There is a slight sense of love for post-apocalyptic movie classics in Neil Marshall’s latest film, Doomsday, but it is a fascination it does not share with the audience. We know all the influences, from the 28 Days Later movies to the Mad Max pictures, but what it lacks is a real creative spark of its own. In fact, I am almost tempted just to make a checklist of all the steals this film makes from other far superior movies.
What happened here after Neil Marshall’s revival of classical horror in The Descent? That movie also had a myriad of references to movies from the golden age of horror that is the 1970s but took great care to polish its time-tested elements to a frightening gloss. This movie abandons any buildup of suspense or ideas and just goes for mindless chaos.
The launching premise of yet another lethal, viral outbreak in Britain in 2008 seems to so shamelessly rip off from the premise of the 28 Days Later movies (only this time it is Scotland). There is an intriguing twist that comes when the government decides to barricade the place and abandon any potential survivors inside. But the whole element of a mother trying to get her son to escape the outbreak is getting a little tired by now.
Fast forward to 2035 when Big Brother sees that the outbreak is spreading to London and there are still survivors left behind the barricades; the government figures that they must have discovered a cure somehow. Prime Minister John Hatcher (Alexander Siddig) and his right-hand man Michael Canaris (John O’Hara) thus tap on the Chief of Department Security, Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins), to send in their most elitist soldier. That turns out to be Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who acts and struts around like a British version of Alice from Resident Evil (though, come to think of it, Mitra probably could have made a better Alice than Milla Jovovich was in those horrible movies).
Anyway, she is sent in to find a renowned doctor, Kane (Malcolm McDowell), in an attempt to retrieve the cure. She goes behind the barricade to find that all of the citizens have descended into complete disarray and become — what else? Punk rockers out of Mad Max to complete the movie-filching trifecta (and there are many other smaller rip-offs besides the three cornerstones I have already mentioned). I am amazed that people in this post-apocalyptic world could scrape together so much hair gel to hold their spiked hair everyday.
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