Doomsday

Neil Marshall, 2008.
Where to begin? On the surface this is an enjoyable action-adventure romp using a fair amount of British culture as plot-props. This in itself is something rare and I have great respect for any British action film of this production standard getting made in the first place.

Evidently, my problems with this film don't lie in its production values. They lie in the fact that Doomsday is a hotchpotch. It's full of great ideas but it’s unfortunate that they seem to be lifted from other films. Let's start with the most obvious: the films of John Carpenter. Neil Marshall looks as though he wishes he was John Carpenter. That's the message coming out loud and clear. It's as though he’s bought a franchise from the great man to continue making his movies.

John Carpenter’s films always have the same typeface on the titles. Neil Marshall has used that same typeface here. John Carpenter created groundbreaking and haunting electronic scores for his films. Neil Marshall has (partially) done the same in Doomsday. John Carpenter made Escape From New York, a futuristic film set in a dystopian über prison Manhattan where anti-hero and eye-patch wearer Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) must glide in, save the crash-landed President and blast his way out to save his own skin. Neil Marshall has totally ripped off this classic film. Harsh words, but this is no light homage. Scotland is the new Manhattan. Snake is now the female Major Eden Sinclair. She's a sexy, one-eyed elite military killer who pops her CCTV glass eye out to look around corners. She's been sent in to deepest Glasgow see if anyone has survived a killer virus thirty years on. This is when the colours on the palette start to mix (eventually making a grey/brown mess).

The next films up for blood donation are any recent zombie flicks (28 Days Later and the awful Land of the Dead spring to mind), Aliens (crack unit gets destroyed almost immediately - even the APCs are in Doomsday!), then we have the entire Mad Max collection in there (car chases, stupid future punk haircuts, decaying industrial set design). Moving further on it gets all medieval. This seemed like an original idea at first, having the whole future/past in a technology conflict with bows and arrows versus machine guns but after about ten seconds of thought I realised this must've been influenced by either Westworld, or Army of Darkness (what the hell, maybe even both!). I reckon there's also a tiny bit of Robocop in there too (recording corrupt officials talking cock using cyborgy eyes). Also, the transition from one ‘world’ to the next made it feel like a big budget version of The Crystal Maze.

Doomsday is pretty derivative and has the nerve to take itself too seriously. At least Rodriguez’s Planet Terror knew it was a piss take when it referenced John Carpenter, and it was actually quite funny.