The Dalek War (1970)

D. Philip Strafer
Colour

This is what Terry Nation was striving for. From the first murmurings of dalekmania, his piggy eyes rang with pound signs and he was desperate to take his creations out into the world by themselves. Sod ‘Doctor Who’! He didn’t have the rights to ‘Doctor Who’ and so didn’t care about it. Indeed, arguably, the daleks were much bigger than the programme which beget them. They were the ones who made it the much watch show. What’s more, there had been five films at this point with the word ‘Dalek’ in the title and all of them had made money. There was clearly a market there for exterminators extreme and this movie was going to capitalise on it.


So whereas on TV The Doctor temporarily bid adieu to the daleks, in film the daleks waved a full goodbye to The Doctor. (That’s not as bizarre an image as it sounds: if a dalek holds its sucker at the right angle and weaves a little, it can do a pretty good wave.) So here we have a film which isn’t about The Doctor meeting and defeating the daleks, it’s about the daleks being the daleks and the audience revelling in their awesome metal coolness. This is the daleks being the best creatures in existence, shiny pepper-pots who will eventually control the universe.


Of course you couldn’t just have a film about daleks (even for Terry Nation a searing drama with a dalek only cast would have been a push) so there has to be some human characters as well. This comes in the form of a bunch of space soldiers – led by a young Gareth Hunt, with a shifty second in command played by Hywel Bennett – who crash land on Skaro, the daleks’s home planet. From being a hard-arsed incursion force, they suddenly find themselves having to survive long enough for the rescue ship to reach them. ‘The Dalek War’ is aiming to be a taut and claustrophobic movie, with lots of shiny corridors made dark by failing lights and humans being picked off one by one by the impressively relentless daleks.


To modern eyes the film it most resembles is ‘Aliens’, both are about military operations against an unremitting foe who can’t be beaten. Except in many ways it’s not at all like ‘Aliens’, as instead of being scary it finds new ways to be ridiculously cheesy at every turn. Imagine there were whole scenes in ‘Aliens’ given over to various xenomorphs chatting to each other about what strategy they were going to take. Imagine that the xenomorphs spoke in shrill, grating voices and actually had passionate arguments about what to do next. James Cameron’s vision suddenly becomes a lot less menacing, doesn’t it? But that is actually what we have here, sequences where daleks have ridiculous dalek conversations that just make them look far more comical than scary. But then part of the problem is that we’re clearly supposed to see the daleks as scary monsters, but also really like them as well. For all we’re supposed to care about the humans’ plight, there is part of the film that just desperately wants the daleks to win. And that gives it a real problem in tone, as with the charisma free Gareth Hunt, snivelling Hywel Bennett and nothing but anonymous meat bags surrounding them, it just feels like we shouldn’t want these idiots to escape even when two of them manage it. Instead we’re supposed to root for the daleks: to be scared of these pepper-pots, as well as finding them immensely cool, even when the film goes way out of its way to make them utterly bloody stupid.
It’s a confused movie which raises lots of conflicted emotions. It’s also the first dalek film not to make money, a crucial element would be back next time though.