Doomsday (2008)

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.   ***