If you like the post-apocalypse films of the Eighties and fancy seeing another one that just happens to have been made 19 years late, this is the film for you. There's an ominous man in a suit with a silly name and a gravelly voice, and an honest-to-goodness old-fashioned car chase.Īt this point it's fair to say that there's a dividing line for Doomsday, a simple test. Malcolm McDowell is in it as a crazy doctor guy. Bob Hoskins is in it as a world weary member of the Police State, who "used to be a policeman". With no great charisma and a slightly unsettling line in bionic eyes she is Major Eden Sinclair, a refugee from the Reaper Virus, now a sort of policeman in a dystopian future London.Īfter a series of delightful matte paintings and old-fashioned effects shots, including a Millennium Dome turned into a vast internment camp, it becomes clear just how old fashioned it actually is. She can act, after a fashion, it's certain, but she's most famous for wearing turquoise latex and khaki shorts and pretending to be Lara Croft, and despite her work in US TV this is likely still the case. Nor is she a Kurt Russell, a Russell Crowe, or even a Lori Petty. One almost expects a tie-in videogame on the Atari or SNES, with a mine-cart level and a driving section. It certainly seems as if Neil Marshall has, as in both script and direction Doomsday nearly creaks under the weight of its references. You could throw Gladiator, Pulp Fiction, Hostel, Tank Girl, Aliens, even Excalibur into the mix. So too with Mad Max, for the ornately tattooed and coiffed remainders of Glasgow's population with a remarkably good set of vehicular and tactical skills for somewhere that's been without civilisation for three decades. It'd be more unfair to compare this with Escape From New York if there weren't a night shot of a helicopter landing in front of a big wall, with vaguely atonal synthesiser stabs on the score. An isolated British government launches a desperate mission on a fixed timescale to find a cure, and it's adventuring we will go. The world looks on in passive horror, until, years later, the virus shows up in London. It springs into being in Glasgow in 2008, and within weeks the population of Scotland is sealed behind a wall and left to die. In Doomsday the agent of Apocalypse is medical, the terrifyingly obvious flesh creeping "Reaper Virus". There isn't the same fear of nuclear armageddon, so our metaphors are different. 28 Weeks Later and Land Of The Dead are zombie movies first, and the same is true of Resident Evil: Extinction. Zombie apocalypses are ten a penny, but explorations of their aftermath less so. Post-apocalypse movies as a genre sort of died with the Warsaw Pact. It's clearly been made with a genuine love of classic Eighties action movies, but it lacks the same visceral impact. Doomsday might be tribute or homage, but it feels too often like pastiche. ![]() ![]() ![]() There are food riots, oil prices are rocketing, and there's a good chance there will be a black man or a woman in the Oval Office.
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