Todd's Much Longer DOOMSDAY Review

[This one arrives a couple days late thanks to my hectic travel schedule ... I'd hoped to get it posted a little while back but, erm, I didn't. So here it is now.]

Oh, stop crying, you big babies. Yes, as the trailers made clear, Neil Marshall’s Doomsday is very aware of the ground it is treads. Yes, it includes clear nods to Mad Max, Aliens and Escape From New York. But there’s a big difference between simply aping a genre and building upon it, a difference Marshall knows perfectly well and he is absolutely on the correct side of that line. Doomsday is the film that fans of 1980’s post apocalyptic fare could only dream about, one that works the system to perfection, uses what has come before as a launching point to up the ante, and does it all with production values that Carpenter et al could only dream of. This is no mere clone or copy, this is the real thing in its own right and it is one bloody, violent rush of a film.

For those who have missed all the lead in, here’s the basic premise. In less than one month from now a horrible virus, known as the Reaper, emerges in Glasgow. It spreads as quickly and easily as the common cold, always ends in a horrible death and there is no cure. It cannot be stopped. And so the British government makes the only decision it can: complete and total quarantine. Scotland is walled off, a shoot-on-sight military perimeter established and the entire Scottish nation simply left to die. It is a brutal price to pay, to be sure, but one which must be paid if the spread of the virus is to be halted.

Thirty years later. A young girl who escaped the viral holocaust through the sacrifice of her mother has grown into a hard and brutal woman, a one-eyed military machine who executes her missions coldly and entirely without emotion. She is ruthless, efficient and absolutely perfect to take on a suicide mission required to save the human race. The Reaper has reappeared, this time in London, and she must now lead a team back across the wall into Glasgow to find survivors, the records of the medical research team left behind there to continue their work, and hopefully a cure.

But what they find is not what they had hoped. There are survivors, sure, the offspring of the rare few blessed with natural immunity to the virus. But this is a generation abandoned, a generation raised surrounded by nothing but death, a generation abandoned to die. And they’re not particularly pleased about that. Most of the military recon team are slaughtered within minutes of arrival, the last few on the run, trying to complete their mission while caught in the middle of a tribal war between the raging street punks of Glasgow and the followers of Dr. Kane, who have literally gone medieval and occupied an ancient castle in the countryside.

Where the film goes from here should be immediately apparent to any fan of the genre. This is a classic survival-at-all-costs, x-amount-of-time to achieve your goal blood bath. Society has completely and utterly broken down and the only rule still recognized is that of strength. It is kill or be killed and the killings happen frequently, in graphically unpleasant ways. So, yes, on that level it’s been done before. But what separates Doomsday from, say, Waterworld is the way that it is done. Marshall is both fiercely smart and wickedly genre-savvy. He’s no dabbler, he breathes this stuff and while he nods to the films that came before him – and how can you not if you’re going to do this sort of thing – nods are all they are. The tips of the hat are there for those who recognize them but you could miss them without losing anything essential to the film and, most importantly, they do not make up any of the high points of the picture. Take the Mad Max out of Waterworld and you’re left with almost nothing other than Dennis Hopper’s performance, take it out of this film and you’ll still do just fine, thank you very much. Marshall brings his own bag of tricks to the table and it’s a well stocked bag indeed. There are a host of compelling characters – Rhona Mitra is surprisingly bad ass in the lead – kills are plentiful and frequently worth cheering for, Marshall frequently indulges his morbid sense of humor, and the film alternates nicely between satisfying and subverting expectations.

I’ve gone on record before saying that I think Marshall is the brightest light in the UK genre scene and arguably one of the very best genre films directors in the world today. The Descent is one of the greatest modern horror films and Doomsday only further cements his position in the international genre world. Yes, I pretty much love this film. A word of advice: pay attention to the details – in particular the use of music, the background actors and the way Marshall uses his ‘name’ players – throughout and you’ll find a lot of extra moments to love …