I just saw Doomsday and although it was not a bad movie, it was not a good one either. Like most movies today it was a “one off” movie that really is only good for one viewing.
The plot rips off Escape from New York and Resident Evil and to a certain extent, 28 days/weeks later.
This time the sealed off city/area with the super virus is Scotland. Scotland gets infected with the “Reaper” virus, because it sounds cooler than something real, like the bird flu, and then Scotland is walled off and forgotten for THIRTY years. Supposedly aside from routine satellite photos, nobody decided to check up on anything, or at least send people in to do research on just WTF happened. Of course an outbreak hits the overpopulated London and it’s revealed that Scotland apparently has repopulated in the past three years, even though it’s made quite clear that the survivors have been there the whole time. After finding a room of Reaper victims, in a routine drug bust, the disease seems to spread much like the ridiculous “Rage” virus; at an unrealistic pace. Now, here’s what I don’t understand. The cops find a crack den with Reaper victims, why doesn’t the government just simply TORCH THE PLACE and the infected officers. I know it sounds horrible, but as evidenced at the start of the movie, death is certain and very quick. Better to kill 12 people that are going to die anyway and firebomb the whole block and blame it on a gas leak, than to let 12 million people die.
The leaders of “England” decide they only have 48 hours till “something” worse happens and thus our heroine and her crack team is dispatched into Scotland to find the survivors and thus the cure.
O.K. let’s start the tear down of the movie.
The movie has some good action sequences and some good gore, but has some downright stupid stuff as well.
In 2035 I would hope that special forces would have at least better equipment than we do right now in 2008. The group brings no sort of thermal imaging/radar/motion detector devices, so the mohawkians (my nickname) are able to easily sneak up on the heroes. During the first firefight the heroine tells everyone to get into the elevator, upon which she perfectly severs the elevator cable with one shot (blind, through the roof) and then tosses a grenade at floor of the elevator as it is now descending at death-enabling speeds downward.
The grenade detonates and gasp! Guess what type of grenade it was?! A Deus Ex Machina grenade! It was a FOAM grenade; the grenade created and elevator’s worth of foam to protect the descending heroes from dying, much like in the movie Demolition Man, when Sandra J. Bullocks smashes her car into a wall.
The heroes’ APC’s are pretty much what we have today, except that they apparently replaced the bulletproof glass with plate glass, as the mohawkian’s bows and arrows were able to easy penetrate the windows, killing one of the drivers, much like the Ewoks bow and arrows were somehow able to penetrate the Stormtrooper armor in Jedi.
After the APC’s are destroyed by bows and arrows and rocks and Maltov cocktails, The heroine and her team are ambushed by the “Mad Max” society and captured and most of the crack team are killed.
They are taken to the mohawkian’s lair, which is setup much like “Thunderdome” in Mad Max, with the exception they mohawkians just eat their captors; no arena/pit battles.
The Heroine escapes and meets up with the two remaining teammates, including the pussy doctor and the token, but somehow/some reason, non-bad ass black guy AND the heroine just so happens to find and help break out of jail, the
-
only
person that can lead the team to find the elusive Doctor Kane (a name which should be forever retired in movies and literature) who has the cure. Did I mention that this person just happens to be the daughter of Kane, being held captive by her brother, King Mohawk.
The group escapes via a STEAM ENGINE piloted by the escapee’s OTHER brother. At first you might say, “Escape via an old steam train, that’s kinda cool!” Well, it is, until you realize that trains and especially steam engines make a shit-load of noise; essentially how would this escape vehicle been able to sneak into the city undetected?
Anyhoo, the group escapes and makes their way through the highlands till they get to an elaborate “doomsday” bunker filled with endless crates of goodies that apparently nobody decided to loot in the past 30 years. Of course they don’t stop and check to see what is in the crates, they just continue on.
The group is then confronted by a HUGE knight on horseback. Apparently the knight is part of the “execution squad” for the King, a.k.a. Doctor Kane. So, our fully armed heroes decide the smartest thing they could do is to throw down their guns and be taken prisoner by group of men on horseback only know for executing enemies of the King.
The appropriate thing for them to do would have been this:
--Three of the execution squad are killed by the heroine-- who then points her gun at the uber knight and says something like this:
"Alright, you primitive screwheads- listen up. This... This is my BOOMSTICK! Now I swear, the next one of you that so much as even touches me, BOOM! Take me to your leader."
We then find out that Dr. Kane has developed his own little perfect feudal society of which he is the king, and of course, does not want it to get out that there is a world outside the barrier walls. So he sentences the heroine to fight the "Terminator Knight."
Now am sick and tired of female "kick ass" characters as the main character. Well, at least I'd say from about year 1998 on. The current trend of women that are 5' 5" being able to take on whole armies was started with the Fifth Element and does not seem to be letting up anytime soon.
Now, I am not saying I don't dislike female "kick ass" characters in movies, just not these petite superwomen of today's Hollywood being somehow able to cut through men twice their size with ease. One of the last excellent Female "kick ass" character was Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, mainly because although she kicked ass, she was still scared shitless of the Aliens and displayed her vulnerability. Today's Hollywood would have a 5'4" girl killing machine kick the alien in the shin, dropping the alien to it's knees, and then rip off it's arm with a well placed elbow jab, and then drinking it's acid blood dripping from the arm, and then shoving the alien arm into both mouths of the alien, and then spewing an utterly cliched one liner to top it all off.
A more recent example of slight abuse of the female "kick ass" character was in the movie Serenity. The character River Tam, was a diminutive girl who was programmed via mind conditioning to become a super killing machine via a code word. She was fast and graceful, but really could not have done much damage to the endless rivers of men she fought (generally with her bare hands). Ironically, the actress who played River Tam, Summer Glau, is now the new female terminator.
Another example is Jessica Alba in the short lived t.v. series "Dark Angel." C'mon! Jessica Alba is like 4 foot 6, how in the fuck, even if she was a robot, would be able to kick anyone's ass?
O.K. the only "cool" thing in this movie is that the survivors in walled off Scotland formed two separate societies. The first being a feudal-medieval society, complete with appropriated castles, and the second being your atypical "Max Max" society, complete with dirtbikes and ratted out, spiked vehicles and mohawked, crazies.
In Doomsday, the main female "kick ass" character, who's name I can't remember and don't want to look up, fights a knight in full armor. She fights the knight with no weapons. The knight is like 6 foot 7; she's 5 foot 5. She beats the knight. Sure, she shimmies up a rafter and ends up stealing an axe of some sorts from a guard to do it, but even that is ridiculous, as instead of just escaping, she goes back down into the arena to kill this uber-knight.
The heroes escape to the doomsday bunker and find out that there is a whole bunch of goodies after all, including a 2008 Bentley. The backup generators of course work, as well as the battery in the Bentley as it starts up first time, with no battery jumping, hacking, or hot wiring. Now, here comes the obvious point. Besides the batteries working in just about everything, so does the stored gas/diesel. Now, gas has a shelf life of about two years, about the same for diesel; that is stored with a fuel stabilizer, in an optimum tank. However, THIRTY years have past, so the fuel, even under optimum storage conditions, would have turned to varnish or worse. This is a common flaw in most doomsday movies. The first thing I asked after the premiere of "Waterworld," was where the fuck did they get gas for their See-Doos?! O.K. lets say they had captured an oil platform in the sea, which I think was the case in the movie, do you realize, or does any writer out there, realize how hard it is to distill gasoline? It's not something you cobble together.
O.K. heroes escape the bunker, but not before token black guy takes a few arrows in the back, in slow motion for the team. They escape in a Bentley, which if I am not mistaken, weighs around 7000 pounds AND can go zero to sixty in FIVE seconds. I bring this up, as they are initially chased by one jury-rigged police car and the police car is easily able to catch up the the Bentley. Of course, then the rest of the mohawkians are able to catch up to the Bentley and King Mohawk is able to get INSIDE the Bentley, which a long and drawn out "car fight" ensues. Of course the heroes manage to blow right through a bus/roadblock with no problem (with King Mohawk somehow able to get on the roof after being flung out of the car at 100mph, getting caught in the blast).
The heroine make a cell phone call from the 30 year old Bentley which somehow manages to get through to the Prime Minister, even with London now in utter chaos, on the first try.
Being a pre-2004 GM vehicle owner with ONSTAR, I can tell you for certain that cell phone technologies used today most certainly will NOT be used 30+ years from now. My ONSTAR service was cutoff at the start of the year, as I refused to pony up $300+ for them to essentially install a new cell phone in my car, since analog cell systems mostly went the way of the Dodo Jan 1st.
The heroine delivers the "antidote" to the sort of villianous Prime Minister, who then tells her that he is going to "thin out" the population of London first and then administer the antidote. Oh, did I mention she was recording this conversation with her removable, fake, electronic eye? The Prime Minister leaves in his chopper with the Pussy, but now sort-of bad ass doctor, and the antidote person, Kane's daughter, and the Heroine decides to stay behind.
O.K. movie over, right?
No, you see I forgot to mention that the heroine is Scottish and was a little girl when the country was locked down, but escaped, sans one eye and then decided to grow up and become a badass killer, who just really wanted her mommy. The Heroine goes back to her home and hangs out for an undetermined amount of time, then Bob Hoskins shows up out of nowhere and she gives him the disk/chip of the recording of the Prime Minister divulging his master plan, which of course Bob Hoskins uses to expose the sort-of evil Prime Minister to the world.
The Heroine then goes back into the heart of Mohawk-ville and tosses down the head of the dead King Mohawk leader, which she managed to find in the desert after the previous melee/bus explosion. She says something about how they can eat his flesh if they are hungry (they are cannibals) which is met with raucous applause. So apparently she is to become the new leader of the Mohawkians??
The End
Other Errata:
The director/editor decided to try his hand at the new fad in Hollywood, "Epileptic Editing," and fails at it. This was started by MTV, but really did not hit it's stride till the second Bourne Identity movie. The director/editor decided to cut so fast that now we see 24 different images a second; one per frame. Amazingly, The Third Bourne movie won the best Oscar for editing. It should have won an Anti-Oscar for shitting on all the other editors who deserved it in the past. You want to see Oscar caliber editing, look at "The French Connection," which was edited using a lite-brite, a pair of sciccors, and some blood and sweat. Or how about the over one MILLION feet of film that was edited for Apocalypse Now?
The Heroine uses her electronic eye by popping it out of her eye socket, and tossing on the floor and controlling it with her watch. She uses the eye to peer around corners, which is sort of cool until she puts it back in her eye socket without cleaning it off. This is not necessarily gross, per-ce, but just unrealistic, as anything tossed on the floor is going to pick up sand/dirt which would really irritate the eye socket, regardless if the eye is artificial or not.
I was going to compare this movie to Escape from New York, but I have already spent more time writing this, than I think watching the actual movie.
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