the lazy man's friend, and boy, were we typecast in Britain". In 1992, she said of the film: "I saw it on TV a couple of years ago and I was very pleased with it. I thought it came over quite well". To Chris Bentley, Doppelgänger is a "stylish and thought-provoking science-fiction thriller". TV Guide magazine gives the film two stars out of four, calling it a "strange little film" with an "overwritten script". Glenn Erickson of DVD Talk considers Doppelgänger a "good" film but writes that it "takes an okay premise but does next to nothing with it. We see 100 minutes of bad drama and good special effects, and then the script opts for frustration and meaningless mystery". He criticises the cinematography, comparing it to that of Thunderbirds in so far as the characters "stand and talk a lot", while defining the script as "at least 60 percent hardware-talk and exposition ... How people move about – airplane, parachute, centrifuge – is more important than what they're doing". In a review for Den of Geek, Martin Anderson praises the direction and effects but states that the film's "robust and prosaic" dialogue sits "ill-at-ease with the metaphysical ponderings". He criticises some of the editing, noting that many of the effects shots have "that 'Hornby' factor, slowing up the narrative unnecessarily". He rates Doppelgänger three stars out of five, summing it up as "an interesting journey with many rewards". The Film4 website gives Doppelgänger two-and-a-half stars out of five, summing it up as "an occasionally interesting failure". The review praises the effects and costume design but judges the subplots about Hassler's treachery and the Rosses' marital problems to be unnecessary distractions from the main story. It also questions the originality of the premise and the depth of the writing: "Anderson's has to be the cheapest alternate Earth ever. Whereas audiences might expect a world where the Roman Empire never fell or the Nazis won World War II, here the shocking discovery is that people write backwards. That's it". A similar view is expressed by Gary Westfahl, who describes the setting as "the most boring and unimaginative alien world imaginable". Interpretation Archer and Nicholls suggest as possible causes of the film's box office failure its "quirky, offbeat nature" and waning public interest in space exploration after Apollo 11. The topic of the Moon landing dominated a contemporary review in The Milwaukee