"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I knew just enough about the Final Destination franchise to enjoy Final Destination Bloodlines, which expands on the lore to cover the descendants of Death's fugitives (perhaps obscure comic book joke: Has it gone after the Challengers of the Unknown yet?) and presents Tony Todd's last screen appearance in a way that's actually somewhat poignant. From what I understand, the rest is pretty much rote. Death sets up the dominoes and makes you squirm as you wonder which will be the first one to fall in a play of tension and misdirection. Then, poof, some blood balloon (I mean person) explodes in some gory fashion. The kills are imaginative enough, but leave little to the imagination, making this a black comedy much more than a horror film. Kaitlyn Santa Juana is an engaging lead, but you apparently shouldn't get attached to anyone in these films. I'm going to go out on a severed limb here and defend Death. All it's doing is giving some choice Darwin Awards to worthy recipients. Try to watch this without thinking they sort of deserve it for acting foolishly.
At home: In Safe, Jason Statham is a cage fighter with a complicated past whose life is destroyed by the Russian mob (and I've rarely seen such a total punishment). 12-year-old Catherine Chan is a girl with a head for numbers kidnapped by Chinatown gangsters and forced to participate in gang crime. New York's most corrupt cops play both sides. When the two leads' stories intersect, all three faction might just lose big. Because Jason Statham, after all. "Protect the kid" is nothing new for action movies, but Safe tries to be as original as it can be without breaking the mold. Piling on the villainy - and sheesh, these baddies are absurdly murderous - it clumsily offers a surprise third act villain in Anson Mount, but kind of denies us a fight between Captain Pike and Statham (which would have been WILD). I'm not going to jokingly say it plays "safe", because the details are fairly new, but it's also "just another Jason Statham actioner", and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
[Afghanistan] The Taliban represent such an extreme gender-repressive regime that a film exploring it like Osama does feels like it's a science-fiction fable. We immediately start on ironies, like preventing war widows from even walking unaccompanied, never mind earning a meagre living, and even men who don't adhere to the strictest of these rules are called out by men with assault rifles. Enter the girl who will be known as Osama. Her family contrives for her to dress as a boy so she can make money, only for it to backfire spectacularly when she's taken to a Taliban indoctrination school, and if anyone thinks this will end well - it's a school for bullies, after all - hasn't been paying attention. At best, she can dissociate from what's happening, but it's still happening, and happening still. This is a film about misery, and not about the values of freedom somehow triumphing. It's something I have limited interest in as art, but still think films like this are important instructional documents.
[Kyrgyzstan] It's amazing to me that there are places in the world that can have both rural areas where people live like they're basically in the Middle Ages, side by side with cities where girls can drive cars, go to college, and hold jobs. Take and Run presents Kyrgyzstan as just such a place, and Sezim (the very fetching and engaging Alina Turdumamatova) is a girl who wants the latter for herself, though her mother keeps shouting intolerant pre-fab "wisdom" at her for her plans. After being kidnapped from the city by a rural family to forcibly marry her, things turn into a misery film, and Sezim's response is to buck the misogynist system, one that's enforced and upheld by women, as much as she can. From a modern, Western context, it all feels quite insane BECAUSE we've seen all those city scenes where we recognized ourselves. But her kidnapping might as well have been conducted with a time machine. I would have liked this to be feature-length.
[Tajikistan] Waiting for the Sea presents a magical world where curses can come to fruition, as when a fisherman refuses to heed prophecies of doom and hits a storm that turns the sea into a desert, being cast away and losing his boat, his crew and his wife. Years later, he tries to drag the boat to the receded sea through dramatic landscapes, so that it may magically restore everything he's lost, as he struggles with a community that now hates him. A magical world, but, as it turns out, based on real events. I had not realizes that the Aral Sea, plainly visible to the right of the Caspian on my old globe, has largely dried up since the 1960s. Just a discolored patch now on GoogleMaps. So this is more than a fable, and that's a little shocking. As a film, I feel like I'm missing pieces here and there. Transitions can be jarring and the ending is perhaps too elliptical. We meet many characters, but do their subplots amount to something tangible, or are they distractions? Liked it, but just a touch undercooked.
Books: You didn't really need Ian Marter to spruce up the Target adaptation of The Invasion, because it really already is one of the best Second Doctor stories. In fact, I sort of miss particular pieces of dialog or bits of actor business when reading it. But it's essentially all there already: A Cyberman story that focuses more on excellent human villains (it feels like a Robert Holmes script, but isn't), with lots of mystery and action, and the seminal introduction of UNIT. What Marter brings to it is unexpected moments of harsh violence (of course) and a couple of replacement bits of business of his own (like the Doctor's kooky sign-offs). So it's all a bit more dangerous-seeming because described action doesn't have to then be realized with TV-level fight choreography or censors, but If you asked me to pick, I'd still go with the televised version, in a heartbeat.
You don't want to spend too much time with The Krotons, a bog-standard '60s Doctor Who story with stupid-looking aliens and stupid-acting humanoid victims, so Terrence Dicks flies us through at breakneck speed and makes it all seem a little more fun than suffering through four lackluster television episodes. You still can't get away from the back and forth through the aliens' ship, and in the rush of things, I think Dicks gets a little lost himself and misnames a character here and there (or do I just get confused when there's a whole cast of characters with alien names?). He also takes a couple shots at Robert Holmes who wrote the original serial (though not at all prefiguring the heights his scripts would rise to later), but it's meant in good fun. He's right, after all. This IS a fairly cliched SF story. So the rapid pace makes it a quick little adventure novel and we don't notice the weaknesses too much.
In terms of the Second Doctor era, I think The Seeds of Death is mildly underrated. It's a fun backdoor invasion plot, returns us to the Moonbase at some point in the future, introduces T-Mat to the canon, and has some actually memorable "base under siege" characters who don't just play a single note - Fewsham and Phipps have turns and an arc, while Miss Kelly is a cool grown-up version of Zoe (they should have done something with that) - so Terrance Dicks' adaptation plays very well. In fact, he allows himself some uncommon stylistic flourishes here and there (the prologue, for example, and some omniscient narrator commentary) that enhance the story. I kind of wish he'd explained how this fits into the Ice Warriors' timeline (it never was), but that's a minor point, made by a Doctor Who nerd who likes this kind of stuff.
Though I've long held the suspicion that The Space Pirates was actually a pretty cool story, and everyone would know it if the bulk of the episodes hadn't been lost, every time I consume it in some form - and the rapid-fire adaptation by Terrance Dicks is no different - I realize why it can't be true. I think I'm always taken by the world-building and politics (and the novel at least does away with the characterization of Milo as a twangy mine prospector from the Old West), but the truth is, the Doctor and his companions are largely incidental to the plot. They come in at various points to solve problems for the cast, but they're largely passengers, out of the action while we watch the actual characters of the piece do things. It feels like one of those early historicals where the TARDIS crew are just observers, in and out of prison cells to create some jeopardy, as fixed events unfold. Except in the future. Dicks does well with the material, but it's flawed.
With Doctor Who and The War Games, Malcom Hulke had the potentially difficult task of adapting second-longest Doctor Who serial into a single, short book. The Daleks' Master Plan would be split into two, so this stands as the most compressed story... and he succeeds very well! Some incidents and secondary characters are cut, but the way he mostly does it is by having scenes recounted later in the narrative, sometimes by new-to-the-novelisation extras that see what's happening from afar. It's a cheat that actually adds a lot of flavor to the story, as we get into the heads of transported humans from different eras who were never given voice in the original story. And what a story! Time frames crashing into one another. More violence than ever before. Goodbyes for all three cast members. And the introduction of the Time Lords! The Second Doctor era is where all the world-building happened, isn't it? Many recurring foes were born in this era, as was Time Lord lore, the sonic screwdriver, and of Troughton and the writers hadn't differentiated the Second and First Doctors, we wouldn't have the formula we have today. And since a lot of the era is technically lost, the novelisatons are important. It chronologically ends on a high.
Though earlier novelisation were wrapped into the Target line, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrence Dicks was the first actual book commissioned for the line (you can tell it's early yet, because it includes illustrations), near the end of the Third Doctor era. Spearhead from Space is very well rendered by Dicks (the UNIT era is covered between him and Malcolm Hulke, so we're in good hands), expanding the canvas of the invasion with what's happening in the larger world, giving guest characters efficient backstories, and explaining things that never were on screen (for example, how Channing came to be and where the word Auton came from). Alas, no word on whether Seeley's dog was killed or not (in my head canon, it yipped away at the first sign of trouble, okay??). As with any adaptation, I miss a line or bit of performance here and there, but generally, it makes the stories bigger and more effects-heavy, which is enjoyable.
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