Monday 22 May 2017

Project Rewrite: Daleks in Manhattan

This may be a short-lived series, but I've been analysing the things I watch more critically in recent weeks and I'm starting to look at the stuff I don't like and wondering how I'd write them so I like them. Today I want to look at an episode from David Tennant's run as Doctor Who: "Daleks in Manhattan".

A brief rundown of the plot: Martha and the doctor arrive in Manhattan, 1930. Learning of strange disappearances throughout the city, they arrive in a shanty town to look for clues and end up taking a job in the sewers to further investigate. This leads to their discovery of the pig-men, human-pig hybrids created as a slave army. Shenanigans follow: Martha is kidnapped by pigmen, the doctor discovers daleks are in the Empire State Building (still under construction) and the short-lived reign of human-dalek hybrid Dalek Sec begins. It's a two-parter which ranges from shanty-town Hooverville in Central Park, to the city's sewers, to the top of the Empire State Building, and in general it feels unfocused and confusing.

So how would I fix it?

Saturday 20 May 2017

The Robocop Problem

I haven't been to see many movies lately (read: any) so I've been keeping myself busy with various video games and podcasts to occupy my time instead. Of note is a new addition called The Sequelisers: an hour-long show which attempts to rewrite bad movie sequels and make them better. I mention this because their movie this week was Robocop 2, and it occurred to me that it's been months since I saw the Robocop sequels. So I decided to rewatch them, since the original is something of a favourite of mine, and it occurred to me that the franchise as a whole has a serious problem.