'Doomsday'
Reviewed by Martin McGarth

It is a mistake to think of watching a film as a passive experience. To properly enjoy cinema an audience, and the individual viewer, has to be willing to engage with the images flickering before them, they have to be willing to give something back. Any film worth watching will require the audience to work a bit to get the most from it.

And some films ask more of their audience than others.

Some films, often in black and white, with subtitles and a lot of smoking, ask you to concentrate hard on theme or setting. Some films will ask you to invest emotionally with characters whose circumstances might be wildly different from our own. And some films ask you to give flight to your imagination and to suspend your cynicism.

Doomsday asks an awful lot of its audience but none of those demands are made of the intellect, the emotions or the imagination.

To enjoy Doomsday an audience has to be willing to shut off those higher functions. They have to be willing to sit back in their seats, widen their eyes and allow their adrenal glands to take over. Those who remain conscious throughout the almost two hours of Neil Marshal’s latest adventure will get pleasure from recognising the various dystopias the director has stolen from to create this film (Mad Max, Escape from New York, 28 Days Later, Aliens... the list is almost endless). But the real pleasure (it’s a base, visceral, childish pleasure, but like a Mars bar, it remains a pleasure) to be had from Doomsday comes when you decide that you aren’t going to struggle against the tide of silliness, you’re just going to throw your hands up and go with the flow.

The story is that in the near future Scotland becomes the site of the outbreak of a terrible plague – the reaper virus – and as a result the whole country has been placed in quarantine, with a huge wall cutting across the countryside. Now, 27 years after the outbreak, the virus has broken out in London. The English government – which has become a corrupt police state – decide to send a team back into Scotland in the belief that there may be survivors and that those survivors may hold the key to a cure.

The team is led by Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) a kick-ass policewoman who lost her family and one eye (replaced by a neat electronic version that can be removed and used as a remote surveillance robot) in the original outbreak. Rhona leads her rapidly diminishing team of expendables through nightmarish Glasgow and then to the Scottish countryside where Malcolm McDowell holds court in the style of a medieval king in a remote castle (complete with gift shop signs) to a final showdown with the corrupt English politician.

The plot is predictable, the characters shallow and the action often silly but Doomsday is still fun. Mitra makes a passable action heroine, there’s good support from the likes of Bob Hoskins, David O’Hara, Adrian Lester and Alexander Siddig. And there’s the unmistakable sense that Marshall loves this kind of movie and he’s doing everything he can to recreate the excitement of movies he’s enjoyed himself but with a much smaller budget.

However, Doomsday also reveals Marshall’s limitations as a writer, the dialogue often clanks and crunches on the ear. All the great movies that Marshall is referencing in Doomsday had great action but they also had smart dialogue and clever characterisation – Marshall’s film can just about compete in the action stakes, but it is, in comparison, a non-runner in the other categories.

Marshall deserves credit for being the one British director capable of getting a slate of genre movies funded, produced and actually released in the cinema. That Doomsday is a slight misfire shouldn’t be allowed to block the development of this genuinely interesting director.