The First Men in the Moon (2010)

The first of the 7 movies I've watched over the last few days and thus need to update my blog with, was the British TV-movie, The First Men in the Moon, adapted from H.G. Wells' novel by and starring Mark Gatiss. Julius Bedford, played by Rory Kinnear, encounters scientist Professor Cavor sometime in the early twentieth century. Cavor has managed to manufacture a substance named Cavorite that does some mumbo jumbo with gravity, and basically, some garbled sci-fi explanation later, the two have decided to coat a vessel in Cavorite and fly it to the Moon. Can you tell I didn't really follow the psuedo-science involved?

What follows is a funny, old-fashioned adventure on the Moon with some curious CGI aliens, which Cavor dubs Selenites, and which Bedford finds feel like cinder toffee when punched. It was a diverting 90 minutes and Mark Gatiss is fun to behold - his Cavor is a great creation, punctuating all of his sentences with a quiet '...probably', while Kinnear does solid stuff with Bedford. It didn't blow me away, but for a BBC television movie, the CGI was good, and I liked the old-fashioned style, compared with the modernist takes of Doctor Who and the like. It has made me interested to read the book, though I wouldn't watch the movie again.