Doomsday

Up until now Neil Marshall had done relatively small movies.  The cast was small, the story was small, but the production felt bigger than it was in reality.  With the success of The Descent Marshall decided to go all out and make a giant film.

I knew absolutely nothing about this when I saw it in theaters and was pleasantly surprised.  Marshall took Escape from New York, The Road Warrior, Aliens, Gladiator, The Warriors and who knows what other pictures and put them in a blender.  That sounds like a disaster but it works better than you would think.  The story is about a virus that kills people almost instantly.  It broke out in Scotland so they quarantined the whole country.  No one gets in or out.  Thirty years later the virus shows up again but this time in London.  Now all of a sudden there’s interest to find a cure which some suits believe is in Scotland.  Living people have been spotted there which means some are immune to the disease.  Scientists could make a vaccine from their blood but they need someone to go over the wall and bring back a specimen.

Now I want to say right off the bat that I like this movie.  It’s a helluva ride with a lot of good action.  There are gun fights, a sword fight, a car chase, a dude gets burned alive and there’s even a gladiatorial match.  And it’s all done much better than its contemporaries.  The lead character, Sinclair (Rhona Mitra (Highwaymen, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans)), is basically a female Snake Plissken.  She has only one eye but wears a fake eyeball (that can act as a video camera) instead of an eye patch, she dresses pretty much all in black, she has a doesn’t-give-a-shit, take-no-shit attitude and you get the idea.  Definitely not as good as Snake but who the fuck is?  The other two characters that were cool were Sol, the leader of the cannibalistic Road Warrior type gang, and Canaris, some evil high up guy that wants to rule the UK.  Everyone else was just ok.

For this write up I went back to watch this sucker again and still enjoyed it but realized a couple of things.  First, the plot doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it.  For three years the British government knew that living folks existed in Scotland and just ignored it until the virus hit their home turf.  (Spoiler) Also at the end Canaris gets a hold of a survivor (remember they can find a cure for the disease with this person) but says that he’s going to wait yet another bunch of years before administering a vaccine.  I get that he’s the bad guy and he was to do shit that will make him look like an asshole but this is just baffling.  He says he’ll look like a hero later when he shows up with a cure but why wouldn’t he look like a hero if he came out with a vaccine immediately?  The only thing I can think of is that he’s going to make money off of the cure and wants demand to be at its peak.  But that’s not the smartest business move.  People are dying so there won’t be as many folks to give the vaccine to.  The sick aren’t the only ones that are gonna need this shit.  The healthy will need it too to prevent the disease from setting in to start with.  This felt pretty lazy and like the filmmakers didn’t think that Canaris was evil enough so they had to have him do this other shit that is definitely villainous but doesn’t add up.

Another thing is that the team that gets sent into diseased Scotland looses their bio suits after a little while.  None of them seem to get the deadly virus while they’re over there which lessens the threat of the quarantined area.  I mean the disease was the reason why Scotland was cut off from the rest of the world.  The few living people over there are supposed to be immune but our group of heroes isn’t.

And the whole idea of a covert operation with sneaking people across the border isn’t really necessary.  They say in the movie that they don’t want to fly a helicopter in there to arouse suspicion.  But we’re talking about the entire UK at threat of being decimated.  They should’ve just flown a chopper in, grabbed the first couple of people they saw and flown back over the wall.  This aspect of the film actually isn’t that bad but it’s definitely a forced spin on Escape from New York.  Marshall couldn’t come up with something as good as the president being held hostage in the quarantined section.  It makes more sense that a covert operation would be implemented in that situation.  But a virus that’s a threat to the world?  Just find a cure ASAP, who cares if people notice.  And even if someone did notice, they don’t know what’s going on so it doesn’t seem like there’s a big risk there.

This film isn’t as good as the ones it’s imitating (except maybe Gladiator).  It’s too influenced by its influences.  I would’ve liked Marshall to be more subtle about it.  He kind of took one step forward and two steps back with this one.  Instead of continuing to expand the boundaries of horror or making another best-in-subgenre movie he went for an action extravaganza with a cast of hundreds, filming in South Africa, incorporating so many different types of action, extreme makeup and blood effects and even going back to the old art of using a miniature for the exploding bus at the end.  All that shit’s cool but I just want it to be more original and/or less reliant on its inspiration.  It borders on big dumb action like Invasion U.S.A. and Death Wish 3 where you’re treated to a pretty incredible spectacle but there’s almost no depth to it leaving you somewhat unsatisfied.

Even though I shat on this a bit I can’t deny that I smiled a bunch during this thing.  It may be too obvious a mix of your favorite action pictures and segmented as such but man is it fun.