If the film has one major issue it’s that, conceptually speaking, it’s rather unambitious.
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Suspension of disbelief is helped by a superb supporting cast who are never less than fully committed absolute treasure Bob Hoskins, The Long Good Friday (1980), crops up as top cop Bill Nelson, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Alexander Siddig pulls political duty as Britain’s beleaguered Prime Minister, while David O’Hara, Braveheart (1995), is suitably sinister as shady government agent Michael Canaris, who uses the crisis to engineer a quiet little coup.Īmong the more overtly villainous, Craig Conway, The Descent (2005), earns MVP as the manic Sol, leader of the cannibals, and while stuntwoman Lee-Anne Liebenberg doesn’t get to say much as his 2IC, Viper, she certainly leaves an impression - but full facial tattoos will do that. Marshal is a dab hand at this sort of thing, and clearly enjoys mounting all the mayhem he can manage - there’s a reason he regularly gets tapped to direct the big battle episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Mitra’s Sinclair is a suitably dour, no-nonsense protagonist (comparisons to Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken are apt), equally adroit at machine-gunning advancing hordes, going hand-to-hand with a monstrous gladiator, or driving like a maniac in the film’s pell-mell Miller Lite climax. ‘Come at me, bro!’īut it’s the action we’re really here for, and Doomsday delivers in spades.
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Yet it never winks at the audience, although the soundtrack comes close at times - other needle drops that comment directly on the action include tracks by Adam and the Ants and Siouxsie and the Banshees, which should make aging Goths (like, er, me) smile, plus there’s a pretty spot on use of ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Its tongue is always firmly in its cheek, even when its characters are stoically sacrificing themselves for the sake of the mission or, in one memorable sequence, being cooked alive to the strains of ‘Good Thing’ by Fine Young Cannibals (alas, poor Pertwee, we hardly knew ye).
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Piling into a couple of high tech armored cars (let’s add 1977 cult misfire Damnation Alley to the homage list while we’re at it) Eden and her team, which includes Adrian Lester, Mary Queen of Scots (2018), and Marshall regular Sean Pertwee, Fox’s Gotham (2014-19), are soon contending not only with your usual colorful crew of ravening cannibals, but also Kane (Malcolm McDowell, because of course Malcolm McDowell), a scientist who has set himself up as a cod-medieval warlord, complete with castle, knights and the odd trial by combat.īrutal, muscular, and completely aware of its own preposterousness, Doomsday succeeds because it never stops to dwell on its own considerable fallibility. 30 years later, with the rest of Britain now a 2000 A.D.-ish police state, the virus erupts in London, and so one-eyed supercop Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) is dispatched north of the containing wall in search of a cure, as satellite images of surviving Scottish enclaves indicate that the plague may not be 100% fatal. After infesting it with werewolves in 2002’s Dog Soldiers and before invading it with Roman legionaries in 2010’s Centurion, Doomsday simply walls off the whole troublesome country in an effort to quarantine the horrific ‘reaper virus’ that is rampaging through the population. The film also sees Marshall perpetuating his grudge against/ fascination with Scotland. Marshall’s girl-on-a-mission B-movie blow out is an exercise in deliberate pastiche, blending elements of Escape From New York (1981), The Warriors (1979), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Mad Max 2 (1981), Excalibur (1981), and more into an enjoyably daft and brutal dystopian disasterpiece. People are in a panic and the military are no less shocked (although they are also responsible for what happened, courtesy of their permanent confrontation with NATO) and only a young couple in love from Chertanovo dare establish an unfathomable “first contact”.It’s not especially difficult to spot the influences on Neil Marshall’s 2008 post-apocalyptic action extravaganza, Doomsday, but that’s kind of the point. Out of the blue, an extraterrestrial spacecraft crash-lands in Moscow’s dormitory Chertanovo suburb. Attraction (Притяжение, 2017), Fyodor BondarchukĪ Russian variation on the themes of ‘Arrival’ (2016) and ‘District 9’ (2009), the film is about an alien invasion that carries a potential threat to the whole of humanity. This approach only added to the film’s originality: A minimum of special effects and more psychological drama against the background of a world gone mad. “We tried to adhere to an art-house style in the movie, rather than going for imitation of mainstream Hollywood,” the director said.
Khvaleev made the film in co-production with Germany. Involution is the director’s dystopian vision of Darwinism gone into reverse.
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