Doctor Who: Paul McGann (1996)

Doctor Who: Paul McGann (1996)

The Eighth Doctor | TV Movie, approx 89 mins.

Doctor Who: The Movie (1996) was a joint production between Britain and America that was intended to kick-start a US approved version of the long-running UK TV show.

It's set in San Francisco (but filmed in Canada) and stars Paul McGann in the lead role, dressed like he's just stepped off the set of a Victorian era George Pal movie. But besides the famous title music and iconic TARDIS exterior, he's the only aspect of the production that feels like it belongs.

The shift in style to a more 'serious drama' and a misguided pandering to the perceived target audience meant the show was stripped of almost everything that made the original TV venture interesting in the first place.

The story has the Doctor travelling from Skaro to Gallifrey, tasked with returning something noteworthy back to his home planet. But things don't go to plan and the Timelord ends up in the aforementioned US city in 1999.

It starts out with continuity to the parent TV series, and then adds things that contradict the established lore. The Doctor's regeneration is officially canon, but some other things aren't. In some ways it does for Doctor Who what Masters of the Universe (1987) did for He-Man.

Eric Roberts plays The Master, a villain with snake-eyes that wants the TARDIS for himself.

I'm glad it didn't go to series, but also sincerely saddened that Paul McGann didn't get another proper shot at the role onscreen, because he surely had the skills to make it work. Take him from the grim US production and put him in a British one and he'd probably have been great.

Please don't attach any nationalistic feelings to that statement, it's simply a belief that if you remove the cultural ingredients from a work of art, then more often than not you remove its heart and soul, too. In the same way that Godzilla is inherently Japanese and Superman is symbolically American, Doctor Who is a British creation and I feel that it would be wise for any incarnation of it to strive to retain its Britishness, regardless of where it's set or filmed.

The UK Blu-ray is a native 4:3 ratio but an upscaled 1080/50 presentation, even though the film was shot on 35 mm (IMDB reports that it was printed onto NTSC video - ugh!).