Honestly, this might be my favourite review I’ve done!
The War Games In Colour - 6/10
This is an interesting one, there’s a lot to like, a lot to not like, so instead of a normal rambly review, I’m going to format this one
The Good: The colourisation is incredible, everything is so much more vivid, and it makes the contrast between the war zones, the war room, and the ending segment with the Time Lords even more stark. The War Lord’s glasses being tinted red especially was a touch that I just adored. The colourised intro sequence was also an unexpected delight, and I loved that they also kept the The War Games title too, colouring it and the explosions.
While I’ll speak more on it later, there’s some elements I really enjoyed with the cutdown, having the scientist’s monologue explaining the reprogramming partly cut over footage of people in the war zones was a great way to make that scene more visually interesting and reuse some of the footage that would otherwise go to waste.
I can understand criticisms with the music choice, but I think I felt the emotional aspect of Jamie and Zoe’s departure moreso here than I did in the original, it just worked for me quite well.
The ‘regeneration’ scene is brilliant, I love that the faces were all coloured differently as they spin around, the extra colour and effects really give that scene a little extra flair that wasn’t needed, but is an absolute delight to have. and on a similar note, the NuWho faces showing up as Two comments on potential new faces is just delightful (though a shame it’s only NuWho ones).
There’s a few new CG shots in there that I think really elevate the piece, a few exterior shots of the war room, some shots of a TARDIS in flight, some images of Gallifrey. Generally just a little bit of added visual interest on contextualising the setting which I love.
And lastly that new regeneration scene is great, you genuinely wouldn’t be able to tell that the performances were cobbled together from other parts of the show, and the nod to the UNIT Dating controversy is just such a fun little part to add.
The Bad: The music is far too loud in a lot of scenes and can make it harder to hear what the characters are saying, plus a lot of it being newer tracks created a little bit of a disconnect for me.
The main issue however is of course the pacing. The War Games is ten 25 min episodes, being generous with time allowed for titles and such, that’s a 200 minute story cut down to 90 minutes, and it unfortunately shows. A lot of things feel completely rushed, or you can tell when there’s some obvious cuts (the exterior shot of the war room is used more than a couple of times in an attempt to hide them, but the more it happens the more obvious it is). I can understand the reasoning for cutting it down, making it more appealing to modern audiences and not requiring 3+ hours of colourisation, but 90 minutes is just far too short for a story of this magnitude, you don’t really get any space to breathe. I could see a 150 minute cut working well, possibly a bit shorter than that, but it really does need that extra time to flow and give more attention to the characters, the rivalry between The War Chief and The Security Chief is a delight to watch in the original for example, and here it’s pretty much just glossed over entirely.
The Ugly Downright Strange: I have absolutely no idea where to put this, but I find the choice to use The Master’s Theme for The War Chief to be really interesting. Expanded media has of course given countless contradictory accounts of the nature of The Master’s relationship with The War Chief (hell, sometimes adaptations of the same story disagree in the case of Goth Opera). I assumed that this adaptation would continue to simply ignore any connection, so this surprised me. Not really much to say good or bad about it, just that it’s interesting.
Conclusion. Overall I think this is a much weaker story than The War Games, but I’m extremely glad it exists. I’m not always in the mood to sit down and watch three hours of television, and no matter how good The War Games is, that’s still a fatal flaw for it. I think a lot of the updates work to this story’s benefit, and I think I’m more likely to rewatch this than I am The War Games, even if I do think it’s the inferior version.
It’s absolutely not a perfect comparison in the slightest, but I think of it in a similar way to The Lord of The Rings. The Extended Editions give you so much more and are probably better overall, but I don’t always want to sit down and watch 11 and a half hours of film, sometimes I just want to kick back and throw on the theatrical Fellowship of The Ring.
The way they used future incarnations of the doctor and dressed the UNIT dating problem is hilarious. Always good to see Troughton’s performance. I think I’ll have to rewatch the original serial soon to compare