Movie Review - Doomsday

OK the plot is nothing you haven't seen before in 28 Days Later or 28 Weeks Later. A killer virus infects & kills lots in Scotland (incidently, the film jumps the shark in th opening 3 minutes with the soldier opening fire on automatic - just not how British Troops are trained at all), martial law is declared. Scotland gets sealed off & all seems OK until some infected are found in London.

The mayor of London (Alexander Siddig of Deep Space 9 fame) calls his chief of police (Bob Hoskins) to send a team into Glasgow to look for survivors & a possible cure so they won't have flood some of London to kill these newly infected. And this team will be lead by? Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra, Hollow Man & former Lara Croft model).

Eden certainly looks & dresses quite a lot like Jill Valentine from the 2nd Resident Evil movie & I'm sure that's not by accident either. I can see why people have likened this to Escape from New York (the wall around a place, the lead character carrying a GPS device to enable tracking, the general population kept ignorant of the mission, a society of anarchy inside the wall).

With the scenes of the troop getting ready for the mission in the hanger it was very much like bits on Aliens prior to planet fall. Even though we're clearly told the people inside the wall have become cannibals that fact is completely destroyed when the APC knocks down & kills a cow and has to drive through a field of at least several hundred cows so the films own logic has become highly suspect that the writer can't remember something they told the audience only a few minutes earlier. The search mission inside the hospital almost mirrored the search inside Hadleys Hope from Aliens. Although I must admit the people attacking them in the hospital did have a touch of Mad Max styling about them (very lazy being unable to come up with something new themselves I felt!).

There's even a nice nod back to 80's TV series Max Headroom at 1 point. I'm a bit annoyed that the windows of 1 APC are broken so easily, it shows poor writing in needing to hurry the plot forwards. Both seemingly impregnable APC's are destroyed WAY too easily. It's an incredibly lazy writer who set up such seemingly tough vehicles then throws them away to such simple attacks. The fact that the idea is also lifted wholesale from Aliens shows you exactly how little the writer actually did.

The musical scenes in the hall (the entire scene was basically BarterTown stolen wholesale from Mad Max 3) were another very good indicator the writer didn't do much when creating what little script they actually did write themselves. 3 songs to fill almost 10 minutes of screen time (where nothing happens, nothing is explained & the plot is not enhanced in any way, shape or form) just to avoid having to write anything original it seemed to me. We're told the guy leading the insane gang in Glasgow is the son of Kane (Malcolm McDowell) the Scientist that Eden has been sent to find. And the girl she rescued as she escaped is his daughter.

The whole "holed up in a castle" is very surreal (pretty much like Army Of Darkness so yet another stolen idea), almost like it was an idea picked at random & then just done because nothing else had come to mind. Meanwhile back in London the infected were over running the city & The Prime Minister got infected blood on him & killed himself. As for the outcome of the "Gladiator" scene? It was nothing if not 100% predictable. Likewise with the evil Minister in charge & Hoskins told to stay behind while they go to pick up Eden & the cure there was bound to be some sort of twist or betrayal about to happen near the end.

The road action sequence at the end is pretty much bits of Mad Max & Mad Max 2 but after that you at least know the leader of the Glasgow gang is most definitely dead. Eden not going back with the survivors & being found by Hoskins is a bit of a weird scene. I assume her throwing the head back at the gang is her way of telling them she's running Glasgow now (having given Hoskins the video evidence to bring down the evil Minister) but it's a very weak ending & far too open but not a good enough film to warrant a sequel.