I took the wife on a “date night” last weekend. And, being the suave gentleman that I am, I made sure we saw the goriest film currently showing in theaters and then followed it up with food and beer…
Yes, we saw Doomsday, the latest dark-minded offering from “Splat Pack” director Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent). The story revolves around a killer virus in the UK and an attempt to find a cure. Of course, it’s never that simple. And if anyone else saw it, you probably recognize the title of this entry as the most often heard sound effect in the film.
The overarching premise of the film is that Scotland sucks really, really badly. So badly, in fact, that the rest of the UK walls off the country and lets all the Scots die a horrible exploding-face death full of oozy mucus and blood. Fuck the Scots, right? Not so fast! See, some of them survive and, as is the norm of today’s moral compass, they form an anarchic society filled with technicolor mohawks, hilariously inappropriate 80s music and…cannibalism (regardless of the fact that there seem to be giant herds of cattle just outside the city limits of Glasgow).
Hooray for post-apocalyptic irony!
The leader of the…let’s call them The Smiths…the leader of The Smiths is a scary dude named Sol. And by “scary” I mean “loud and scrawny and prone to biting people.” Of course by “dude” I mean “half naked guy in a fur coat.” As you can see in the comparison photo below, he holds a striking similarity to Road Warrior‘s Wez.
The guy on the left doesn’t look very happy to meet his long-lost dad.
That, naturally, goes hand-in-hand with the majority of the movie’s striking resemblance to Road Warrior itself. Look, they even have post-apocalyptic dune buggies, car chases, weapons on sticks…and gimps!
Right…back to the plot (what little of it there is). When the virus first strikes, there is much hand-wringing in London about how to handle the disaster. They ultimately decide, as I’ve said, to build a huge wall. Now, it seems to me that this would take an ungodly amount of effort considering how quickly this virus was spreading. Miles and miles of 30-foot-high steel plates were seemingly erected in about a day or two, the countryside was littered with mines and snipers, and yet people still went out of their way to drive up to the thing and protest. Damn hippies!
We see the military types start shooting innocent bystanders…one of whom is a little girl who loses an eye and then her mom persuades some helicopter crew to take her to safety. This heavy-handed foreshadowing lets us know that this little girl will soon grow up to be a cold, unrepentant killing machine and the only hope for her country’s survival. Obviously.
Lucky for her, the little girl grows up to look like Rhona Mitra.
There are worse fates in life than having the striking good looks of Kate Beckinsale and Carla Gugino mixed with the body of Charlize Theron and the action star movements of Angelina Jolie. Especially when you throw in a magic removable eyeball that can record shit.
Mitra’s character (Major Eden Sinclair) leads a group of war-hardened soldiers into the quarantine zone to retrieve some doctor’s research on the Reaper virus because a subsequent outbreak now threatens the rest of England 30 years later. Naturally her crack team is quickly dispatched by the unorganized, untrained and rather unintelligent hordes of Club MTV throwbacks. A cow is run over (SPLORTCH). Some crazy homeless dude with a spear is run over (SPLORTCH). A soldier girl gets an arrow through the neck (SPLORTCH). And a general blood-laced pandemonium ensues. In the course of this encounter, Sinclair is captured along with one of her scientist buddies. Two others manage to escape and add nothing to the film later on.
Here’s where we meet Sol and his tattooed bimbo assistant. I won’t bore you with the nasty details, but there is much running and yelling, someone gets eaten, someone gets beheaded and someone else gets punched in the face.
The heroes escape to the other side of the mountains where they encounter a group of D&D fanatics led by Tank Girl‘s Malcolm McDowell (who happens to be the scientist Sinclair is looking for…and also Sol’s daddy). Instead of Road Warrior, we’re now in the land of Excalibur.
I’ll pause here for a brief sociology examination. This part of the movie actually piqued my interest from an anthropological standpoint. In the grips of a complete societal shutdown, these two rival camps have adopted quite opposite reactions: anarchy and feudalism. It’s impressive to see, even if it is just a movie, that our world could rebuild itself after a complete loss of civility…making due with more crude ways and means. I never totally understood why the apocalypse would lead to more people shaving their heads, wearing makeup and driving dune buggies so it’s refreshing to me to see this alternate reaction. Bow hunting on horseback makes much more sense than burning shit and eating each other.
But then they have to ruin it by putting Sinclair in a gladiatorial pit with a giant armored fiend reminiscent of Master Blaster from Thunderdome. There’s a bit more SPLORTCHing involved, some general blowing up of stuff and then a pointless escape (set to the Frankie Goes to Hollywood classic “Two Tribes”).
I’m still not sure why the second half of the film happened. Malcolm McDowell’s daughter proves to be the living cure for the Reaper virus. Sol gets killed. The lone black guy in the film gets some arrows in his back (at least he wasn’t the first one to die, right?). And then Sinclair poo-poos the new Prime Minister of England and rides her Bentley back into no-man’s-land with Sol’s head to take over leadership of the The Smiths.
Oh, and Bob Hoskins was in it too.
I guess there’s room for a sequel in there somewhere. While you try to wrap your head around that, let’s take another look at Rhona Mitra:
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