Movie Review: Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog

I love the internet, but it's changed. See in the olden time days...2004, broadband wasn't the norm. So media on the internet was restricted.

The Time

People think the reason internet videos are so short is because people have short attention spans. Nope. It's because when doing video on the net became a thing you could only download about 5 minutes with any sort of reliability i.e. buffering issues or the downloading taking two hours, or the phone lines being messed up. My point? Technology restricted the format. After the invention of Hulu,YouTube and iTunes, as well as the proliferation of broadband. The technology became better. Cue the nerd god Whedon. If you love science-fiction you know what I'm already going to say. Whedon is generally very talented. One of the best writers in Hollywood. The man farts one liners. You know that big blockbuster film that everybody was talking about last summer. That was him.

And the networks hated him.

After two of his babies were canceled in the early 2000's, one so spectacularly that it became the poster child for show being doomed to failure because of the network's hijinks he quasi-retired from television for a while.



He didn't retire, retire, but in later interviews he discussed how much emotional baggage came with dealing with Fox, and stated that for a while he just didn't have it in him.

He then decided to experiment with alternative distribution methods. The internet. While not the first high production value web series, Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog is one of the first ones that made major waves, partially due to the names attached to it, including Whedon as  producer, director and writer. 



Also you had Felicia Day, who was at the time, oh screw it, is still riding high off her work on The Guild.



Also on board was Neil Harris, of How I Met Your Mother, and for the oldschool folks Doogie Howser M.D.  and Nathan Fillion, the lead from the show that got the shaft.

The Format
The show is formatted as well, a 3 part sing along blog. The parts that don't feature him in front of a camera are flashbacks sometimes featuring song.  Doctor Horrible a mad scientist trying to become a supervillian updates his vlog. Here is the thing. Doctor Horrible is a mostly harmless villain and generally sucks at being evil.


Musically the blog features a lot of the same tone and humor as the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "Once more with feeling" I have a theory. Bunnies. Bunnies aren't cute like everybody supposes. They have those hoppy legs. And what's with all those carrots? What do they need good eyesight for anyway? It was the bunnies. It must be bunnies.

Though in the third act the music get's pretty dark.

Plot
The story kicks off when Horrible get's a recruitment letter from the local legion of doom, "The Evil League of Evil".They're interested but want him to prove his evilness.

Around the same time he meets a nice girl, day he kind of likes.

You know how Doctor Horrible sucks at being a villain well the hero is kind of a jackass."He throw a car at my head." Before you all cock you're jaws let me say this was deliberate. You're suppose to be rooting for Horrible, or Billy. At least in juxtaposition to "Captain Hammer", who has managed to woo Billy's aforementioned crush, just for the sake of screwing with his head.

See the audience wants Billy to just give up the whole supervillian thing, most of his attempts are halfhearted in the first place, but anger and frustration towards Hammer actually pushes him further towards it.


Spoilers ahead
Downer ending ahoy. Billy cracks.


He goes on a rampage and accidentally kills his love interest. Without her he's got nothing to lose a goes full supervillian.