Movie Review: Doomsday

Doomsday, from writer/director Neil Marshall, is the kind of film that is there to simply fill up an empty slot pre-summer blockbuster season, a film that takes a well-trod story, adds nothing much new to it, and throws in a big budget and a course of ridiculous scenes resulting in a mediocre and throwaway couple of hours.

Twenty-seven years after a virus outbreak has taken over Scotland, the long quarantined area is found to contain survivors and a possible cure. The government then proceeds to send in a team of tactical officers to survey the area and find the cure to the virus which has threatened to take over the rest of the country.

Take Mad Max, 28 Days Later, add a dash of I Am Legend and you’ve pretty much got an idea of what Doomsday is aiming to be. Some would take all of these things as references where others will see this as an attempt to be those films. Marshall’s previous feature The Descent, which I think is one of the best horror films of the last ten years or so, was both a critical and fan success. But Doomsday just goes to prove that success in one finitely defined genre doesn’t mean you’ll have it in another more genre-mashing work. Marshall’s usual gory mentality is still present in this film, predominantly in the moments in which the film works, but the flair seems to have been removed. This seems like the director’s attempt to break into true Hollywood action fodder and it’s sad to see his more independent roots disappear back into the soil. Hopefully just for now, anyway.

Once the introduction section of the film is over, which admittedly is really quite interesting because of the way they go about doing it, we arrive at the part which tries to tell two parallel stories at once; one about the tactical team in Scotland trying to find the cure and one in England, a political-style storyline which involves trying to stop another outbreak of the virus from occurring. Although the storylines undoubtedly go hand in hand, the attempt to tell them both works against the film rather than for it. It's simply too much to tell in one movie and this makes the ending feel rushed and unsatisfying once the two narratives inevitably confront one another. We are never really quite sure who to root for — those who are trying to find the cure and get out of the zone safely within the time limit or the power-hungry man who wants to take over England. The film never allows us to pick a clear side because it’s too busy trying to make us care about both.

Article Author: Ross Miller

I am a film critic and blogger, and have been so for almost three years now, going from starting my own movie review website, Movie World (which is still running), and then moving on to writing for various movie blogs.

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