Doomsday [DVD]

By Clint Morris

Once you’ve experienced success as a filmmaker, it’d be hard not to resist the temptation of merely cobbling something inferior together and selling it off to the highest bidder.

Lets call this the ‘George Lucas’ syndrome.

Uncle George blew our socks off with the original “Star Wars” trilogy, but simply “blew” with his thrice-as-expensive prequel trilogy.

M. Night Shyamalan, who burst onto the scene with his terrific “Sixth Sense” in the late 90s, spent most of the noughties giving us entertaining but far less inspired efforts like “Signs”, “The Village” and “The Lady in the Water”.

But dozens of filmmakers have been hit by the bug at one time or another – Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese (I know many see “Casino” as a second-rate “Godfather”), Kevin Smith (whose “Clerks 2” wasn’t a shade on his penniless original), Richard Donner (whose still paying for “Timeline”), John McTiernan (dude, “Rollerball”? what the..!?), Paul Verhoeven (no wonder he returned to Holland).

The latest member of the ‘Money first, Merit later’ club is Brit filmmaker Neil Marshall, whose previous two films “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent” went down well with both audiences and critics. When U.S studio Rogue snapped up Marshall’s latest script, “Doomsday”, they weren’t buying anything as inspired as the filmmaker’s earlier efforts, but more so a retread of a movie that worked some thirty years before – “Escape from New York”. Maybe that’s what they wanted?

It definitely isn’t what we wanted.

Set in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom, where most of Scotland has been quarantined and presumed dead, the film sees a one-eyed (hmmm) heroine named Eden (Rhona Mitra) – whose own mother was left in the quarantined area, when she was a tyke – leads a team to seek a cure in inhospitable Scotland, where they’ve received photographs of humans walking the streets, when the virus begins to belatedly emerge in their preserved homeland of England. The initial reason for getting into the quarantined area of Scotland is to locate a doctor (Malcolm McDowell) – the only man genius enough to have found a cure, if that’s what’s happened.

A B-film in blockbuster clothing, “Doomsday” borrows near every element from the classic John Carpenter movie, and then raids his other film “the Thing” for added inspiration. Whether the film was any more original before the studio got its hands on it, I dunno, but at the end of the day, the storyline would’ve remained the same, if nothing else did, and that’s the part that stinks of snatch.

There’s a film here to enjoy, though. We’ve got a kick-butt heroine (Rhona Mitra, of Tvs “Boston Legal”, finally graduates to leading lady status); some impressive production design (would’ve cost a boat-load), and, if only it weren’t so unoriginal, a fun storyline.

Judging by the performance of the film in the states, it’s safe to say that Neil Marshall might put a little more effort into his next film – if he wants to stay in with the big boys in Hollywood (a few I’m betting lost their jobs over “Doomsday”), anyway.

Fun but forgettable.

Extras

Three Featurettes and an Audio Commentary (Extras Unpreviewed)