Doomsday

Saw Doomsday, a ridiculous British apocalyptic film. The idea is that a virus spreads killing everyone. The narrator talks of the brutal indifference of nature. Then in the next breath, he talks of nature restoring balance. This kind of muddiness is endemic throughout the film. It's not just obscure little things like that either. There's some political maneuverings later which are entirely incoherent. Every fight scene is an almost abstract montage of limbs and blood. It's equal parts stylistic and inept. The film is very balls-to-the-walls bad-ass but that's sort of all it is.

The plot follows a sexy female mercenary (or cop or something. Like I say, endemic muddiness.) who is dispatched, Escape From NY-style, to the infected zone where she must contact a scientist who just may have a cure. It's treated like a huge secret that there are living people in the forbidden zone, but as soon as the sexy lady and her troupe of red-shirts shows up they are immediately accosted by endless waves of mohawked young people (I assume they lived near a hair dye and leatherworks warehouse which also happened to be a gym.) These people are inexplicably cannibals despite the literal herds of cows which are flourishing nearby. The toned leather/tribal-tattoo enthusiasts think our heroes look tasty so they fight, the sexy lady gets away but some red-shirts die, they then run into some other people, they fight, they get away, yada yada, etc etc. Eventually the movie ends.

The film is essentially a video game. Blandly badass people rush about from arena-fight to set-piece to boring back-story cutscene to next level and so on. It is also about as fun as a video game, which is to say it's very exciting and heady and quite dumb. I was definitely not in the mood for a fun dumb film however (especially one which is so thuddingly self-serious.) When it sought to fulfil my teenage power-fantasies, it merely left me cold. It may well be that there is a hell of a film buried under all of the bullshit. There's a scene where sexy lady fights a knight in full armour made of scrap metal. That's not a thing you see in your average brainless action-movie, but it wasn't fun or wild enough for me. Maybe if it was a bit more obviously in on the joke it would've been better? As is, it would be a good party-movie to sneer at. Approach with friends.