Directed By: Neil Marshall
Starring: Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Alexander Siddig
Tag line: "Mankind has an expiration date"
Trivia: Scottish Screen contributed 300,000 pounds towards the film's budget
Drawing influence from such movies as Mad Max and Escape from New York, director Neil Marshall’s 2008 film Doomsday is an action extravaganza.
As the movie opens, a deadly new virus, nicknamed the “Reaper”, is spreading like wildfire through Scotland, leaving tens of thousands dead in its wake. Hoping to contain the virus, England constructs a huge wall that essentially cuts the island in half, ensuring nobody, whether infected or not, will ever leave Scotland again. Flash forward to 2035; everyone north of the wall is believed dead, while those in the south suffer from overcrowding and a higher-than-normal unemployment rate. To make matters worse, a police raid in the Whitechapel District of London has turned up evidence that the Reaper virus is back!
It’s at this point the Prime Minister of England (Alexander Siddig) and his second-in-command, Canaris (David O’Hara), reveal some startling information to security chief Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins): For the past 3 years, satellite photos taken in the north show that not everyone on the other side of the wall is dead. Hoping to give their political careers a much-needed boost, the Prime Minister and Canaris ask Nelson to send his best operative into Scotland to look for a doctor named Kane (Malcolm McDowell), who they believe might have developed a cure for the virus. For this difficult mission, Nelson selects Maj. Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who, as a young girl, was saved when her mother, a Scot, arranged for her safe passage to England. With only 48 hours to find Kane, Maj. Sinclair leads a squad of mercenaries into the north, but as she and her team will soon discover, those who’ve managed to survive aren’t going to welcome them with open arms.
Doomsday is a balls-to-the-wall action movie that gets crazier (and more intense) with each passing scene. At first unsure whether or not they’d be able to locate a survivor, Sinclair and her team are soon overrun by the followers of a madman named Sol (Caig Conway), who gets a kick out of torturing people (Sol burns a member of Sinclair’s team to death, then has him carved up and served for dinner). With the help of fellow prisoner Cally (MyAnna Buring), who just so happens to be Sol’s sister, Sinclair and a few others manage to escape and find Dr. Kane, only to discover he’s every bit as crazy as Sol (residing in a castle that looks as if it were trapped in the Middle Ages, Knox, who set himself up as king, forces Sinclair to do battle with one of his knights in shining armor). There’s even a car chase towards the end of the film that could have been lifted straight out of The Road Warrior!
At times, Doomsday is so over-the-top that it feels more like a parody of action movies than it does an homage, but don’t let that fool you: this picture is deadly serious, and, with its plethora of high-octane scenes, is a film that’s sure to satisfy most genre fans.
