My expert viewer and I had mixed reviews about this movie.
Overall it was a good film, it was rather nerdy, and it gave a fairly accurate portrayal as to what it was like when Doctor Who first begun. Since I have gone through all of William Hartnell's series, I could not watch it as though I had never seen the Classic Whos and did not know who and what William Hartnell was like. In fact this made me slightly uncomfortable, because I understand all the understated moments that only people who knew about the Classic Whos and William Hartnell would understand. I watched it from a nerdy standpoint. That has never happened to me before.
I recognized all the episodes that they portrayed in the show, much to my expert viewer's amusement. I complained when the Doctor was clearly in costume for The Reign of Terror, but when he held up the magazine, the Zarbi were on the cover. The Web Planet doesn't come until after The Reign of Terror so they shouldn't have been on the cover of the magazine. My expert viewer was openly laughing at me through most of the movie, because I kept shouting out the characters that I recognized and which episodes they were in.
As much as I got my nerd factor from this film, we found it a bit anticlimactic and rather slow. The movie seemed to be about Verity Lambert, Waris Hussein, and William Hartnell. I thought Verity left very abruptly, without much of an announcement. Up until now the focus had mostly been about her, and then she was gone. It was the same for Hussein. He left just has abruptly.
There was much emphasis put on the William Hartnell screwing up his lines. They implied that he started doing that even in the beginning of his role as the Doctor due to his condition. As we understood it, the Doctor didn't really act like that until the last year or so of his role. A lot of the mistakes were actually part of the script in the beginning. Yes, he deteriorated towards the end, but our impression was that a lot of his screw ups were intentional.
They seemed to put a particular emphasis on William Hartnell's personality off screen. He was a grouchy old man off screen, but his role as the Doctor eventually made him gently and less gruff. I am not sure how much of this accurate. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who was really grouchy off screen, but that was simply an impression I got while watching the show. So he had me convinced that he was always a nice guy, but that probably wasn't true.
There were some parts of the movie that didn't really happen or were embellished in some way, such as that the sprinklers went off while they were filming. That is a pet peeve I always have when making something historically accurate, because minor inaccuracies make me uncertain of the documentary as a whole.
It was fun picking out some of the real actors who had cameos in the movie, such as Ian Chesterton as Harry. Some of the people were only in it for a couple seconds, so you couldn't really blink without missing someone.
Most of the actors in the movies actually looked like the real people from the show. The Verity Lambert actress looked almost exactly like the real Verity Lambert. The one person I thought they did a poor job of representing Patrick Troughton. I thought he looked nothing like the real actor.
What did you think of Matt Smith showing up at the end? There are people who really enjoyed this part, and others did not. I felt as though it didn't really fit in this documentary about the show, but others like the fact that he got to see that the show went on for years and years. Although I would probably have been quite startled at seeing a strange man standing across the controls for me and not concluded that it was one of the future doctors. It did not do anything for me, but that's just my opinion. Though my heart did quicken at the sight of Matt Smith.
Next up: The Power of the Daleks
P.S. Another expert viewer, not my husband, has told me that the sprinkler scene most likely happened. Thank you for your correction on this. It isn't very often that my husband is brought down off his high pedestal.
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