robin_sayer

Within a few minutes of watching this Dr Who episode - you can feel its a bit special.

Often the best Dr Who episodes I associate with the revamp of Eccleston and David Tennant - and this one gave me the same vibe, so after checking I was not surprised to see that Russel T Davies was responsible.

When I say Davies has no fear - I mean he's got such bold ideas, it reminds me of the Scifi of John Wyndham where other sci-fi writers piss around on the margins with aliens, disasters a sort of soap opera in space- Davies like Wyndham has a better reach and doesn't tip toe around an idea.

So what better than this episode - which also had some absolutely fantastic acting on the part of the villain.

It's got the right costumes, its got the right sets, it's got the right subject matter, its got the right scale.

Everything else is just awful.

Napoleons American accent, and his weird detached attempt at acting is just weird.

The slovenly way in which lines are delivered. None of it feels lived in, none of it feels genuinely delivered.

It a clumsy, lazy pastiche - as though someone had a bottomless chequebook, and thought that was all you need.

The historical BS is on play here as well, so the very first battle - The Siege of Toulon - which is supposed to depict 32,000 french against 1500 french royalists, 14,000 Spanish, Sicilian, Sardinian - with 8000 British is turned into rowdy drunk British soldiers being defeated.

The truth is that 1700 French were killed, 20 French ships lost, and 700 British killed and 1 ship lost.

I was put off by the trailers, long views of sand dunes.

And while I remember loving the first one, I cant quite put my finder on why. So I was blown away when I just happened to be next to a cinema with a showing in 30 minutes and I didn't even realise it was imax until I got in and sat down.

It was an absolute beautifully made film, people who so obviously love the books - and for my money its even better than the first one.

While I was watching it, I was thinking 'this is grown up' and what I was thinking, was not that this isn't a move suitable for kids - I was thinking this is a movie that is all in, it didnt try to pander to the sci-fi movie lover in all of us, it keeps Dune where it is in the book, and it did that by absolute immersion in things like scale, costume, set design, sound, detail.

There were so many times while watching Dune Part Two - that you were just awed by the momentousness and scale of the scenes.

I wont spoil which scenes were like that - but I'm sure people can imagine.

I completely forgot that it was 3 hours long, but what I just witnessed was art, creativity, story masterfully rendered.