Starring: Rhona
Mitra, Adrian Lester, Bob Hoskins, David O’Hara, Sean
Pertwee, Malcolm MacDowell
Directed by: Neil
Marshall
Written by:
Neil Marshall
Duration:
1hr 45mins
Rating:
3 out of 5
I love John Carpenter. So do many other people. Robert Rodriguez,
for example. In his excellent memoir Rebel without a Crew, he reveals that Escape from New York was the flick that
got him interested in making his own movies.
And it can seem like Rodriguez has forged an entire career out of
remaking his hero’s films: From Dusk Till
Dawn is Assault on Precinct 13
with vampires; The Faculty is The Thing in high school; and he admitted
to playing Carpenter scores on the set of Planet
Terror in an attempt to replicate the great man’s legendary eerie
atmosphere.
 |
| CARPENTER: HERO, LEGEND, MUSTACHE-GROWER |
But Rodriguez is no mere copycat hack. He injects his movies with enough of his own
Tex-Mex personality, creative bravado and unique sense of fun that you never
feel that you’re watching an unimaginative fan boy copy.
Neil Marshall also loves John Carpenter, and Escape from New York seems to have
figured just as heavily in his own gestation as a film maker. Doomsday's premise is that a near-future Scotland has been isolated from the
rest of the British Isles creating a self-contained den of reprobates, and a one-eyed hard-as-nails mercenary is sent by sleazy
political types into the forbidden zone on a time sensitive mission. Yes, Doomsday
is essentially a remake of the 1981 thriller; Escape from Scotland, if you will.
Are we seeing the point where tribute crosses the line to travesty? Is this
love begetting laziness?
 |
| BUT SHE'S NOT A PATCH ON KURT RUSSELL, OF COURSE |
Not quite.
Two things save Doomsday. The first is that there are just enough differences to make it not
completely derivative. The movie pulls
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine's gender-switch
gimmick and makes it work, mostly due to Rhona Mitra’s steely central
performance – she’s a kind of British Angelina Jolie (both ladies have
portrayed Lara Croft). The UK setting is
refreshing; the sight of soldiers using L85A1 rifles and yelling things like,
“Get a bloody move on!” warms my heart with patriotic pride. The post-28
Days Later viral outbreak plot differs from its predecessor's prison city
concept. There were no cannibals in EFNY; not overtly, at least. And our heroine, though taciturn and a one-woman army all of her own, enters the fray with a team in tow.
Its
other saving grace is that Marshall wears his influences firmly on his sleeve –
just as Rodriguez has From Dusk Till Dawn’s Ernest Liu cheekily wear a
‘Precinct 13’ t-shirt, Marshall has the good grace to acknowledge his idol. This is apparent within seconds, when the
opening credits use Carpenter’s preferred Albertus MT font, white text on a
black background. There’s no way
Marshall would have a) done this by accident, or b) done this without wanting
the more genre-savvy viewer to get the reference. And just to be totally sure, he actually
names a character ‘Carpenter’. In
leaving no margin for doubt about his major influence, I feels like Marshall is rewarding his fellow fans, and the nods and winks made me enjoy the
experience more, not less.
So,
what of the actual movie we’re left with?
Proceedings kick off with an overlong prologue recounting how an
outbreak of the ‘Reaper’ virus in Glasgow towards the end of the 20th century
caused London to react by rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall in steel to isolate
Scotland behind it. Accompanying footage
shows how trigger-happy troops rounded up the poor Scots and left them to fend
for themselves, with Marshall demonstrating a gleeful line in '80s-style
exploitation gore: fingers are severed; someone gets shot straight through
their ‘the end is nigh’ placard. Fast
forward thirty years to now, and the virus has suddenly popped up in England’s capital. The weaselly Prime
Minister (Alexander Siddig) and crony David O’Hara (a man whose voice is so
gravelly you could pave a driveway with it) cook up a plan to send a team
across the border to pursue a cure, before the infection can get out of
control.
 |
| "CHECK THOSE CORNERS..." (ETC.) |
Enter
Mitra’s Major Eden Sinclair, introduced Bond-style mid-mission raiding a ship
hauling human cargo. She proves handy not only with an assault rifle but
in utilising her detachable eye camera, a neat gimmick that makes the obvious
Snake Plissken eye-patch reference not quite as tacky.
Once she’s created enough of a tough-girl impression, she’s debriefed by
boss and father figure Bob ‘Oskins, who gives her the new assignment,
introduces her to her forgettable support team, and off we go.
Once
on the derelict streets of Glasgow the distinctly Mad Max-esque feral locals
soon show themselves, and then it’s the old Aliens
who’s-going-to-be-picked-off-first game, with Sean Pertwee suffering a
particularly nasty fate and Adrian Lester surviving to add a bit of
Ripley/Hicks romantic tension with Mitra that never goes anywhere. Our heroine leads the remainder of her team
into the highlands where future trappings are abandoned for a visit to Medieval
Land, run by a growling Malcolm MacDowell, and a car chase climax that confirms
that Marshall watched The Road Warrior as a kid almost as much as EFNY.
 |
| A TRUE CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST |
All
in all, it’s not a bad piece of entertainment.
It would be hard to call the film a step forward from Marshall’s first
two movies, the excellent Dog Soldiers and The Descent, but he’s daring
to make the kind of genre pictures that we rarely attempt in this country and
should be commended for his efforts. The
weight of past movies does sometimes hold it down, but ultimately Doomsday has
just enough of its own quirks to survive the comparisons. Let’s just hope that Marshall doesn’t really
ape his hero and release an inferior sequel-cum-remake in fifteen years’ time,
set on the Isle of Wight. ***
