May 15th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Films |
Doomsday (2008)
by Ghastly McNastyDirected by Neil Marshall, the British director who previously brought us the enjoyable film Dog Soldiers (2002) and the extremely scary The Descent (2005), gets to make the film he always dreamed of making, in this futuristic action thriller Doomsday.
In 2008, the ‘Reaper’ plague sweeps across Scotland, turning the infected temporarily crazy followed by a permanent state of death. In order to prevent the disease from spreading the British government erects a solid wall around the Scottish to quarantine the population. 25 years later the deadly virus resurfaces in London. In a desperate attempt to find a cure the English Prime Minister send a crack team of special agents, lead by Rhona Mitra as the kick-ass bitch Eden Sinclair, over the wall and into the unknown.
Opinion
This film is a labour of love for Neil Marshall who wrote the movie as well as directing. Marshall confessed the film is homage to post-apocalyptic films from around the 1980’s and it’s quite clear that he has been thinking about this film for a long time. Well, why else would anyone make it? Don’t get me wrong the movie is an entertaining ride down nostalgia avenue. It just feels out of place for a movie in 2008 like it should have been released at the same time as Mad Max when apocalyptic futures were full of road warriors and wide eyed men with mohicans who scream a lot.
The film has so much ground to cover and so many homages to make that fortunately it just skims the surface rather than trying to get too deep and trip over its own ridiculous storyline. The abandoned Scotland still has a few lucky survivors of the plague who have turned in to either cannibalistic cyber savages or castle-dwelling medieval knights. Society has dropped back hundreds of years. It really couldn’t have got any worse!
Other silly little touches don’t really add to the film either. Our heroine’s detachable spy camera bionic eye is a prime example of where this film is at. Stupid for stupids sake, but at least it shows the film doesn’t take itself seriously which would have been a fatal mistake. Instead the film has a good dose humour. Knowing it is merely covering old ground the film decides to just have a bit of fun and therefore could be described as enjoyable if you like these sort of movies.
One excellent point I must add is that the film is very gory with some rather excellent death scenes. Always gets a thumbs up in my book.
Rating
Not a bad attempt at a movie and should keep you entertained for a couple of hours if you switch off the sensible button and set your teeth to popcorn chomping mode. 7/10
by Ghastly McNasty
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Wow. I sat through this film recently and was astonished at how terrible it was. It felt like a student film of low quality – the premise is laughable, the acting is truly dire and the dialogue is excrutiating. This is by far the very worst product of the British film industry in a long, long time. Avoid!!