Doomsday (2008 film)

In 2008, the Reaper Virus ravages Scotland. Unable to contain the outbreak or cure the infected, the UK government erects a 30-foot wall isolating Scotland. The quarantine succeeds, but the extreme method turns the country into a pariah state. In 2035, authorities discover several people in London infected with Reaper. Satellite imagery spots survivors in Scotland, indicating the existence of a cure or immunity. To prevent an outbreak, Prime Minister John Hatcher orders Captain Nelson to send a team to Scotland to investigate, pointing at famed medical researcher Dr. Kane as a likely creator of the cure. Nelson assembles a team led by Major Eden Sinclair, who hails from Scotland and was separated from her mother during the evacuation. Other team members include Sergeant Norton, Sinclair's deputy; virologists Dr. Stirling and Dr. Talbot; and several DDS troopers. The team crosses the wall to Glasgow. While searching a hospital for survivors, they are ambushed by a group of marauders. Norton and Stirling escape, but the team suffers heavy casualties. Sinclair and Talbot are captured by a gang of brutal cannibals led by the power-hungry Sol, who plans to use Sinclair as leverage to cross the wall and invade England. Talbot is roasted and eaten. With the help of Cally, another prisoner, Sinclair escapes and kills Viper, Sol's second-in-command. She finds Norton and Stirling, and they flee on a train. Cally reveals that she and Sol are Kane's children. She also explains that Sol overthrew the previous government with his army of insurgents and refuted Kane's rule. In London, the Reaper epidemic continues to spread. As he is being evacuated from the city, Hatcher is infected by an attempted assassin. Michael Canaris, Hatcher's Machiavellian advisor, uses it as an excuse to quarantine Hatcher and take command as the de facto Prime Minister. Hatcher commits suicide rather than succumb to the virus. After leaving the train, Sinclair's group is captured by soldiers armed with archaic weapons and armor. They are taken to a castle and imprisoned by Kane, who reveals that there is no cure, but that people have developed an immunity to the Reaper Virus. After being left behind during the Scottish quarantine and losing his wife, Kane became a twisted and sadistic feudal lord who blamed science for the downfall of civilization. He sentences Sinclair, Cally, Norton, and Stirling to death. Sinclair is pitted against Telamon, Kane's executioner, in a duel. Sinclair wins, killing Telamon before escaping with the others. They find an underground facility in the forest that contains various equipment and vehicles, including an intact Bentley. Before they can escape, Kane's knights arrive and kill Norton. Sinclair, Cally, and Stirling escape the facility but are soon intercepted by Sol and his gang. After a high-speed chase, Sol and many of his men are killed. Sinclair calls Canaris and tells him she has the cure. Canaris arrives via helicopter, and Sinclair bargains with him to take Cally and Stirling back to London, where Stirling can use samples of Cally's blood to manufacture a vaccine. Canaris admits to Sinclair that he plans to hold back any cure until Reaper successfully eliminates much of the underclass in the form of social cleansing. Unbeknownst to Canaris, Sinclair secretly records the conversation using her bionic eye. Instead of returning to London, Sinclair goes to Glasgow to search for her mother, but discovers she died during the quarantine. Nelson arrives, and Sinclair gives him the recording of Canaris' admission. Canaris is exposed on television, upon which he fearfully realizes that his career has ended and conviction is inevitable. Sinclair remains in Scotland and uses Sol's severed head as a means to assume leadership over his band of marauders. == Cast ==

• Rhona Mitra as Eden Sinclair, a Major of the Department of Domestic Security, was selected to lead a team to find a cure. Mitra worked out and fight trained 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. The character was originally written to have "funny" lines, but the director scaled back on the humor to depict Sinclair as more "hardcore". • David O'Hara as Michael Canaris, a corrupt senior official within the British government whose position is never stated, who acts as Hatcher's puppeteer. Canaris was depicted to have a fascist background, speaking lines that paralleled Adolf Hitler's mindset of cleansing. 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. Emma Cleasby played Eden's mother at the start of the film. Miss Scotland and Miss United Kingdom, Nieve Jennings was an extra in the movie. == Production ==

Conception Director Neil Marshall lived near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall, a Roman fortification built to defend England against Scotland's tribes. The director fantasised about what conditions would cause the Wall to be rebuilt and imagined a lethal virus would work. 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 English/Scottish border as the location for a rebuilt wall, finding the location more plausible than a lengthy boundary between the United States and Canada. Additionally, Scotland is the home to multiple castles, which fit Marshall's medieval aspect. The lethal virus in Doomsday differs from contemporary films like 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later by being an authentic plague that actually devastates the population, instead of infecting people so they become aggressive cannibals or zombies. Marshall intended the virus as the backdrop to the story, having survivors scavenge for themselves and set up a primitive society. The director drew from tribal history around the world to design the society. Though the survivors are depicted as brutal, Marshall sought to have "shades of gray" by characterising some people in England as selfishly manipulative. • Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985): Marshall drew inspiration from the punk style of the films and also shaped Rhona Mitra's character after Max Rockatansky as a police officer with a troubled history. Zulu (1964), and works of director Terry Gilliam like The Fisher King (1991) as influences in producing Doomsday. Marshall acknowledged that his creation is "so outrageous you've got to laugh". He reflected, "I do think it's going to divide audiences... I just want them to be thrilled and enthralled. I want them to be overwhelmed by the imagery they've seen. And go back and see it again." 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, 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." where the majority of filming took place. South Africa was chosen as a primary filming location for economic reasons, costing a third of estimated production in the United Kingdom. Shooting in South Africa lasted 56 days out of 66 days, with the remaining ten taking place in Scotland. Marshall said of South Africa's appeal, "The landscape, the rock formations, I thought it was about as close to Scotland as you're likely to get, outside of Ireland or Wales." In Scotland, secondary filming took place in the city of Glasgow, including Haghill in the city's East End, and at Blackness Castle in West Lothian, the latter chosen when filmmakers were unable to shoot at Doune 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. Since the car company did not do product placement, the filmmakers purchased three new Bentley Continental GTs for US$150,000 each. Visual effects The visual effects for Doomsday stemmed from the 1980s stunt-based films, involving approximately 275 visual effects shots. While filmmakers did not seek innovative visual effects, they worked with budget restrictions by creating set extensions. With most shots taking place in daylight, the extensions involved matte paint and 2D and 3D solutions. The visual effects crew visited Scotland to take reference photos so scenes that were filmed in Cape Town, South Africa could instead have Scottish backgrounds. Several challenges for the visual effects crew included the illustration of cow overpopulation in line with a decimated human population and the convincing creation of the rebuilt Hadrian Wall in different lights and from different distances. The most challenging visual effects shot in Doomsday was the close-up in which a main character is burned alive. The shot required multiple enhancements and implementations of burning wardrobe, burning pigskin, and smoke and fire elements to look authentic. Neil Marshall's car chase sequence also involved the use of visual effects. A scene in which the Bentley crashes through a bus was intended to implement pyrotechnics, but fire marshals in the South African nature reserve, the filming location for the scene, forbade their use due to dry conditions. A miniature mock-up was created and visual effects were applied so the filming of the mock-up would overlay the filming of the actual scene without pyrotechnics. Other visual effects that were created were the Thames flood plain and a remote Scottish castle. A popular effect with the visual effects crew was the "rabbit explosion" scene, depicting a rabbit being shot by guns on automatic sensors. The crew sought to expand the singular shot, but Neil Marshall sought to focus on one shot to emphasise its comic nature and avoid drawing unnecessary sympathy from audiences. == Release ==

Theatrical run 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 Pictures for larger-scale distribution and marketing beginning in 2008. Doomsday was commercially released on 14 March 2008 in the United States and Canada in 1,936 theatres, grossing US$4,926,565 in its opening weekend and ranking seventh in the box office, which Box Office Mojo reported as a "failed" opening. Its theatrical run in the United States and Canada lasted 28 days, ending on 10 April 2008, having grossed US$11,463,861. The film's performance in the UK was considered a "disappointing run". The film premiered in Italy in August 2008, grossing an overall US$500,000. Worldwide, Doomsday has grossed US$22,472,631. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 50% based on reviews from 74 critics, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The website's consensus reads, "Doomsday is a pale imitation of previous futuristic thrillers, minus the cohesive narrative and charismatic leads." On Metacritic it has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on reviews from 14 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale. Alison Rowat of The Herald perceived Doomsday as "decidedly everyday" for a thriller, with Marshall's script having too many unanswered questions and characters not fully developed despite a decent cast. Rowat said, "In his previous films, Marshall made something out of nothing. Here he does the opposite". The critic acknowledged the attempted homages and the B-movie approach but thought that "there has to be something more". Steve Pratt of The Northern Echo weighed in, "As a writer, Marshall leaves gaping holes in the plot while as a director he knows how to extract maximum punch from car chases, beatings and fights without stinting on the gore as body parts are lopped off with alarming frequency and bodies squashed to a bloody pulp." Philip Key of the Liverpool Daily Post described the film, "Doomsday is a badly thought-out science fiction saga which leaves more questions than answers." 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 said Neil Marshall's "flair for visceral action" made up for Doomsday's lack of originality and that the film barely had a dull moment. He added, "There's no question that Doomsday does what it does with vigor, high technical prowess and just enough humor to avoid turning ridiculous." Harvey considered the conclusion relatively weak, and found the quality of the acting satisfactory for the genre, while reserving praise for the "stellar" work of the stunt personnel. Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle also praised the film's stunts, noting that it was reminiscent of "the beauty of the exploitation film era". Hartlaub said of the effect, "Hire a couple of great stuntmen and a halfway sober cinematographer, and you didn't even need a screenwriter." 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." Scottish response Scotland's tourism agency VisitScotland welcomed Doomsday, hoping that the film would attract tourism by marketing Scotland to the rest of the world. The country's national body for film and television, Scottish Screen, had contributed £300,000 to the production of Doomsday, which provided economic benefits for the cast and crew who dwelt in Scotland. A spokesperson from Scottish Screen anticipated, "It's likely to also attract a big audience who will see the extent to which Scotland can provide a flexible and diverse backdrop to all genres of film." In contrast, several parties have expressed concern that Doomsday presents negativity in England's latent view of Scotland based on their history. Angus MacNeil, member of the Scottish National Party, said of the film's impact: "The complimentary part is that people are thinking about Scotland as we are moving more and more towards independence. But the film depicts a country that is still the plaything of London. It is decisions made in London that has led to it becoming a quarantine zone." Haunted house Doomsday was used as inspiration in building a haunted house for Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando. Home media Doomsday was the first Blu-ray title released by Universal Pictures after the studio's initial support of the now-folded HD DVD format. The unrated version was released on DVD and Blu-ray on 29 July 2008 in the United States, containing an audio commentary and bonus materials covering the film's post-apocalyptic scenario, visual effects, and destructive vehicles and weapons, as well as the film's original theatrical version. IGN assessed the unrated DVD's video quality, writing, "For the most part, it's a crisp disc that's leaps above standard def." The audio quality was considered up to par with the film's loud scenes, though IGN found volume irregularity between the loud scenes and the quiet scenes. IGN called the commentary "a pretty straight-up behind-the-scenes take on the movie and a bit over-congratulatory". It found the "most fascinating" featurette to be about visual effects, while deeming the other featurettes skippable. ==See also==