DOOMSDAY
June 11th 2009 04:46
Starring: Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell, Craig Conway.
Directed by: Neil Marshall.
Marshall’s two previous horror efforts, Dog Soldiers, and The Descent, were both tense, plot driven, atmospheric scary movies with strong characters. The same cannot be said for Doomsday. In fact, I just want to go WTF? Doomsday is probably the worst film I have seen this year. Eschewing any kind of comprehensible plot, or likeable or memorable characters, in favour of relentless, loud, dumb action, I felt like I had hired a Michael Bay film by mistake.
Doomsday starts well enough: Scotland has been overrun with some kind of killer virus, necessitating the building of a giant wall manned by automated guns, that will seal Scotland off from the rest of England for the next 30 years. As the film opens we see a helicopter evacuating the last of the soldiers from a crowd of panicked, doomed Scots. A little girl is with her mother, and gets injured in the eye. The mother begs the soldiers to take the girl with them. So they do. Never mind spreading the plague to London or the fact that they are shooting every other healthy person who approaches the helicopter.
Cut to thirty years later: the girl is now Rhona Mitra (has she ever made a good film?) and she is part of an elite group of military assassins, or something like that. She is blind in one eye, but her prosthetic eye ball contains a disc that records what she sees. Remember that because that will be an important plot point later on – or the only plot point later on. The virus has decided to crop up in London, and, discovering that there are people alive in Scotland, the shady British government decides to send Rhona in with a bunch of nameless and expendable people with guns in order to find Dr. Marcus Kane (McDowell), who was a scientist left behind in Scotland and who was working on a cure. And that, my friends, is about all the plot you are going to get.
The next 90 minutes are a ridiculous one note, one key, barrage of overly edited explosions, stunts and fight scenes. You may think it sounds cool. It is not. It is like being beaten over the head with a mullet wig. Even the aesthetics of the film are bad. The first sequence, where Rhona and crew get attacked by Sol (Conway) a Mad Max inspired, neo-eighties, cyber punk, is so slavishly faithful to that era of film that it is laughably embarrassing for all involved. Sol’s only character development appears to be screaming and yelling every line of dialogue as loudly as possible. Despite Rhona’s crew shooting many of Sol’s people, whose sole aim appears to be holding raves to bad eighties pop, there is an endless supply of them. I don’t know how many people survived this virus originally, but boy did they breed! And all at the same time as all the people seem to be about thirty. No one older or younger appears to be about. Very strange.
Those of Rhona’s team who have not been hacked apart then free Sol’s sister and flee with her, planning on taking her back to London to provide a cure with her immunity. Oddly enough, Rhona’s team are not worried about catching this virus off the survivors themselves, and none of them get sick. We then enter our Lord of the Rings/Gladiator rip-off sequence. It turns out that Dr. Kane has been hiding out in a Scottish castle recreating the medieval way of life as a way of starting over. There is no cure he says. Never was. Is there a cure for this film I wonder? Then we get a hilarious bit where Rhona must fight some gladiator twice her size for the medieval amusement of Kane’s cronies. I kept waiting for her to go into Russell Crowe’s speech but it did not happen. The whole scene is oddly reminiscent of the crap ending to Resident Evil 2 where Milla Jovovich has to fight the useless, ugly mutant. That is another really bad film.
So they get out of medieval town in time to discover a brand new car in some kind of disused subway. Why is there a new car there? How come it has fuel in it and the car keys? Plot points like this are irrelevant when there is action to be had. Rhona drives the brand new car down a completely empty highway to a rendezvous point or something. But wait, Sol and his Mad Max crew have found them. How? Who knows? It was like they knew they would be there, when there was absolutely no way they could have known that. Anyway, they have very old, modified cars, which somehow manage to catch up, and overtake, Rhona’s new one. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was driving on an empty highway, I would not be thinking about the speed limit, so how can they catch her up? Again, who knows? Car chases ensue.
It finally reaches the end. 90 minutes too late for my tastes. You may have noticed Bob Hoskins was in the cast list, not that he does anything, except accidentally bring about the death of a sleazy looking British PM. He and Rhona share the only real character scene as he comes across her in her old home in Scotland. Too little too late. Doomsday, unfortunately, is just a big, dumb, loud waste of time.
Directed by: Neil Marshall.
Marshall’s two previous horror efforts, Dog Soldiers, and The Descent, were both tense, plot driven, atmospheric scary movies with strong characters. The same cannot be said for Doomsday. In fact, I just want to go WTF? Doomsday is probably the worst film I have seen this year. Eschewing any kind of comprehensible plot, or likeable or memorable characters, in favour of relentless, loud, dumb action, I felt like I had hired a Michael Bay film by mistake.
Doomsday starts well enough: Scotland has been overrun with some kind of killer virus, necessitating the building of a giant wall manned by automated guns, that will seal Scotland off from the rest of England for the next 30 years. As the film opens we see a helicopter evacuating the last of the soldiers from a crowd of panicked, doomed Scots. A little girl is with her mother, and gets injured in the eye. The mother begs the soldiers to take the girl with them. So they do. Never mind spreading the plague to London or the fact that they are shooting every other healthy person who approaches the helicopter.
Cut to thirty years later: the girl is now Rhona Mitra (has she ever made a good film?) and she is part of an elite group of military assassins, or something like that. She is blind in one eye, but her prosthetic eye ball contains a disc that records what she sees. Remember that because that will be an important plot point later on – or the only plot point later on. The virus has decided to crop up in London, and, discovering that there are people alive in Scotland, the shady British government decides to send Rhona in with a bunch of nameless and expendable people with guns in order to find Dr. Marcus Kane (McDowell), who was a scientist left behind in Scotland and who was working on a cure. And that, my friends, is about all the plot you are going to get.
The next 90 minutes are a ridiculous one note, one key, barrage of overly edited explosions, stunts and fight scenes. You may think it sounds cool. It is not. It is like being beaten over the head with a mullet wig. Even the aesthetics of the film are bad. The first sequence, where Rhona and crew get attacked by Sol (Conway) a Mad Max inspired, neo-eighties, cyber punk, is so slavishly faithful to that era of film that it is laughably embarrassing for all involved. Sol’s only character development appears to be screaming and yelling every line of dialogue as loudly as possible. Despite Rhona’s crew shooting many of Sol’s people, whose sole aim appears to be holding raves to bad eighties pop, there is an endless supply of them. I don’t know how many people survived this virus originally, but boy did they breed! And all at the same time as all the people seem to be about thirty. No one older or younger appears to be about. Very strange.
Those of Rhona’s team who have not been hacked apart then free Sol’s sister and flee with her, planning on taking her back to London to provide a cure with her immunity. Oddly enough, Rhona’s team are not worried about catching this virus off the survivors themselves, and none of them get sick. We then enter our Lord of the Rings/Gladiator rip-off sequence. It turns out that Dr. Kane has been hiding out in a Scottish castle recreating the medieval way of life as a way of starting over. There is no cure he says. Never was. Is there a cure for this film I wonder? Then we get a hilarious bit where Rhona must fight some gladiator twice her size for the medieval amusement of Kane’s cronies. I kept waiting for her to go into Russell Crowe’s speech but it did not happen. The whole scene is oddly reminiscent of the crap ending to Resident Evil 2 where Milla Jovovich has to fight the useless, ugly mutant. That is another really bad film.
So they get out of medieval town in time to discover a brand new car in some kind of disused subway. Why is there a new car there? How come it has fuel in it and the car keys? Plot points like this are irrelevant when there is action to be had. Rhona drives the brand new car down a completely empty highway to a rendezvous point or something. But wait, Sol and his Mad Max crew have found them. How? Who knows? It was like they knew they would be there, when there was absolutely no way they could have known that. Anyway, they have very old, modified cars, which somehow manage to catch up, and overtake, Rhona’s new one. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was driving on an empty highway, I would not be thinking about the speed limit, so how can they catch her up? Again, who knows? Car chases ensue.
It finally reaches the end. 90 minutes too late for my tastes. You may have noticed Bob Hoskins was in the cast list, not that he does anything, except accidentally bring about the death of a sleazy looking British PM. He and Rhona share the only real character scene as he comes across her in her old home in Scotland. Too little too late. Doomsday, unfortunately, is just a big, dumb, loud waste of time.
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