Saturday, June 21, 2014

Doctor Who Weekend: The Doctor On the Big Screen....Again!






Monday night saw the El family and our friend Victoria venture forth to see Doctor Who at the movies. This is not the first time we've seen Doctor Who at this theater; last November, we saw "The Day of the Doctor" (IN 3-D!!!!!!). Victoria had missed that opportunity so when my wife found out about a new cinema event for Doctor Who, Victoria wanted very much to be a part of that. So we met up at the Regal Cinemas in Greensboro to watch the two part "Rise of the Cybermen"

Now I'm not exactly sure WHY this event was taking place. International David Tennant Day or something? I don't know. But we paid a pretty penny to see: 


  • Episodes we had seen several times before in the comfort of our homes. 
  • Episodes we had in fact just watched at the El Fortress of Ineptitude a few months ago. 
  • Episodes that were not in 3-D, even! (It is paired up with a 3-D feature; more on that later.)  


But there we were, the Els, our friend Victoria and about 3 dozen or more other Whovians gathered in a movie theater to watch the 10th Doctor and Rose take on the Cybermen. 

It was pretty cool!

Yeah, it was not the mind blowing experience of "The Day of the Doctor". These were episodes that we knew too well to be totally wowed by. Still, these episodes looked good up on the big screen. I don't know how much (if any)  re-mastering of the visuals was done but for a couple of televisions episodes, they looked good enough to justify their presence on a big movie screen. The sound was clearly jacked up to 11 which was awesome most of the times but a few times was just a bit too loud. (The scene where the Cybermen crash through the windows of the Tyler estate is particularly jarring.) Still, that's part and parcel of the whole movie going experience.  

"Rise of the Cybermen" makes for a fairly good choice to present as a movie going experience. The Cybermen are very striking visually, there's lots of cool explosions and several neat visuals (Zeppelins!). The story is basically self contained and not hamstrung by any major story arc machinations. Like any good Doctor Who story, it's an entertaining amalgamation of humor, drama, science fiction and heart. Although I've seen this story several times, I was not bored watching it again, this time played out on a wide screen. 

It was a little off-putting to realize that the Doctor Who episode was not going to be in 3-D. It was paired up with a 3-D documentary called Wings 3-D, narrated by David Tennant. I guess in our excitement, we failed to notice that 3-D only applied to the latter part of the double bill. Well, as my daughter pointed out, did we really want those Cyber saw/laser/cutting things coming at us in 3-D? Probably not. 

Anyway, the documentary was shown on Tuesday. And I'll write about that in tomorrow's post. 

Until then, be good to one another.  

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