Review - Doomsday

Doomsday
dir. Neil Marshall
2008

After having success with Dog Soldiers and, to a larger extent, The Descent Neil Marshall brings us Doomsday. While not as inspired as The Descent, Doomsday deftly skirts the line between a tribute and a blatant ripoff.

Doomsday begins in 2008 with a plague, named the reaper virus, breaking out and killing virtually everyone in Scotland. Opening narration by Malcolm McDowell paints the horrific picture of the cannibalism and violence that breaks out after the rest of the UK walls Scotland off using the old Roman Wall as a line across the country. Our heroine is shown to be a child at this point who by her mother's sacrifice has escaped Scotland just before it was sealed off. Our main plot then begins 27 years later in England.

By this time England, which the world has turned its back on just as England did to Scotland, has been cut off from much of the world and has large problems with overcrowding and food shortages. Our heroine, Eden Sinclair, is shown to be a hard-nosed military agent who can handle herself in combat in a quick battle against criminals. The government learns that the reaper virus has appeared again in London and plans are set in motion to abandon the city, but a small team led by Eden is sent into Scotland to see if there are any survivors and if a doctor who had been working on the virus had discovered a cure before Scotland had been left to fall apart.

At this point the film plays out just as one might imagine it to: Eden and a small team, most of whom are destined for death, go into Scotland and find survivors who are none too friendly. Eden is captured by two different groups of survivors, one which is straight out of Mad Max, and another group which had decided to restart medieval civilization in a Scottish castle. She and a continually smaller number of her team escape from each location while always being chased. There is a lot going on in Doomsday, but much of it including government corruption, critiques on modern society, and more are barely touched on.

The film has two obvious sources of inspiration, or imitation if you prefer, in Mad Max and Escape from New York. Eden is the consummate badass character and is in many ways a female Snake Plissken, even going so far as to be missing an eye after her escape from Scotland as a child. Marshall attempts to draw from these two and other films for touchstones while not relying too much straight imitation. There are definitely some unique and strong scenes and, for the most part, the action and special effects are done quite well. In the final scenes the callbacks to Mad Max are perhaps too strong, but for the most part the film manages to draw upon the past without plagiarizing it. Doomsday is not strong enough to stand up against the sources of inspiration, though Escape from New York has aged rather poorly, but it is a good hard R-rated action film that does effectively recall a time when screaming leather clad villains in a post/near-apocalyptic setting was reason enough to go to the theater.

Verdict: 3 1/2 stars out of 5.