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Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
I am Ollie Elliott. I studied BA Computer Games Design and got a 2.1 with honours at Newport University. I'm from sunny Somerset. This is my blog. It's about different things. Go away.

Tuesday 29 December 2009

Day of the Triffids on BBC 1

It's not long. I was interested and looking forward to the new adaptation. I haven't read the novel but I want to. I haven't seen the 1962 film and according to Corrado I don't want to. I've seen bits and pieces of the 1981 BBC series and I want to see the rest. Really wasn't keen on the new two-parter though. I remember the old series reminding me of old Doctor Who in terms of production at the time. Laughable effects looking back now etc. Looking back on this weeks version, in the future, I think people may make similar comparisons with current Doctor Who. It looks like Doctor Who vs 28 Days Later. I'm not quite sure who it was aimed at either. The first part was about the blinded people and the second part was about the Triffids. I don't think that's how the producers would like it described. The two parts felt completely segregated from each other. The Triffids weren't characterised at all in the first episode. Maybe they were but it was so badly handled I didn't notice. I think I would have done a better job. Then in the second episode they just felt like background characters. They are the title characters. Their design was particularly unadventurous as well. I think the old series' Triffids were better designed. More exotic. I designed a Triffid for a horror postcard project last year and I think mine was more interesting. The special effects deserve some praise. The CGI was very good on the roots of the plants. A lot of the time it was hard to tell if they were real or computer-generated. That may be because it was so dark though. The blinded were ok. Not as good as the old ones by any means. Then in the second part they didn't feature at all. Nor the american guy. Thought he was going to be shit but turned out to be one of the more believable characters. Not particularly difficult a challenge to be fair. The brilliance of the whole blinded thing is that they're essentially the zombies of DOTT but at the same time just blind humans caught up in mob mentality. They almost got it down in this version. Then they disappeared. Not good. uuuuuummmm. The script and dialogue weren't good. The performances were bad. The action was nothing but what we've seen a hundred times before. The two children characters in the second part were ridiculous. There was absolutely no successful creation of mood, tension, fear, emotional connection or the vital impending danger. The cinematography was as conservative as possible. Except when it makes no sense. There's one bit in part two where Eddie Izzard's main baddie character arrives at the goodie's dad's house where they're all hiding and it's all filmed showing only his feet and trouser bottoms. I didn't understand this at all as it was immediately clear it was him. He wasn't a new character and we knew who it was just by his shoes. No mystery so why not just show his whole fucking body? I'd like to think I could do a better job. And where did all the guns come from? Every policeman seems to have a pistol on them. It's set in Britain. I don't really know what happened at the end. Offer me a job.

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