Movie Review of Doomsday

Doomsday Occasionally, not often, a moment arrives that is so defining, so transcendent, that one realizes a new artistic paradigm has arrived, something has occurred that will change everything . . . . this was not one of those moments.
This movie is another post-apocalyptic sci-fi—horror flick. Everybody thinks they can do a better job with this genre, or they’ve found a new angle, and the genre always makes a little profit so they get financing. This one is so derivative it’s pathetic. It stars Rhona Mitra, as the one-woman special forces killing machine, as well as mildly easy to look at, Bob Hoskins as the completely superfluous chief of police—or whatever they’re called in England, and other people I’ve seen whose names I don’t know and am too indifferent to click back and find.
The Plot. Think Road Warrior meets Resident Evil meets Twenty-Eight Days Later. Only nowhere near as good as any of those—and this in a genre where “good” is a relative term at best. A new super-virus called the Reaper Virus, erupts in Glasgow Scotland, and begins to spread uncontrollably. They try to stop it, but finally, in desperation and terrified they are failing, build a new Hadrian’s Wall and lock the infected in with the healthy to let nature take its course. Triage writ large. Go forward 25 years (to 2035) and satellite imagining has revealed survivors at just the same moment a new outbreak is discovered in London. What timing! I can’t bear anymore. We’ve already seen every scene from then on in other movies. Scotland was nice though, and there is a certain logic to putting the crazy, cannibalistic, make-up wearing, chain swinging, and weird-hair-doo packing survivors in that particular country, because they would save so much time and money on special effects, make-up and costumes.
The story is stupid. The writing is vapid, the acting is obviously acting and Malcolm McDonald plays yet another seedy role in a career ruined by his starring role in A Clockwork Orange. Just goes to show you, never dance with the devil. Every move made in the entire movie is irrational, illogical, and worst of all, unnecessary. Good special effects and lots of scenes with cool fighting and action—none of which make any sense at all—and then it ends by sort of petering out while setting us up for a sequel, which will be like being in remission and having the disease come back again. It is Über-gory, and violent. Why is it that survivors in movies like this are always crazy, psychotic murdering cannibals? The writer should have made them zombies; then all the nonsense would have had some kind of bizarre rationale. But these losers weren’t even sick—they were immune to the virus (thus their survival). This flick brings up so many questions I haven’t the time, space, or inclination to even ask them. Okay, just one example. At one point our heroes are running from bad guys, out in the country. A local takes them to an old bunker. They are told the tunnel is a short cut through the mountain. The bunker turns out to be a massive fallout shelter, obviously government designed, built and stocked. It has everything someone would need to thrive in a post-nuclear war world. So, it’s been there the whole time, lots of people know about it because they use it regularly as a kind of underground railroad, but it is still pristine, after 25 years of anarchistic mayhem where resources are so scarce the populace has resorted to institution cannibalism. Nobody has explored it, rifled it, looted it or is living in it. And when the good guys return to it, everything they need is right there—even an inventory list hanging on a wall out in the open. One of the containers has a brand new Bentley in it. The local girl asks “what does it do?”, even though she has seen all kinds of Road-Warrior inspired vehicles running around everywhere all through the movie. I mean, it’s beyond belief.
It is rated R for ridiculous. Blood, prurient exploitation, gore (including decapitations and squishing bodies under heavy things) nudity (very brief), usual British potty language, and an incomprehensible story-line. It will make a profit because there are several million teenagers out there with fake ID’s who will see anything that might have a boob or entrails in it. But I’m not like them—my ID isn’t fake.