I finally got around to seeing Neil Marshall's latest, and boy was I sad that I waited so long! The director's third effort (Dog Soldiers and The Descent preceded this) was a solid flick that was sensible to himself while paying homage to his obvious influences. To say the movie is set in a Carpenteresque Escape from NY type of world is an understatement. Everything from plot ques to music felt like that movie, and that's not a bad thing at all. Marshall pulls all of that off and yet still the movie felt fresh.
While The Descent was a darker type of horror flick, Doomsday is more akin to his first movie Dog Soldiers. That one is a more fun action horror film in which soldiers are trapped in a house with a pack of werewolves outside. Doomsday is set around a futuristic virus plagued Scotland that was completely quarantined and cut-off from the rest of society. When the virus resurfaces in England, the powers that be send a team of soldiers and scientists to find a cure in the aforementioned doomed Scotland where the survivors have built an immunity to it. The rest is a total mash of Escape and Mad Max with some Excalibur thrown in, I'm not even kidding there, and it's awesome. The thing that unites those two movies is a more light-hearted approach to the subject, which hums better to me than the downer that the The Descent was.
While the cast and plot is fine and kind of derivative, it's Marshall's sense of action and horror and comedy that drives this piece forward. Everything is so well choreographed and timed perfectly that he actually had me giddy with excitement during some scenes! Because of that, Doomsday was his most fully formed film to me. It kept me satisfied from beginning to end, and has moved Marshall to one of my must-see director's list. To be sure, I'll be looking forward to his next movie, Centurion, as he moves from the future to a tale of the Roman Empire's Lost Legion. Sold!
Rent Doomsday now if you haven't!
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