We watched the colour recovered ep1 off the 2012 DVD
Paddy Russell's return to DW. Malcolm Hulke's last script for DW.
It's reputation is terrible visual effects.
The first episode is unsettling and intriguing. Initially there are crime tropes and martial law tropes overlayed on an effective unexplained mystery. Unfortunately the monster reveal is telegraphed TWICE.(The pterodactyl in the warehouse and the TRex battling the soldiers nearer the end of the ep.)
Which makes the overall effect of the first episode something of a letdown.
The overall approach is clearly limited by the poorly animated dinosaur figurines. But little attempt is made to hide the dinosaurs. Surely a better way to do this would be to focus on the mystery, the reactions and the disbelief/horror of the human inhabitants. Perhaps reduce the military encounters and add scenes of people arguing with what someone claims they saw etc?
What we are served is lingering shots of dull, bendy dinosaur "fighting". The colouring of the dinosaur mouth parts is a particularly poor aspect of a generally poor dinosaur presentation.
Added to that 45 years on, this is made look very silly by CGI dinsoaurs in Jurassic Park and Walking with Dinosaurs.
So ignoring the dinosaurs... (This is an egregious leap because.. well, the title...)
There's also a awful amount of slow driving around and loopy chase scenes. (Ep5 is particularly bad for this.) Most eps have long sequences of breaking into railway stations or secret office fileroom lifts or taking pictures of sleeping dinosaurs. This seems deliberate as it is unfortunate.
Is this (director)' Paddy Russell's fault? At what point did the production team give up trying to make it exciting and just try to make it 6 eps long? I'm not sure I want to find out.
The accompanying Matthew Sweet Making of Doco on the DVD makes two interesting points about this show.
One, it suffered from at least two radical rewrites (Bridgehead from Space and Timescoop).
And two, beneath all the Dinosaur "terror" is a serious plot point about the dangers of absolute-ism and what conservatives would call 'Green fascism". Matthew Sweet suggests it may be some kind of counter argument to the 'ecology' message of The Green Death. (He reminds us that Mac Hulke, being and old time Commie, is likely to be very much against hippies and new age greenie stuff.) With the level of rewrites it's plausible that this is all someone else's work....
A modern counter to this egregious analysis would be to label this "moral equivalence" (or there's good and bad on both sides). i.e. Cliff Jones and the Nuthutch are good guys but watch out they are exactly the same as greenie world smashers like Operation Golden Age....
Clearly Grover, Finch, Butler, Finch, Yates are deluded and their plan is very wrong. But in the 21st century lack of responsibility and the laid back, free rider uninvolved position makes their passion look very unusual.
In dramatic DW-ey terms there's no charismatic villain present. The baddies are boring politicians, dull soldiers, ex-firemen and a scientist whose grant was rejected....
So apparently DW is not political allegory..... of any kind at all.
Four T-Rex episode ends out of six... Four! And not one of them is anywhere near any good.
In the final analysis, the dinosaurs make this appalling. The plot and the story scores this a whole 'rescue' point.
This is not Pertwee's worst serial but only by a small margin.
ABM Rating 2.10/4.00
LJM Rating 2.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 6.50/10
Link to Cumulative Rankings
No. 51 (out of 71)
Rankings Scoreboard
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