Doctor Who 7.13 – Nightmare in Silver

“Kids like explosions and action-packed stuff,” our son reminded us. This was after he protested that he didn’t actually like this story, because, as he keeps claiming, he doesn’t like the Cybermen. But while we were watching it, he was in seventh heaven. He enjoyed this one tremendously, but he backpedaled at the end, finally allowing that the “action-packed stuff” only temporarily held his attention. Uh-huh.

I’m not a big fan at all myself, but it really starts amazingly well, doesn’t it? Neil Gaiman wrote this one, and while I don’t think it’s a patch at all on “The Doctor’s Wife”, I love the effortless world-building of this planet so incredibly far away from Earth. Up to this point, the Cybermen were a comparatively easily-contained threat local to the Milky Way over the course of a few hundred years, and memorably dismissed by the Daleks as just pests. These Cybermen are way the heck out somewhere very, very far away, where humanity has built an absolutely massive empire. These Cybermen are such a threat to the empire that the entire Tiberian Spiral Galaxy had to be destroyed to stop them in a war a thousand years prior to this story. Perhaps this is the same area of time and space where “Ascension of the Cybermen” in series twelve is set.

So I enjoy the world and I like guest star Warwick Davis very much. I’m less a fan of Matt Smith’s performance as the Cyber-planner; I think he’s more animated and emotional than I’d have wanted. There are lots of little things I don’t care for in the story, but Gaiman did such a good job creating a sense of place that I don’t mind how ordinary the nuts and bolts of it are. And after all, there are explosions and action-packed stuff.

Willow (1988)

You can add Willow to that long list of fantasy films from the eighties that I never cared to see at the time, and like most of them, it turned out to be more entertaining than I expected. Directed by Ron Howard from a story by its producer, George Lucas, it’s a movie that many people I’ve known have seen and enjoyed. Glad to see they weren’t wrong.

But our kid… he completely loved this. It’s a movie with lots of chasing and lots of fighting and he loved them all, especially a scene where Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer – and the baby that they’re protecting – are rocketing down a snow-covered mountain on a runaway sled. There’s also a recurring gag about a sorceress who was transformed into a rodent many years ago, and Willow’s attempts to reverse the spell just results in her changing into different animals. That went over extremely well.

The sorceress had been stuck in that body by the evil magic of a wicked queen played by Jean Marsh. She had been Princess Mombi in Return to Oz a couple of years before and would play Morgaine Le Fay the following year; I suppose this was Marsh’s Witch Period. Marsh has kind of a one-note character, though. The heroes, led by Davis and Kilmer, along with a couple of three inch-high “brownies” and, once she decides to betray her evil queen mother, Joanne Whalley, are much, much more interesting. This isn’t a movie for those of us who like compelling villains, but the swordfighting, mayhem, and wit are good enough.

I was also surprised by how dark this film starts. Our heroes are protecting this baby because a prophecy says that she’ll overthrow the evil queen, and before the titles have finished, the mother is executed and the midwife who spirited her away is eaten by wild dogs. The baby floats far downstream to a village of little people – the great Billy Barty is the village’s wizard and apparent leader – and eventually, the villagers decide that they need to find some humans to whom they can return this kid. Since Willow and his family found the child, he gets tasked with taking it to the Daikini (humans), before any more wild dogs get its scent and rampage through their homes.

I was pleased that I was able to predict just one single thing this movie did. Granted, I really try not to spend any little gray cells on guessing where stories will go the first time that I watch a film, as I prefer to be caught up and taken for a ride, but I figured the guy with the skull helmet was going to kill the guy with the beard, and that was it. At one point, a spell goes awry and there’s a monstrous, two-headed fire-breathing thing that Ray Harryhausen would have found acceptable raining nine kinds of hell on an army of evildoers, and I couldn’t have been happier. I’d say that was two hours well spent, but our son says that was two of the most awesome hours ever.