Doomsday

Neil Marshall's Doomsday plays like a collision of different movies and genres. We the audience, and even Marshall himself, try to make some sense out of what's going on up there on the screen, but everyone involved is fighting a losing battle. The opening of the movie gives us about five minutes of backstory, but you'll soon come to wonder why, as the film quickly takes the form of a violent video game that could care less about plot. Here's the info you need to know: A deadly virus known as the Reaper Virus swept across Britain, and the government was forced to quarantine and block off the infected from the healthy with a giant wall they constructed. Britain has since been divided, with one half of the country devoted to the healthy, and the other half devoted to the infected. The sick are left to die, while the healthy pretend the infected never existed.

Our heroine, Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), was there the day the military forced the infected away. She lost an eye when a stray bullet hit her, but she's grown up now, and is working for a special police force for the healthy half of the country. Her missing eye has been replaced with a robotic one that she can remove from her empty socket, and use as a hidden camera. Instead of thinking of clever uses for this eye camera, the movie just uses it for shock value in one scene, then pretty much forgets about it after that. Early on, Eden is approached by one of her superior officers on the force, who is played by Bob Hoskins. You may remember that Hoskins used to get lead roles in good movies like Mona Lisa and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Now he appears in bit roles in stuff like this, where he exists simply to get the plot rolling, then disappear for a majority of the movie. He tells Eden that the Reaper Virus is back, and is starting to infect the healthy society. The only choice is for Eden and a small band of super elite soldiers to go into the long-abandoned other side of the wall, and look for a possible cure.

Eden and her crew cross over to the other side, and find there are a large group of survivors who are not exactly happy they've been ignored for so long. Fair enough, I say. They're cannibalistic punks who dress like they escaped from a casting call for a Mad Max remake. As villains, they're about as effective as the mindless enemy drones that populate some video games. They exist simply as targets, not as actual characters in a screenplay. In their introduction scene, they just keep on running at our heroes and screaming, one after another, simply to get blasted away like ducks in a shooting gallery. Eden is captured briefly, but befriends some other prisoners, who lead her to a completely different society of survivors that have built their society around a Renaissance Fair apparently. They live in a castle lorded over by a cranky doctor (played by Malcolm McDowell in a glorified cameo), dress in period-appropriate armor and clothes, ride on horseback, and hold old fashioned gladiator tournaments, which Eden finds herself forced into. Once again, our heroes are forced to flee, and then...

I'd go on, but why bother? If you think the above synopsis was hard to follow, try following it at a hundred miles per hour, which is how quickly this movie seems to run at. (Unfortunately, it does not move fast enough to make its nearly two hour running time go by any faster.) Doomsday has a plot that reads like it was conceived by an escapee from a nut house who watched too much television during their time in captivity, and the director just fails to make any sense of it all. The fact that the writer and director are the same person is not a good sign. It manages to steal ideas and images from 28 Days Later, the Road Warrior films, and a generic medieval fantasy adventure made for the Sci-Fi Channel, but it doesn't steal any of the good stuff. It's lifeless, it's inert, and it's quite frequently incoherent. This is a big surprise when you consider the movie is really just one big action set piece after another, peppered with occasional dialogue that sounds like the kind of one-liners Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone would have turned their noses up at during their film career peaks. The movie doesn't care about its plot, making sense of it, or giving its characters anything resembling personality.

What it does care about is gobs of over the top blood and violence that often comes across as being too cartoonish in nature to get the shock reaction the filmmakers obviously want. This is the kind of movie where a character tells Eden that the wall dividing the societies has an automated gun system to kill anything that comes close. In order to ram the point home, it instantly cuts to a little rabbit who wanders too close to the wall, and then we get a close up of the little critter getting blown to bits by the automated defense system. Marshall is obviously aiming for dark humor here, but he misses the point. It's not funny just to see a rabbit get turned into computer animated blood and organs that fly at the camera for no reason. This is one of the film's more subtle moments, as we also get numerous close ups of people getting their flesh burned off, eaten alive, and so many decapitations that I almost feel like watching the movie again so I could keep track. The best moment of violence occurs when one villain gets decapitated, and we get an extremely fake special effect shot of the head flying right at the camera, as if the director wishes his movie was in 3D. This leads to a hilarious moment later on where Eden uses his head as a trophy. Never mind the fact that it'd be virtually impossible for her to track down the head again given the circumstances the decapitation falls under. This movie wants to shock us with its violence, but it's so hilariously over the top that it starts to resemble an Itchy and Scratchy sketch from The Simpsons.

When it was over, I happened to see a young couple who were sitting a few rows in front of me standing outside the theater door. The young man asked his date what she thought of the movie. She didn't even give an answer, just shook her head, and looked at him. He too said nothing, and simply nodded his head in agreement. That kind of quiet disapproval is perfect for a movie like Doomsday. Here is a movie that strives for very little, and ends up accomplishing nothing.

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