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52-week film challenge, film 42

I should mention that one or two other friends of mine are (briefly) in it, but that won’t influence the review. In brief, it’s a competently-made ecological thriller set in the year 2091 (where retro old-school IBM type personal computers and 3.5″ floppies have made a comeback!). It gives the three main actors and some of the supporting cast (also from “Doctor Who”) something different to showcase another side to their acting abilities.

It’s quite watchable still, largely because writer Nicholas Briggs was incredibly prescient about predicting both widespread mask wearing and increasing ecological disasters, both of which have since happened/are happening; his only mistake was in combining them into one problem, and setting his story too far into the future (optimist!). He also nailed corporate responses to these sorts of problems, which if anything have only gotten even more entrenched and tone-deaf.

If you didn’t know the connection to “Doctor Who,” you will probably find this project a bit low-budget and occasionally cliched, but decent. If you do know the connections of the main and secondary actors to the TV show, you’ll probably enjoy this more than the general public as a whole.

The story centers around two men — indie filmmaker Al Dunbar (Peter Davison) and environmental activist Anthony Stanwick (Sylvester McCoy), who are each going their own way but occasionally cooperating — with the help of a benefactor, Oliver Thretheway (Jon Pertwee) — on suspicious activity by private company Airzone. The company CEO, Robin Archer (Bernadette Gephardt), has promised the UK government a miraculously no-pain solution to decreasing the air pollution that forces people to wear masks when they’re outside.

Airzone, however, hasn’t really got an actual plan together yet — but they’ve hit upon what might be an ace in the hole, and Dunbar and Stanwick are using an inside mole named Rachel (Heather Tracy) to get more information about this seemingly sinister option the company is considering. Due to a strange and unexplained connection, they later find and rope in popular TV weatherman Arnie Davies (Colin Baker) and his journalist girlfriend, Ellie Brown (Nicola Bryant).

Dunbar manages to infiltrate Airzone after hours and discovers the company’s secret option, but is discovered and stumbles into a secret lab where the air is so polluted he almost instantly suffocates to death. At that moment, Stanwick and Davies feel the loss, even though at this point they don’t know each other — and Davies, who never even met Dunbar before, begins seeing visions of him urging Davies to get involved.

Thanks to Davies’ relationship with Brown, he does get drawn in, but continues to have “episodes” where he sees Dunbar and gets a few bits of key information from him, which leaves Davies very shaken, and Brown very concerned for him. When he finally meets Stanwick, who is having the same visions, and Thretheway (who can also apparently see the dead Dunbar), the plot moves into the “race against time and the evil company” phase very nicely.

The second half of the video shows the two men (and less frequently, the ghost of Dunbar), Brown, and Rachel unlocking the secret Dunbar discovered, and then racing to expose it before the government blindly agrees to fund Airzone’s plan. The standard amount of cat-and-mouse ensues before the secret is finally revealed, and the evil plan stopped in the nick of time.

Baker’s Davies is probably the strongest (and occasionally quite funny) performance in the film, with McCoy’s Stanwick also doing well, though prone to speaking in riddles – rather like his Doctor. Davison, who was given the smallest of the three principle parts owing to his limited availability for the project, is able to characterize Dunbar differently enough from his usual roles to show off his skill, but not much more than that.

As someone who was a friend of the late Jon Pertwee, I was happy to see him in the film, though he plays Thretheway mostly as he played The Doctor — as himself, because he has a really commanding and charismatic presence on screen, even at the age he was when this was filmed (73, having played The Doctor some 20 years earlier). The problem with Thretheway is that there’s literally no reason for this part to exist except for him to interact with actors who succeeded him in “Doctor Who.” Thretheway acts as a passive and benevolent observer, but doesn’t actually do anything except for funding Dunbar’s exposé, nor does he actually move the plot along at all.

Other actors that “Doctor Who” fans will recogize are Bryant (here as a romantic partner to Baker, which mostly gave fans the creeps when they saw the very brief love scene); Michael Wisher as Richard Allenby, a corrupt government minister; and a very young Alan Cumming playing a TV station exec named MacNamara, who is not all that he seems. Cumming didn’t actually get to play a role in “Doctor Who” until 2018, but it was worth the wait.

It’s still a pleasant and now more-relatable drama, made on a low budget but everyone seems to be having fun doing something a bit different. If you are familiar with classic “Doctor Who,” this is probably a must-watch. For everyone else, it’s not a bad way to pass an hour and four minutes, but taking a bit more time to build the big reveal, building the main characters’ backstory, and giving Thretheway more of a reason to exist would have made The Airzone Solution more watchable outside its built-in cult audience.

And don’t think I didn’t spot you in there, Gary. 🙂