Synopsis: After the events on Sentinel Island, Lockwood and Natasha Alexander have disaapeared. Computer systems are breaking down, an entire village vanishes and only Lockwood holds the key.

• A Review by Stuart Gutteridge
• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Stuart Gutteridge 25/11/99

As the final part of BBV`s Auton trilogy, Auton 3 had a lot to live up to considering expectations were high  following the successes of Auton and particularly Auton: Sentinel. But does it succeed? Well yes, it does in a surprising sort of way. Auton 3 is much more character driven than the previous two tales and also answers the mysteries presented in its predecessor. As such great use is made of the psychic abilities of Natasha Alexander and newcomer Ross Palmer.

This time around Bryonie Britchard`s  Dr Sally Arnold is used a great deal more, although Lockwood plays a less central role to the proceedings. On the acting front it is difficult to say who comes out on top, as, due to some sparkling dialogue, all of the regulars shine. The Autons themselves take centre stage here and rightly so, being both servants and killers. They are also shown to be vulnerable,to various kinds of attack, as well as acquiring new methods of killing of their own. The mixture of studio and location filming works well and is complemented by the excellent use of CGI effects.

So are there any bad points? Well providing a resolution to the mysteries already posed and trying to tell a new story isn`t easy at the best of times, so Auton 3 might alienate the casual viewer, as it requires concentration, but overall it provides a great conclusion to a great trilogy. Just don`t expect any happy endings...

A Review by Finn Clark 16/7/13

It's the third of BBV's Auton trilogy, but the credits would have you believe that it took place with no involvement from Nicholas Briggs. Instead it's directed by Bill Baggs and Patricia Merrick and written by Arthur Wallis with additional material by Paul Ebbs.

However, Arthur Wallis is a pseudonym for Nick Briggs. Speculating on why he might have wanted to hide under a funny hat this time, I wonder if it might have something to do with Big Finish's launch that year. Their first release was The Sirens of Time in July 1999, written by... goodness me, Mr Briggs. I imagine it's not because he's embarrassed with this movie, then, although he probably should be. Continuing my earlier parallels with superhero movies, Auton 3: Awakening is the third and worst of its trilogy. I didn't hate it, but it's a bit rubbish.

The problem is the story. Remember all that muddiness last time with psychic links and psychic powers? Here it's even worse. Lockwood (Michael Wade) has a psychic link. Natasha (Jo Castleton) has a psychic link. There's a new character (Graeme Du Fresne) and he has a psychic link. The Nestenes have psychic links coming out of their ears, because they're Nestenes, but what's more the plot this time is all about their psychic link with Lockwood. No infiltrating warehouses or hypnotising inbred villages this time! No, all they want is to persuade Lockwood to open their mind to them. The plot can thus be summarised as follows:

Autons: "oh, go on."

Lockwood: "no."

Incidentally I know a reviewer who hates psychic links with a passion, in addition to Chosen Ones and one other pet hate I can't remember offhand. (It should have been parallel universes, but wasn't.) Anyway, until now I never shared his ire, but this is a film to make you regret that psychic links were ever invented. There's no story yet written with one that wouldn't be improved by removing it. (Warning: possibly untrue.) Psychic links are lazy. Want to convey some plot information? Beam it into your protagonist's head! Better of course would be for your characters to dig it up for themselves in a way that (a) makes them do some work, (b) moves along the story and/or (c) spells out the information itself for the audience.

I called Auton 2 muddy, but this is a mud tower built on mud, surrounded by mud and ultimately collapsing into mud. The characters know things psychically and/or are affected by the mental influence of Nestenes. (The latter could have been creepy if Briggs had made a thing of it and had everyone struggling to resist mental domination, but he doesn't.) What's everyone trying to do? Answer: not a lot. Even the Autons are unusually passive, going in for the Michael Myers "Walk Don't Run" approach to chasing people because they don't actually want to kill them. The characters themselves comment on it. Someone has an unconvincing plan that apparently stretched back to the first film and requires them to have made ludicrous assumptions that, as it happens, came true. The ending is an anticlimax, although in fairness to Briggs it would seem that he was a better director in the first two movies than his replacements are here.

The good stuff here would be the Lockwood-Winslet scenes. Michael Wade isn't served well here, but I still like him and he finds the odd juicy moment. I enjoyed his bitter laugh after "I wonder who else I shall dream about?" If nothing else, again it's pushing on the character's development from film to film. Meanwhile, George Telfer pushes the boat out as Winslet, arguably stealing the limelight from Wade. "And you are about a nanosecond in the history of my species!" He gets a dual role (damaged original and Auton duplicate) and I thought he was impressive.

That I genuinely liked. Telfer in the psychiatric ward is the one interesting idea in the movie, I think, since it's unusual in Who to give this level of attention to a throwaway victim. I also liked the moment where Castleton and Du Fresne meet and start kissing, because they have a psychic link and presumably it hasn't occurred to them that they're ill-matched physically. She's young, wiry and a bit tough-looking. He's a bald middle-aged guy in a bow tie and a cardigan, with the face of a hamster.

What else was worth watching? Um... there's lots of CGI, I suppose.

The Autons aren't anything to write home about. They hardly do any killing and there's nothing much new here being done with them, apart from Telfer's acting heroics. We meet another Nestene. That's good. We learn that there are apparently "a billion Nestenes buried throughout your Earth". That's... surprising. They're disrupting computers worldwide, which sounded good and I assumed would be a cool new angle on their plastic abilities. Unfortunately not. They make energy barriers as in, um, The Daemons. They can fire disintegration beams from their eyes, which is mildly cool but I prefer detachable hands. Oh, and on the one occasion when an Auton hand hand does fall away, it's the wrong gun inside.

In other words, they've practically stopped being Autons. Also, UNIT have Auton-killing guns that look like water pistols. These make no difference to the story, except to make the Autons less menacing.

Occasionally, the dialogue would distract me. I'd have preferred "octopi" to "octopusses". It seems that Lockwood's human after all (shame), but with alien tech in his mind (no further explanation). We're told early on that Bryonie Pritchard has been interrogated for "three weeks solid", but I didn't get the impression that three weeks had passed for Wade and Castleton.

In short, it flounders. It's a non-story that blobs around for 57 minutes, then dribbles away. However, it gives Wade and Telfer some good scenes and they do rather well with them, as well as occasional bits elsewhere that I liked. It's the weakest of the Auton trilogy, but it still beats the living daylights out of some other semi-professional fanvids I've seen. I didn't think it was much cop, but I could still watch it without pain and I think it just about managed to justify the time I spent watching it. Wade and Telfer are worth your time, at least.

"I've had enough of this psychic crap."