First up, let me just say that I am a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings.  By this, I do not mean I enjoyed a handful of films I saw a decade ago.  I love the books, I’ve read them and seen the films several times.  I like the mythology in The Silmarillion and clamber after every bit I can get.  Consequently, I really enjoyed The Hobbit.  And yet, it left me feeling frustrated because, for me, it came close to being a masterpiece, but fell perilously short several key areas. The Lord of the Rings trilogy excelled in making Middle-Earth a living, breathing world inhabited by real yet fantastical characters.  It did so through...

In Brief: Weak. In Detail: Here we are again.  Another week of Revolution, and Danny still hasn’t reached Monroe, the tablets still haven’t been explained even a fraction more, and Tracy Spiridakos continues to annoy the hell out of me. There are some positives in this.  Maggie’s death is at least realistic, being stabbed through an artery in the leg, and we see that in this post-apocalyptic society, there really are struggles from a lack of health care and medicine.  I would argue that everyone’s denim clothing is in remarkably good nick this far after the blackout.  Maggie’s death also solidifies...

The Angels Take Manhattan In Brief: Detective Noir? Check. Pond Farewell? Check. Emotional? Very much check. In Depth: Beware: spoilers within. At the close of David Tennant’s last episode of nuWho, the trailer for series 5 promised us that “The end is only the beginning” and before long we had Eleven, Amelia Pond, Rory Williams, space whales, Daleks, Weeping Angels, River Song, vampire fish, Dreamlords, Sontarans, River Song (again!), Romans and the list goes on… And here we are again, at another ending, for now the end of the Ponds’ is nigh… This is a beautiful episode in terms of setting, look, theme and atmosphere;...

In Brief:  Better, but still some way to go. In Detail:  After last week’s pilot, I wasn’t holding huge amounts of hope when I sat down to watch the second episode of Revolution.  It was formulaic, predictable and the pacing wasn’t great. This week showed improvement in some areas, but worsening weaknesses in others. I felt the pacing was stronger.  Splitting Charlie and Miles from the others has helped speed things up, and seeing more of Munroe alongside three other plot lines has made the show feel more complex and interesting than it had. I think the strongest two characters so far are Miles and Giancarlo...

In brief: Beautifully made, but ultimately falls flat. In depth: Revolution, NBC’s new post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama, is a real kettle of very mixed fish. It’s got epic production all over it, courtesy of Bryan Burke and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot.  But once you get past the visual splendour of the show, it’s easy to see that there’s suddenly not that much substance behind it. The plots presented in the pilot are both formulaic and not overly exciting, and the pacing is so tedious that it’s difficult to get drawn into the show as it moves along.  Daddy dies, daughter resolves within seconds to travel the...

The Power of Three In Brief: Shades of oldWho, RTDWho, and nuNewWho! In Depth: I think, maybe, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall snuck in a part one, at least thematically, to the midseries finale goodbye to the Ponds… See nuWho can’t just pick up and companion and drop them off all hidy hi and hody ho like they used to in oldWho; the companion(s) are now more than ever the audience surrogate, we meet them, their families, their home life, their personal lives and for the first time ever, we now have a married couple in the TARDIS, who are feeling forced to choose between the Doctor, and normality. We have two...

A Town Called Mercy In Brief: The Doctor. A Doctor. Two sides. One coin. In Depth: The latest Who offering promised a Wild West adventure… and we most certainly got it! It’s probably best to say that, whilst A Town Called Mercy isn’t quite the beautifully dark Asylum of the Daleks romp, or the madcap hi-jinks of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, it does manage to place itself rather squarely between them – and even finds a few moments for quiet contemplation that the first two speedy entries to Series 7 could not! Mercy begins quite simply compared to the others as well; rather than a reasonably long teaser before the opening credits, we...

In Brief: I actually can’t do better than the episode title… In Depth: A very good episode that jumps straight back into the current set up for the first half of Doctor Who series 7, whereby the Doctor has no regular travelling companion, instead he picks up people along the way for brief trips and then drops them off again! “This is the gang! Never had a gang before!” This episode figuratively blasts off from Egypt 1334 BC, to India 2367, to African plains circa 1902, to modern day Earth (specifically the Ponds [they are not Williams’] living room) and then FORWARD again to 2367. All in the first 10 minutes – got that? That is...

I went into this film with low expectations, and to be honest, that’s probably the best way to approach it. Underground is a low budget 2011 horror film from director Rafael Eisenman.  It’s got all your typical horror conventions: running around in the dark, lots of gore and entrails and a plucky hero trying to stop everyone from getting killed.  ’Trying’ being the key word here. Let’s start with the positives.  The movie is very well filmed for such a low-lighting flick.  The camera angles are generally very good, and keep the plot vaguely interesting.  That’s one of the strengths of the DVD,...