Did anyone see/like the movie Doomsday?!
Question: It was about average I guess...started out ok then a lil better than went south and was bad then ended ok like Mel Gibsons Road Warrior. did u like it???
Answers: It was about average I guess...started out ok then a lil better than went south and was bad then ended ok like Mel Gibsons Road Warrior. did u like it???
A bubble of such near-impenetrable critical praise surrounded "The Descent" back in 2006 that any argument of its greatness became moot, and for good reason: not since "The Blair Witch Project" had a horror film been given such unanimous praise. And while I don't hold "The Descent" on a master's level (I think the claustrophobic horror bests the creature-driven stuff), I still think it was a confident effort from Neil Marshall, who bucked the torture-porn trend to deliver something tense and effective. Even its winks toward genre favorites like "Alien" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" seemed like fitting Valentines from one film-making generation to another.
"Doomsday," on the other hand, is a film so saturated in homage that the overall experience can be labeled a fun rip-off at best, and a derivative, migraine-inducing mess at worst (leaning more toward the latter as it wears on). The film begins as a semi-serious, semi-playful riff on "Escape from New York" (most of the UK becomes a walled-in quarantine zone...) and "28 Days Later" (...containing a population stricken by plague), as bureaucrats enlist Eden Sinclair (Kate Beckinsa...er, Rhona Mitra), a cop with a traumatic past (and one false eye) to lead a group of cops into a London given over to anarchy and ostentatiously-pierced scumbags to find a cure.
What's most stunning--and disheartening--about "Doomsday" is how it never feels like Marshall's own vision at work. Instead of filtering his influences through an individualistic perspective, putting a new spin on old conventions, he is complacent to shift from one stylistic imitation to the next (that Marshall has a higher budget than his forefathers only underlines his lack of ingenuity and creativity here). At one moment he'll invoke Ridley Scott (during a Medieval-tinged gladiator showdown), the anti-authoritarian diatribes of John Carpenter, and the gross-out humor of early Sam Raimi or "Dead Alive"-era Peter Jackson (I'll admit I enjoyed a pitch-black gag involving a hand/retinal scan), to name a few glaring instances. By the end, he's devolved into Michael Bay--rapid cuts and zooms that make the climactic chase look like an apocalyptic sports-car commercial.
Needless to say, a film this obsessed with surface attributes pushes the characters to the back burner. Malcolm McDowell (as a rogue scientist/Ren Faire leader), Bob Hoskins, and Mitra deliver dialog that is (much in the vein of Bay) mostly relegated to the occasionally-quirky one-liner. The supporting cast is so ill-defined that I'd challenge anyone to care about their fates, let alone remember their names.
Marshall's decision to indulge a plethora of "auteur" hats also means he frequently succumbs to the overblown, in-your-face gore that has become the tiresome staple of current horror. The relative subtlety and restraint of "The Descent" has been given a 180-degree turn toward the blood-sick sadism of the "Hostel" and "Saw" flicks. Mining humor from pitch-black situations and morally repugnant characters takes a carefully trained director, but Marshall is merely content to sling tastelessness at the audience with reckless abandon, hoping something will stick. But since the characters are one-dimensional ciphers propelled along by the slim story, "Doomsday" comes closer to the dreck of an Eli Roth film than the inspired absurdity of a Monty Python sketch.