Doomsday (2008 film)

Doomsday
Forest Gump
Directed by	Jesus
Written by	Elton John
Produced by	Satan
Starring	Sir FUGALOT McDowell]]
Cinematography	Sam McCurdy
Music by	[DickInmouth Bates]]
Distributed by	Universal Studios
Release dates	14 March 2008 (USA) 9 May 2008 (UK)
Running time	105 min.
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	£17 million

Doomsday is a 2008 British science fiction film written and directed by Neil Marshall. The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic world that has been mostly wiped out by a lethal virus. Rhona Mitra stars as the heroine who leads a team to seek a cure in inhospitable Scotland when the virus begins to belatedly emerge in their preserved homeland of England. Marshall cited Doomsday as an homage to numerous films from his childhood, including Mad Max and Escape from New York. Filming took place in Scotland and South Africa in the course of 2007. Doomsday was released on March 14 2008 in the United States and Canada.

Synopsis

Authorities brutally quarantine a country as it succumbs to fear and chaos when a virus strikes. The literal walling-off works for three decades - until the dreaded Reaper virus violently resurfaces in a major city. An elite group of specialists, captained by Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), is urgently dispatched into the still-quarantined country to retrieve a cure by any means necessary. Shut off from the rest of the world, the unit must battle through a landscape that has become a waking nightmare.

Cast

• Rhona Mitra as Eden Sinclair, the leader of the elite team sent to find a cure. The heroine was inspired by the character Snake Plissken. Mitra worked out and trained in fighting for eleven weeks for the film. Marshall described Mitra's character as a soldier who has been rendered cold from her military indoctrination, and her journey to find the cure for the virus is one of redemption.
• Bob Hoskins as Bill Nelson, Sinclair's police chief who nominates Sinclair for the mission and monitors her progress.
• Malcolm McDowell as Kane, a former scientist who now lives as a feudal lord in an abandoned castle. McDowell described his character as a King Lear. According to Marshall, Kane is based on Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The director originally sought to bring Sean Connery out of retirement to play Kane but was unsuccessful.
• Craig Conway as Sol, the son of Kane and the leader of the Marauders
• Alexander Siddig as Hatcher, the Prime Minister of England
• Sean Pertwee as Dr. Sterling
• Darren Morfitt as Dr. Talbot
• Adrian Lester as Sergeant Norton

Production

Conception

File:Doomsday survivor.jpg

The post-apocalyptic survivors in Doomsday possessed tribal characteristics like tattoos

Director Neil Marshall originally resided near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall, a Roman fortification in England that had been built to defend against Scotland's inhabitants. In 2003, the director had fantasised about what conditions would call for the Wall to be rebuilt and conceived of the threat of a lethal virus. Marshall had also visualised a mixture of medieval and futuristic elements: "I had this vision of these futuristic soldiers with high-tech weaponry and body armour and helmets—clearly from the future—facing a medieval knight on horseback." The director favoured the boundary between England and Scotland as the central setting for a rebuilt wall, finding the location more geographically plausible than the more lengthy boundary shared by the United States and Canada. Additionally, Scotland was the home to multiple castles, which would contribute to the medieval aspect of Marshall's vision.

The lethal virus in Doomsday differs from contemporary films like 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later by being an authentic plague that actually decimates the population, instead of changing people into zombies or mutants. Marshall intended the virus as the backdrop to the film's story having immune survivors scavenge for themselves and set up a primitive society. The director drew from tribal history around the world to design the society, implementing tribal characteristics like tattoos and sacrifice. Though the survivors are depicted as brutal, Marshall sought to have "shades of gray" by characterising some people within walled-off England as selfishly manipulative.

The director intended Doomsday as an homage to post-apocalyptic films from around the 1980s, including Escape From New York (1981), Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and The Warriors (1979). The film's heroine, portrayed by Rhona Mitra, was inspired by Escape from New York's Snake Plissken. Marshall also cited Metalstorm (1983), Zulu (1964), Excalibur (1981), and works of director Terry Gilliam like The Fisher King (1991) as influences in producing Doomsday.

Filming

Rogue Pictures signed Marshall to direct Doomsday in October 2005, and in November 2006, actress Rhona Mitra was signed to star in Doomsday as the leader of the elite team. Production was budgeted at £17 million, an amount that was triple the combined total of Marshall's previous two films, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent (2005). The increase in scale was a challenge to the director, who had been accustomed to small casts and limited locations. Marshall described the broader experience: "There's fifty or more speaking parts; I'm dealing with thousands of extras, logistical action sequences, explosions, car chases—the works."

File:Doomsday car chase.jpg

A massive car chase was filmed for Doomsday, with the director implementing a Bentley to mimic the "sexy" car from Casino Royale

Production began in February 2007 in South Africa, where the majority of filming took place. Filming also took place in Scotland in the city of Glasgow and at Blackness Castle. The shoot, involving thousands of extras, included a series of complex fight scenes and pyrotechnical displays. The director sought to minimise the use of computer-generated elements in Doomsday, preferring to subscribe to "old-school filmmaking". In the course of production, several sequences were dropped due to budgetary concerns, including a scene in which helicopter gunships attacked a medieval castle.

A massive car chase scene was filmed for Doomsday, described by Marshall to be one part Mad Max, one part Bullitt (1968), and one part "something else entirely different". Marshall had seen the Aston Martin DBS V12 used in the James Bond film Casino Royale (2006) and sought to implement a similarly "sexy" car. The filmmakers purchased three new Bentleys for US$150,000 each since the car company did not do product placement. The film also contains the director's trademark gore and violence from previous films, including a scene where a character is cooked alive and eaten. Paul Hyett, the prosthetic make-up designer who worked on Marshall's previous film The Descent, contributed to the production, researching diseases including sexually transmitted diseases to design the make-up for victims of the Reaper virus.

Music

Marshall originally intended to include 1980s synth music in his film, but he found it difficult to combine the music with the intense action. Instead, composer Tyler Bates composed a score using heavy orchestra music, a change which the director applauded as "diverse and interesting". The film also included songs from the bands Adam Ant, Fine Young Cannibals, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Kasabian.

Release

Theatrical run

Prior to its release, Doomsday was presented at Comic-Con in July 2007 with a teaser trailer, additional footage, and teaser posters. For its theatrical run, the film was originally intended to be distributed by Focus Features under Rogue Pictures, but the company transferred Doomsday among other films to Universal Studios for larger-scale distribution and marketing beginning in 2008. Doomsday was commercially released on March 14 2008 in the United States and Canada in 1,936 theatres. It is estimated to have grossed US$4,743,000 in its opening weekend, ranking seventh in the box office. The film will also be part of Germany's Fantasy Filmfest Nights, screening in Berlin in April.

Critical reception

Doomsday was not screened for critics in advance of its theatrical opening. The film received generally negative to mixed reviews from critics. As of March 15 2008, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 24% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 21 reviews. On Metacritic, the film rated a score of 54 out of 100 based on 7 reviews, considered "mixed or average reviews". Alonso Duralde of MSNBC described Doomsday: "It's ridiculous, derivative, confusingly edited and laden with gore, but it's the kind of over-the-top grindhouse epic that wears down your defenses and eventually makes you just go with it." Duralde believed that Mitra's character would have qualified as a "memorable fierce chick" if the film was not so silly. David Hiltbrand of The Philadelphia Inquirer rated Doomsday at 2.5 out of 4 stars and thought that the film was better paced than most fantasy-action films, patiently building up its action scenes to the major "fireworks" where other films would normally be exhausted early on.

Reviewer James Berardinelli found the production of Doomsday to be a mess, complaining, "The action sequences might be more tense if they weren't obfuscated by rapid-fire editing, and the backstory is muddled and not all that interesting." Berardinelli also believed the attempted development of parallel storylines to be too much for the film, weakening the eventual payoff. Dennis Harvey of Variety thought Doomsday lacked a dull moment, perceiving, "There's no question that Doomsday does what it does with vigor, [sic] high technical prowess and just enough humor [sic] to avoid turning ridiculous." Harvey considered the conclusion relatively weak and found the acting only sufficient for the genre of the film.

Matt Zoller Seitz of The New York Times saw Rhona Mitra's character as a mere impersonation of Snake Plissken and considered the film's major supporting characters to be "lifeless". Seitz described his discontent over the lack of innovation in the director's attempted homages of older films: "Doomsday is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up."

External links

• Official site and trailer
• Doomsday at IMDb
• Doomsday at Rotten Tomatoes
• Doomsday at Metacritic
• Doomsday at Box Office Mojo
• Doomsday at AllMovie