LW-08854

A pretty good adaptation that keeps it fairly straightforward in terms of its structure and cinematography. The pacing of it does speed up as it builds towards its climax. The characters provide plenty of suspects and I did admire the location shooting in Egypt. There's also some good humour in this too and its always a pleasure watching David Niven on screen.

A quite wonderful adaptation of a Christmas Carol. It does a fine job balancing the Muppet antics the films are known for with a faithful version of Dicken's Christmas carol that does not shy away from the dark side of the story and wonderfully pulls at your heartstrings. The cinematography I thought deserves a lot of praise transitioning to a dark and haunting look as the story moves into the future. So much of the credit ultimately belongs with Charles Dickens for conjuring up with haunting Christmas story of loneliness and redemption, still the film largely gets it right and delivers. I wasn't completely sold on the art design for some of the street scenes but for me this remains a real classic.

Back in 2009 James Cameron gave us a huge hit Avatar telling the story of an Everyman who finds himself encountering an exotic new species and acting as the go between in a story with obvious themes of environmentalism, militarism and displacement. There of course was even a little romance too between our male human hero and our female alien.

Fast forward to 2025 and Russell T Davies has dreamed up this highly highly original series which of course bares not the slightest relation to the James Cameron hit film franchise!