Gagnon, who is nothing short of miraculous.

What’s even harder to forgive is the gigantic plot-hole which sits at the heart of this film and which seems to have been rather unremarked upon. As Gordon-Levitt’s character explains via voice-over “Time travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been. It will be instantly outlawed, used only in secret by the largest criminal organizations. It’s nearly impossible to dispose of a body in the future. I’m told. Tagging techniques, whatnot. So when these future criminal organizations in the future need someone gone, they use specialized assassins in our present, called loopers.” Okay fine, so characters like our hero Joe get instructions to lie in wait for a victim to be zapped back in time, bound and gagged with payment in silver strapped to them, and when they appear, blast them with a shotgun, take the body to a furnace and stash the silver for themselves.

When one of these assassins (“Loopers”) is retired, the future mob sends the old version of them back in time (“closing the loop”). They get extra payment in gold and can retire from this brutal life. That’s one niggle right there – why should not the killing of one’s future self be the first assassination? Why does it have to be the last? But anyway, in one of the film’s most elegant narrative sequences, we see Young Joe fail to execute Old Joe who appears unbound and so escapes. We then apparently flash back to the same scene again, this time watching Young Joe blast Old Joe away when he appears, correctly trussed-up. In a long montage sequence we watch Young Joe celebrate his retirement, get bored, grow old, fall in love, and become Old Joe who eventually has a run-in with the mob who come for him, guns blazing, slaying his wife who is caught in the crossfire. Joe is taken to the warehouse where the time-travel machine is housed, and it becomes his only means of escape and thus, when he arrives in front of Young Joe, he is untied and ready to outwit his younger self. The whole of Old Joe’s motivation from this point on is to prevent his future – the future in which his beloved wife is killed by the mob – from occurring.

But it seems almost inevitable that if you stick clever criminals in a time-machine and send them back twenty-five years that they will find a way of fucking-up whatever you have planned for them. If it is “impossible to dispose of a body” as we are told, then a far better plan would be to shoot unwanted persons through the head and then send the dead body back in time for disposal. Bursting in to Old Joe’s place, firing weapons with lethal force, demonstrates that actually the mob is perfectly happy to kill people in the future. They just prefer to send living bodies back in time, because – well because it makes for a better movie apparently.

Anyway, there’s a lot to enjoy here, but movies that want to play with science fiction concepts like this need to be a bit more careful to deal with these kinds of inconsistencies. I’m not saying it’s Prometheus bad – just a bit sloppy.

Argo

In the hope of getting a jump on my Best Picture Nominees programme for 2013, I went to see Argo, the third film directed by Ben Affleck. Having greatly admired Gone Baby Gone and thoroughly enjoyed The Town, it was with very high hopes that I went to see this, and despite paying a premium to sit virtually around the corner from the television-sized screen, in the very back row of the smallest auditorium at my local Odeon (ugh!), Argo made me smile a lot. Just like The King’s Speech, it’s perfect Oscar fodder. Not a great film, perhaps, but a very, very good one, expertly balancing humour, suspense and character notes; blending a real-life story with a bit of Hollywood sparkle; and tackling big themes without confronting any deeply-held beliefs.

To its credit, the screenplay fearlessly plays fast-and-loose with the truth when it makes for a better film. The two major scenes on which the structure of the movie rests – one of the hostages declaring that the plan will never work, and that same hostage playing his role to the hilt when they are detained at the airport – are complete fiction. So are the most exciting and suspenseful scenes – the “location scout” in the bazaar, the last-minute scramble for tickets and the final runway chase. And for that matter so is the most entertaining character – Alan Arkin’s hard-bitten Hollywood producer.

But none of this matters when the attention to detail is so great and the forward momentum of the plot is maintained so effortlessly. Chris Terrio’s screenplay is brilliantly written and Affleck’s evocation of the period is breathtaking. And Argo probably has the best supporting cast of the year, with John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Richard Kind, Philip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton, Titus Welliver and any number of other familiar faces joining Affleck in his astonishingly accurate recreation of 1979-80. Marvellous entertainment and an amazing true (or at least true-ish) story of courage and ingenuity, it hardly puts a foot wrong, provided you aren’t expecting a super-accurate history lesson.

Skyfall

This week comes news that Skyfall is the most successful film ever at the UK box office, scooping up in ten weeks what it took second-place contender Avatar eleven months to haul in, and without Avatar’s stereoscopic tax (such movies are not 3D). And a well-deserved achievement it is too. Director Sam Mendes and screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have accomplished a minor miracle here. Unceremoniously junking Quantum of Solace’s tediously unresolved storyline, the new movie brazenly reinvents Bond, whom we last saw as a febrile and undisciplined rookie, now as weather-beaten and rueful veteran. I adore Kim Newman’s theory which is that between Quantum and this film, all the other 007 adventures have befallen the Daniel Craig Bond. So, having left Dominic Greene to die in the desert, this man has faced Dr No in Jamaica, battled Oddjob in Fort Knox, married and lost Tracey Vincenzo, blown up Hugo Drax’s secret space station, sledded on Kara Milovy’s cello case, been betrayed by Alec Trevelyan and been held prisoner by General Moon in North Korea (inter-alia).

In the amazing pre-credits sequence – just possibly the best-ever – Bond pursues his quarry on foot, by car, on a motorcycle, and eventually on a train, before a badly-aimed bullet from Naomi Harris’s younger agent’s gun sends him plummeting into one of the best title sequences the series has ever produced. From a twenty-first century perspective, many of Maurice Binder’s once-innovative sequences look repetitive and clumsy, with awkward post-production camera moves reducing the gyrating figures to cardboard cut-outs. Daniel Kleinman’s revolutionary GoldenEye titles added a third dimension thanks to modern CGI technology, and gave us a virtual camera able to slide smoothly past surreal vistas with genuine depth. The three subsequent sequences failed to live up to the splendour of his first, but the flat graphic style of the Casino Royale sequence was exactly what was required – utterly different from any previous incarnation, and yet recognisably a continuation of what had gone before. That’s what long-running series like the Bonds need to be, and that’s Skyfall all over – the titles included. Returning to the fold having missed Quantum, here Kleinman’s CGI camera pushes forward, forward, forward, through a landscape with more depth than ever before. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

Returning to the fold, Bond is tested and found wanting, but M nevertheless sends him out on the trail of Raoul Silva who has blown up MI6. Together with the immensely striking Bérénice Marlohe, he tracks Silva down with apparent ease, but must sacrifice his latest girlfriend to do so. The execution of the apparently leading Bond girl within about 20 minutes is another shocking development, another radical departure from established practice, although I have to criticise Sam Mendes or Barbara Broccoli or the BBFC or someone for squeamishness here. Forced into playing a murderous game of William Tell with a bound Sevrine and a shot-glass, Bond shoots and misses, following which Silva wins the game by simply shooting her through the head – but the photographing of this shocking development is so coy that it’s easy to mistake this kill-shot for another poor aim by the marksman and a flinch from the target. A shame, as this moment should have been heart-in-the-mouth stuff. It’s not unusual for James Bond films to begin with a “sacrificial lamb” Bond girl (Jill Masterson, Aki, Rosie Carver, Andrea Anders, Corinne Dufour, Paris Carver, Solange, Strawberry Fields, etc etc) but it’s unprecedented for the leading Bond girl to be executed half-way through the movie, never to be replaced.

No more so than in his interrogation scene, Javier Bardem has tremendous fun with this camply disturbing character, and the revolting jaw prosthesis which he wears. His Lawrence of Arabia style entrance, walking slowly towards camera in a single shot, is also worthy of note – possibly Mendes’ reposte to the frantic cutting of Quantum which helped make that film such an unsatisfactory experience. From here, Silva’s plan becomes increasingly unlikely, but criticising the movie for this I rather think this misses the point. The best Bond films, with the possible exception of From Russia With Love, aren’t spy thrillers at all, they are colossal absurd fantasy adventures. The trick is in balancing the insane on-screen action with enough ballast so it doesn’t just become laughable. Daniel Craig adjusting his cuffs as he lands on the back of that train is perfect. Blofeld evading capture by dragging up (Diamonds Are Forever) is harder to take seriously, and Bond pretending to be Tarzan (Octopussy) is so stupid as to be insulting. Silva trying to kill Bond by chucking an entire tube train at him is hard to take, sure, but the execution is so faultless and the idea so extraordinary, I’m perfectly happy to watch it in delighted slack-jawed amazement – it seems rather dull trying to wonder just what it would take to plan, time and pull-off such an outré method of execution. You might as well complain that the idea of a “licence to kill” isn’t entirely credible.

From here, the film boldly veers off into completely uncharted territory. There’s no particular reason why not, but Bond has never really presented a siege situation before. In film after film, Bond has stormed the villain’s lair at the end, whether solo (GoldenEye, Quantum of Solace) with modest back-up (For Your Eyes Only, Tomorrow Never Dies) or at the head of massive army (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker) but never before has he holed-up in a safe house, set traps and waited for the villain to come to him. This splendidly suspenseful sequence both delivers the necessary excitement and catharsis and exemplifies the film’s theme – sometimes the old ways are the best. But the cost is ghastly – Judi Dench’s redoubtable M has paid the ultimate price.

It’s not until the credits begin rolling that I really took on board what had been wrought in the closing moments of Skyfall. This most revisionist of Bonds, as much a reboot as Casino Royale in its own way, has been quietly rebuilding the old Bond before our very eyes. Not just the little nods to previous movies (Bond’s escape on the backs of some reptiles, Q’s caustic reference to exploding pens, Bond telling Eve to stop touching her ear, probably others), but the mythos of Connery, Moore and Dalton movies is being reassmbled. As the screen fades to black, we are back to a patrician and avuncular M with complete if sometimes testy faith in agent 007, whose office hides behind a leather-panelled door, guarded by a spunky Moneypenny and whose payroll includes an enthusiastic gadget man, designated Q – a line-up we haven’t seen since 1989. Welcome home 007. I can hardly wait for your next mission.

NB: The version posted on 6 November included a few small errors, which I have now corrected.

This is my quick-and-dirty analysis of the state of the US election. The attached table shows the states ranked by certainty of outcome, with the Republican strongholds at the top, working down to those likely to vote Romney, coming to the toss-up states in the middle, then the likely Obama states and finally the Democratic strongholds at the bottom. This is based on the most recent polling data I could find, but compiled by hand, so there is the possibility of error – let me know if you find one.

Assuming it is correct, what does this analysis tell us?

Here’s a very very quick guide to the American Electoral College system, just in case you weren’t already up-to-speed. Elections are held in each of the 50 states and Washington DC and each state will thus pick a favoured presidential candidate. Some time after the general election, each of those states will send a predetermined number of electors to the state capital and these people will actually cast their vote for and elect the president. The number of electors per state is roughly correlated with the population of the state, although none has fewer than three. The total number of electors is 538 – the same as the total number of members of the United States Congress.

If a candidate wins a state, even by a very small margin, then that candidate wins all of the electors in that state (two very small states allocate their votes proportionally). Winning California is a much bigger prize than winning Delaware since winning California by one vote earns you 55 votes in the electoral college, whereas winning Delaware by a landslide only wins you three votes in the electoral college. Just as some parliamentary constituencies in the UK always vote the same way (safe seats), many states always vote the same way. The small number of “swing states”, where the pre-election polling is very close, are crucial to determining the outcome of the election.

With 538 electoral college votes available, a candidate needs 270 to win – although a tie is possible. On my analysis Romney has a clear 191 electoral college votes in the bank – the top red block from Alaska down to South Carolina where Romney has only a six point lead. Romney’s lead is narrower in the next two states, North Carolina and Florida, but he is still the favourite there, which gives him a further 44 votes, taking him up to 235. In order to win the presidency, Romney now has to start taking states where Obama has a slim lead. But even if he wins Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire and Nevada (where Obama’s poll lead ranges from 0.3 points to 2.8 points) he’s still three votes away without Ohio. Hence Romney’s last-minute pitch for Pennsylvania with its 20 votes. If Romney wins Virginia and Colorado but loses Ohio, Iowa and Michigan, he can still win if he pinches Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile for Obama, things look a little more comfortable. He can also count on 191 electoral college votes basically for sure. If Romney wins New York then we’re talking fire and brimstone coming down from the sky, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Less certain but still very likely to go Obama’s way are Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the afore-mentioned Pennsylvania. Those states bring his total to 247, which means that again Ohio marks the turning point. Past Ohio, Obama can count on 271 votes, just enough to secure him the presidency.

But look again at the whole of the white area. Having won his near-certain 247 votes, even if Obama loses Ohio and Florida – easily the largest swing states – he can still take Colorado, New Hampshire, Nevada and Iowa and still win, all states where he has the advantage in the polls currently.

So, in short Obama will very likely win (although if you are in the US do please, please, please exercise your democratic right to vote, regardless of what outcome you are hoping for) but that shouldn’t stop this from being an exciting night. Polls will start closing around midnight GMT and many states are happy to declare winners long before all the ballots are actually counted because it’s easy to see from a sample what the outcome is going to be.

If you’re staying up to watch then around 23:00 GMT the first polling station will close – Indiana. This is a fairly safe Republican state, so expect it to declare for Romney soon after midnight.

At midnight GMT, further polling stations close including Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. Virginia is typically quick to count ballots and the race here is very close. A comfortable win for Obama is very good news. A comfortable win for Romney is not terrible news (Obama can win without Virginia) but it’s not a good sign.

At 0:30 GMT polls close in Ohio which, as we’ve seen, could decide the whole election. If Ohio is very close, the result may not be known tonight, and there are plenty of scenarios in which Ohio’s 18 electoral college votes are enough to tip the balance. North Carolina is also one to watch. It will likely go Romney, despite narrowly going Obama in 2008. If Obama retakes it, it’s curtains for Romney.

At 01:00 GMT Florida and Pennsylvania polls close. If there’s going to be a Romney surprise, then Pennsylvania going Republican could be an early sign of it. Conversely, if Florida goes Democratic, then Romney supporters can pack up and go home – however, Florida may not declare until later – the 2000 debacle still smarts. The race is very tight in New Hampshire, so that could also be one to watch, although it only carries four electoral college votes.

At 02:00 GMT, polls close in another 14 states including Wisconsin, where a surprise Romney victory would be disastrous. Also Minnesota and Michigan need a close eye.

At 04:00 GMT, polls close in five western states. Chalk up 78 electoral college votes for Obama from California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington and just four for Romney from Idaho. At this point we should clearly be able to see who has won or that counting will go on for days more. McCain’s concession speech was around 04:00 GMT in 2008.

Hope this helps and enjoy the fun.

The website Kickstarter has been coming in for a bit of a, well, kicking recently.

On its face, it seems like a marvellous idea. Launched in 2009, it’s a crowd-sourcing platform, initially focused on creative or artistic enterprises but increasingly with a heavy gadget and especially iOS bias. In case you don’t know, here’s how it works.

I am an inventor, artist or other creative individual and I have thought of a thing. Ideally, I’ve reality-checked it, prototyped it, got it to the point where I can explain it, demonstrate it or pitch it. If I knew that there were 10,000 people out there who would all pay $50 to buy one, or come and see it, or download it, then I would know that the income would be there to justify a full production run, or staging it, or producing it. But I don’t have the funds right now to start that process, making me somewhat stuck.

Enter Kickstarter. You describe your project and set levels at which people can invest. Back the project for $50 and when it’s ready, you’ll get one, or a ticket, or a download. If I get enough people promising their money by the deadline, then credit cards are charged and I get the cash to start making my dream a reality (after Kickstarter gets its cut) and then pretty soon you should get what you’ve paid for. If not enough people invest, then nobody pays anything and I’ve done some pretty useful market-testing which may be enough to convince me to abandon the project.

I’ve got at least one really excellent product through Kickstarter – my Zooka Wireless Speaker bar which connects to my iOS device (see?) by Bluetooth and amplifies my music or video soundtracks. But I’ve also got carried away once-or-twice. “Wow, shooting 360 degree video on an iPhone – that is so cool. Here’s $40!” (Six months later) “Why has somebody sent me this useless piece of plastic in the post? What? Shooting 360 degree video on my iPhone? When would I ever want to do that?”

But that’s not the worst problem with Kickstarter, not the problem which has forced the site to substantially change its rules recently. With my Zooka, I plunked down my money and some months later, I received the speaker bar I wanted in the mail. Just like shopping on Amazon, if Amazon’s warehouse was on Mars.

But Kickstarter is not a shop. You aren’t buying a product, you are investing in an idea that might eventually turn into a product, but equally might all go up in smoke.

Kickstarter’s biggest success in terms of funding to date has probably been the Pebble. This smart watch with an e-ink display pairs with your iPhone, so with your phone in your pocket you can see who is calling you, get calendar alerts, see email messages and so on. It launched in April 2012 with a funding target of $100,000 and has actually raised over $10m, but despite an estimated ship-date of September 2012, so far no-one has actually got their $99 watch yet. And they may never.

So, in September, when I saw the Kickstarter campaign for the LIFX WiFi LED light bulb I was excited but also cautious. When we bought our new flat, we had all the wiring and lighting redone. We had hoped to get dimmable bulbs everywhere, but of course, we also often wanted one bulb operated by two switches and (apparently) you can’t have two dimmer switches operating one bulb or the fight each other and then your house burns down (or something). So we have several lights which are operated by one dimmer and one (or more) on-off switch. Workable, but not ideal.

The LIFX bulb solves this problem at a stroke. These LED bulbs can each be set at any brightness – and any colour!! – and you control them from your iPhone. Neat, huh? Of course, they’re expensive – around £50 each, and for our whole flat we’d probably need at least eight, maybe more.

So, after some discussion, I theorised as follows. Committing to buying eight bulbs now means that by the time they eventually show up (supposedly around March 2013), I may have less enthusiasm for the project, or have found another solution. In that time, various problems may or may not come up – the bulbs may be dim, or unreliable, or the software flaky or who knows what. WiFi LED light bulbs may end up being a “thing”, they may go mainstream or they may not. If they do, then in time the price will come down and the technology will improve. If not, I’ve bought a lemon.

Shortly after I decided not to invest, LIFX was one of a number of Kickstarter projects identified as being particularly likely to be problematic in articles such as this one from Reuters. Now Kickstarter has substantially changed the rules making it harder for pure “vapourware” products to swallow up large sums of other people’s money as they evaporate away.

Having mentally shelved the WiFi LED light bulb project, I was most startled when all over my favourite blogs and websites two days ago I saw an announcement from Philips that they had an essentially identical product called Hue which would be available exclusively through the Apple Store the next day.

The price is basically the same – £50 per bulb, £179 for the “starter kit” containing three bulbs and the “bridge” which connects them to your home WiFi network (the LIFX version doesn’t need the separate bridge which is neater and tidier, but may make initial configuration more fiddly). The bulbs are sleeker without the heat-dissipating fins which make the LIFX bulbs look a little odd, but they’re only available with Edison Screw E27 fittings, so if you have bayonet or downlight fittings, you need an adaptor. But crucially, you can go into the Apple Store and pick them up right now, today and put them in your home (but not buy them online, yet, for some reason). [UPDATE: You can now buy them on-line.]

So I stopped off at Ryness to buy some B22-E27 adaptors and then took myself to Regent Street, walking out of the Apple Store minutes later with a very handsomely presented box. Installation couldn’t have been much easier. Like WPS WiFi systems, the bridge has a physical button on it, so you connect it to your router with the cable provided and then push the button to connect it to your iPhone. Instantly I had full control over all three bulbs.

The software is a little clunky at present (LIFX’s software looks more fully-featured, but of course it doesn’t actually exist yet, so…). In particular, it is very focused on using colour from images to create lighting effects (or “scenes”) which is surely a niche application. Nonetheless, after a bit of messing around, I was able to create some suitable presets, such as a dim warm glow in the bedroom for going to sleep, or a nice bright clean light for reading in the living room. I was even able to create a single button to simultaneously dim the light in the TV room, and turn the light next-door off (for fear of it casting a reflection on the TV screen). Three bulbs is not of course enough, but as a proof-of-concept, I’m sold. We’ll give it a few more days to see how we get on and then stick a few more in.

If you turn a bulb off at the wall, you can’t then turn it back on again with the app – you’ve cut power to the WiFi electronics – but if you then turn it back on again, it returns with a standard warm glow and near maximum brightness, which means it’s always possible to override the tech if need be. A good solution.

Are they remotely worth the price though? Well, being LED bulbs they should last around 15 years. An old-fashioned incandescent light bulb, costing maybe £1.50, will last about six months. So you can easily spend £40 over a 15 year span. Of course, who knows if WiFi will even exist in 2027, but at least I’m not going to be chucking my £50 bulb in the bin this time next year. They’re also energy-efficient, drawing less than 9 watts of power, while creating the equivalent light of a 50w incandescent bulb.

For completeness, a Halogen bulb will last twice as long as an incandescent bulb but might cost twice as much. An LED bulb without the WiFi-ness will cost around £25-£30 and will presumably last as long as the Hue bulbs do.

Oh my god, they killed Rory.

You bastards!

There’s a lot to like about The Angels Take Manhattan. It looks fantastic, with director Nick Hurran making excellent use of the opportunity to go on location in the USA. The regulars are all on sparkling form – it’s a pleasure just to watch the three of them sitting in Central Park and teasing each other. The opening hard-boiled narration is atmospheric and captures the spirit of the novels and movies it’s referencing without being smug, and the story as a whole acts as a fine finale for the era of the Ponds and Amy in particular, with enough references to key episodes from the past two-and-a-half seasons to engage the regular viewer’s sentimentality without being key to understanding the episode.

That brings up what for me is the main point though – who is this really aimed at? On the one hand, clearly the regular viewer. The character of River Song blithely referring to the Doctor as her husband and Amy as her mother would be baffling for any casual or new watcher, and the emphasis of the whole story is very clearly on the departure of Amy and Rory – even to the point of just letting an Angel keep roaming around free, the Doctor is apparently entirely unbothered by the thought that the paradox they have created may not have been entirely successful in eradicating them. So clearly, this was made for the regular viewer then.

One the other hand, only a casual viewer would fail to spot that we’ve seen all of this before. The Weeping Angels first return in The Time of Angels brilliantly added to their powers and qualities while preserving their original Grandmother’s Footsteps appeal. This simply reprises scenes from Blink, when it isn’t ignoring established Angel lore altogether (like having Rory transmitted only in space for no reason at all except that it makes the plot work). Likewise the relationship between River and the Doctor is never explored in any new way at all, it’s just minor variations on themes played again and again by Steven Moffat in previous scripts – the Ming vase is simply a lesser version of the “Hello Sweetie” message in The Pandorica Opens, and the novel is just River Song’s diary rehashed for example.

There’s also a tendency in the episode for things to be true only because someone, usually the Doctor, says they are, rather than because they flow naturally from other story elements, or because they fit with things already established. Once you read something it becomes true. Really? Okay, I guess. The Doctor has healing hands now? Uh-huh. New York is messed up with time… things… so it’s hard to land a TARDIS there. Really? Didn’t seem to be an issue in The Chase, but I suppose. If you voluntarily go back in time, I can never come and visit you again. Huh?

When I overcome the aching familiarity of it all, then it does kind-of work – at least up to the moment of old Rory’s death. Honestly, has any character in fiction other than South Park’s Kenny McCormick died more frequently and less permanently? It’s impossible to take the sight of an emaciated Arthur Darvill seriously, given that he’s already been aged to death in a previous episode (as well as shot, turned into an Auton, desiccated to death, erased from history etc), and even Rory commenting on his propensity for resurrection can’t overcome the feeling of “here we go again”. Amy and Rory chucking themselves off the ledge is nicely done and is moving for as long as you ignore how fast-and-loose the show is now playing with the rules of the Angels (they basically obediently wait for you to finish being noble now, whether you blink or not) but tarnished slightly by the fact that we then get the same damned scene again in the graveyard. Only Rory Williams could exit the series dying three times in the same episode.

And yet, and yet, and yet… there is energy and power and pace to this episode. Moffat’s use of structure is as elegant as ever – “break mine” is if not a fresh melody then at least a nimble variation and Amy’s “afterword” is both a nifty idea and a nice bit of writing. And, following-on from the Doctor’s erasing of himself from history, maybe a bit more of a clean break with the past is what’s needed. The Ponds living a quiet life as a media couple in New York makes sense, and is a fitting departure for them – clearly the Doctor was never going to leave them alone. But what on Earth is the Doctor going to say to Brian…?

So, now I suppose I have to give this episode a star rating, which I find almost impossible. If I’d never seen Blink or the various other episodes plundered for ideas, I think I would have loved it. If I judge it on the basis that every episode this year is supposed to be a completely original “mini-movie” then clearly it falls very far short. If I didn’t truly believe that the Ponds were gone for good, I would have found the abandoning of the evil-Angels plot maddening, but equally if I hadn’t mourned Rory a dozen times already I would feel the loss of him and Amy more keenly.

It’s generally been quite a strong half-season, although nothing has absolutely hit it out of the park so far. We began with the impressive and vibrant but rather uneven Asylum of the Daleks followed by the rather clunky Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, redeemed by the thoughtful if not perfectly-realised A Town Called Mercy and the excellent, save for the hasty ending, The Power of Three. I think ultimately The Angels Take Manhattan is far more successful than Dinosaurs, but far too flawed to get the four-star treatment meted out to Asylum and so I think three-and-a-half stars is fair. But I want to watch it again, and I shall be interested to see what commenters make of this one. I’ve a feeling it may divide opinion.

Doctor Who is often at its best when it focuses on just one thing. There’s a Rutan in a lighthouse. Who created the Daleks? Don’t blink, blink and you’re dead. Trying to juggle too many different ideas, concepts, points of focus can easily lead to muddle, especially when you’re trying to deliver a movie-of-the-week in 45 minutes.

Sometimes an episode can suffer from being over-ambitious and yet the parts which work work so well that I’m prepared to forgive a bit of muddle. School Reunion never does anything interesting with its alien invasion plot beyond a bit of amusing undercover work from the Doctor in the first five minutes. But the return of Sarah Jane and K9 and the amazing meeting-of-companions past and present means that the underdeveloped melodrama never gets in the way of the relationship story which delivers handily.

Writer Chris Chibnall’s best script for Doctor Who is easily 42, which follows the principle of Keep It Simple Stupid. By contrast, the Silurian two-parter has barely enough material for 60 minutes, let alone 90. And Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is an obvious first-draft with no care or time taken to smooth over the bumps and properly bed-in the plot points (despite Moffat’s claims in Doctor Who Magazine that the script was “perfect” as delivered). How would The Power of Three measure-up given that it was trying to balance an alien invasion plot with a Ponds-eye view of The Doctor?

By and large, it worked very well indeed.

The sudden arrival on Earth of countless identical smooth black cubes is a delightful and arresting image, which works extremely well as a point of focus, providing The Doctor, Rory, Amy and not forgetting diligent Brian, with a deep mystery to explore, providing time for The Doctor’s impact on the Ponds’ lives to be examined. As well as including the traditional first-person narration by a shortly-departing companion, the story is full of incidental pleasures – The Doctor’s demented need to fill time by playing keepy-uppy, doing the hoovering and painting any available fences; an RTD-style series of celebrity cameos; the return of UNIT, now re-oriented (“science leads”) and led by daughter-of-the-Brig Kate Stewart played by bloody Jemma Redgrave; and the now apparently obligatory side-story, this time involving Zygons and Henry VIII.

All this time, we get only a couple of hints at the cubes’ necessarily malevolent nature and this too is a dangerous game. The longer you leave it, the more you spin out the suspense, the more jaw-droppingly amazing must the reveal be when it finally comes. Chibnall again plays it clever here by initially making the actions of the cubes when they come to life bewilderingly inconsistent, but when they do strike, it’s fierce and hard.

It’s really only in the last ten minutes that the careful balancing of timing and theme slips through the story’s grasp. While it’s an enormous pleasure to see Steven Berkoff snarling his way through the lines, Shakri’s plan and motivations were pretty standard-issue, and The Doctor’s solution seemed to amount to little more than a bit of sonic-ing. Here’s also where, in his zeal to build up the excitement and whack up the stakes, Chibnall hugely over-reaches himself. As soon as you announce that around a third of the Earth’s population has suffered fatal heart attacks, any half-awake viewer is going to recognise that a reset switch is about to be thrown. And while I’m grateful that a) we didn’t actually rewind time and b) the solution was properly bedded-in to the story and not grafted-on at the last minute, the timing is way, way off. Even given that the cubes, which are designed to find live, beating hearts and administer a fatal shock, can be reprogrammed with a flick of the sonic to instead find only those hearts which have already been stopped and administer a shock sufficient to get them going again, The Doctor still has only  something like two minutes to zap the victims before permanent brain damage is inflicted. Not the many minutes of Berkoffing which we actually got. And that’s generously drawing a veil over the fact that you can’t shock a non-beating heart back into life anyway, only correct the rhythm of a heart which is not beating properly. And while I enjoyed the sight of The Doctor struggling through with one heart out of action, I was frustrated at how quickly and easily this was resolved. Surely, if anyone is going to defibrillate The Doctor in a hospital, it should be medically-trained Rory?

So, if the climax was a bit skimpy, the Pond/Doctor story generally made up for it, with Brian’s final speech sending the Ponds back to the TARDIS I thought particularly effective. It’s an essentially unbreakable rule of scriptwriting physics that the more screen-time you give to your personal drama, the less you have available for your alien-invasion plot, and it’s to Chris Chibnall’s credit that he balanced both demands as well as he did for as long as he did.

Elsewhere, the production team is not tested to breaking point, but ably rises to the occasion. The make-up job on the two creepy orderlies is fine (if a bit reminiscent of The Empty Child), Douglas Mackinnon’s camera consistently frames the story in interesting ways and Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill prepare to send the Ponds off  to their final reward in fine style.

For the first half-hour, I honestly thought this was going to be my favourite of the season so far, earning four-and-a-half or even five stars until the last ten minutes, but that slightly limp resolution sees The Power of Three stuck on four, roughly even with Asylum and Mercy but still a tremendous improvement on the dreadfully clumsy Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.