Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 14, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The biggest disappointment about Doomsday is not so much that it’s a pastiche, a stitched-together collection of scenes from great sci-fi/action/horror films of the late ’70s and ’80s. The real shame is that it comes from writer/director Neil Marshall, who brought a fierce originality and vision to his two previous movies, Dog Soldiers and The Descent. In that duo, he applied a distinctive intelligence to the werewolf and subterranean-terror subgenres, along with a talent for sharp characterizations. One could understand something like Doomsday coming from a feature first-timer who has yet to develop his own voice and feels most comfortable homaging favorites from the past, but it’s a shame Marshall has sublimated his considerable gifts in what amounts to his major-studio big break.
It’s not that he doesn’t exhibit an awareness of the recycled parts he’s using, at least during the film’s prologue. As he establishes that an especially nasty virus called Reaper has swept through Scotland, leading the country to be quarantined behind a 30-foot steel wall, Marshall very blatantly gets his Escape from New York on, from the opening-credits font to Tyler Bates’ John Carpenter-inflected score to the title card telling us that the subsequent action takes place in “2035—NOW.” The main story is sparked by the appearance, three decades after the initial outbreak, of a new batch of Reaper victims in London, whereupon the British government decides to act on its three-year-old discovery that there may be a survivor or two, and thus a cure, somewhere within the abandoned country to the north.
The reasons for their delay in acting on this knowledge have to do with the usual bureaucratic villainy, which doesn’t make a lot of sense but does serve to impose a ticking clock on the proceedings. Specifically, Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) is given 48 hours to enter Scotland with a team of military and scientific specialists, find that cure and get out. (The defense official who gives Eden her marching orders is played by Bob Hoskins, whose bulldog intensity gives the obligatory expositional scenes a bit of spark.) The squad piles into a couple of armored vehicles that look just like the one in Aliens, and wind up creeping through dark corridors with automatic weapons and flashlights and getting ambushed just like in that film; the survivors then find themselves at the mercy of a gang of savages just like those in The Road Warrior…and ultimately, skipping ahead a bit, the final action sequence comes to a pulverizing punchline that manages to knock off both Road Warrior and Mad Max.
All the derivations become wearying before the halfway point, and the occasional self-reflexive in-reference (like naming two of the characters “Carpenter” and “Miller”) can’t take the curse off. Homage is one thing, but the longer Doomsday goes on, the clearer it becomes that the film has nothing new to add to the mix. And not only have any number of cinematic influences appear to have been run through a blender here, but some of the action setpieces have as well: A key swordfight and the climactic car chase have been editorially Cuisinarted into virtual incomprehensibility.
This wouldn’t necessarily matter so much if there were characters worth following through all the mayhem, but Doomsday lacks a memorable central hero of the type that helped elevate all the above-referenced films into the genre pantheon. Eden is given no specific distinctions other than the fact that, as a child, she was the last to escape from Scotland while her mother was left behind, and that she has a bionic eyeball she can roll down hallways and hold around corners to get a bead on tense situations. Yet the movie forgets about both after the first half hour, and Eden becomes just another bundle of good looks, tough talk and physical endurance. No one else is given even that much to play with, though Malcolm McDowell does his best with his brief screen time as the object of Eden and co.’s quest.
All that said, Marshall does keep Doomsday moving on a superficial level, at least, and a couple of action sequences pack a bit of punch. He certainly hasn’t been stingy with the gore, and the movie does serve as a hell of a showcase for up-and-coming makeup FX supervisor Paul Hyett, who contributes a welter of plague-ravaged faces, blood geysers, cranial abuse, cannibalized human meat and even a splattered bunny rabbit (now that’s just wrong…). Marshall’s regular cinematographer Sam McCurdy, as always, brings the right gradations of light and darkness to the proceedings, and there are occasional bits of cheeky humor that work, like “Good Thing” by Fine Young Cannibals being played during a flesheating punk rally, and a “Gift Shop” sign glimpsed on a medieval castle wall…
Did I forget to mention the medieval castle? Right, there’s one of those, too, complete with a dungeon and knights in armor; under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been surprising for a dragon to show up as well. It might seem incongruous for such things to turn up in the middle of a thriller set in 2035, but such is the cut-and-paste nature of Doomsday. It has been announced that Marshall’s next feature will be an actual period piece (a horror/Western, to be exact) and the filmmaker’s fans—of which I am certainly one—can hope and expect that he has now gotten all of his tributes out of his system and will make a return to his previously very fine form.
