communication | the m0vie blog

Doctor Who: Wish World (Review)

Posted on May 24, 2025 by Darren

“We’re going to bring down God. Are you with us?”

In many ways, Wish World feels like a thesis statement for Davies’ return to Doctor Who.

It is a story that is, very overtly, about the power of stories and narratives to warp reality. It is a story about the violence that comes from attempts to impose restrictive and suffocating conformist narratives upon people, and how media can bend reality to a point that doubt can cause the world itself to literally crack open. Davies’ return to Doctor Who has been fascinated by the porous nature of reality and the power of television as a medium, and all of that comes crashing to a head with Wish World.

A delightful John-ty adventure.

Wish World is very obviously setting up The Reality War, the big blockbuster-sized finale that will be the first episode of Doctor Who to premiere on BBC One since The Giggle, allowing for the Christmas Specials The Church on Ruby Road and Joy to the World. A significant portion of the episode amounts to pieces being moved around the board so that they can deliver in the season finale, to the point that the Rani herself has to acknowledge that the final act of the episode is largely “exposition.” It is always difficult to discuss the first part of a two-part episode in isolation, and that is especially true of a the first part of a season finale.

However, Wish World works largely on its own terms, crystalising the ideas that have been simmering across these twenty episodes since The Star Beast, articulating themes that are clearly weighing on Davies’ mind.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: communication, conspiracy theories, continuity, doctor who, ideas, narratives, power, pronatalism, Rani, reactionary, reality, russell t. davies, story, Television, the internet, the rani, wish world | 1 Comment »

“You Understand Me Now, Don’t You?” Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch” and the Chaos of Miscommunication…

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Darren

This Saturday, I’ll be discussing Snatch on The 250, the weekly podcast that I co-host discussing the IMDb’s Top 250 Movies of All-Time. However, I had some thoughts on the film that I wanted to jot down first.

“Have I made myself clear, boys?”

“Yeah, that’s perfectly clear, Mickey. Yeah… just give me one minute to confer with my colleague.

“… did you understand a single word of what he just said?”

Guy Ritchie is an interesting director, in large part because there seems to be very little that actively defines “a Guy Ritchie film” outside of a few stylistic quirks.

Films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Revolver, RocknRolla and The Gentlemen suggest a director fascinated with “hard men”, and some of this sensibility undoubtedly carries over into his blockbuster filmography, most obviously in the rambunctious stylings of Sherlock Holmes and most painfully in the attempts at grit in King Arthur. However, Ritchie has also spent a lot of time working as a director-for-hire on mainstream blockbusters worlds apart from that hypermasculinity, such as Swept Away, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or Aladdin.

More than that, Ritchie’s work is more often recognised for its visual flourish rather than its thematic coherance, the director adopting a high-energy approach to camera movements and editing. Ritchie’s emerged from British independent cinema in the late nineties, and his work shares more than a few passing similarities to the work of young and hungry filmmakers working on the contemporary American scene. It is perhaps too much to describe Ritchie as “the British answer to Quentin Tarantino”, but it’s not entirely unfair either.

This is what makes Snatch such an interesting film. It is Ritchie’s second film, one that notably added some transatlantic flavour to the sensibilities of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Indeed, it’s tempting to write Snatch as an inferior copy of that earlier film, as a reiteration of that striking cinematic debut with extra Brad Pitt thrown in for marketability. After all, this was a particularly common line of criticism when the film was released. While there’s certainly some substance to this accusation, it overlooks the way in which Snatch makes its arguments much more clearly.

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Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: america, communication, england, guy ritchie, imdb, language, Movie, podcast, Snatch, The 250, understanding | Leave a comment »

40. The Emoji Movie: Express Yourself – This Just In (-#11)

Posted on August 12, 2017 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, This Just In is a subset of the fortnightly The 250 podcast, looking at notable new arrivals on the list of the 250 best(and the 100 worst) movies of all-time, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.

This time, Tony Leondis’ The Emoji Movie: Express Yourself.