The Grim Cellar

Neil Marshall has seemed like a director who might hold the key to a great future for British genre movies since his feature debut (Dog Soldiers) so seeing the pretty exciting trailer for his new futuristic action movie was enough to entice me to visit my local Cineworld for the first time in a couple of months and check out what he‘s been up to since the much respected The Descent. In the near future the outbreak of a devastating virus causes mass chaos in Scotland and, unable to contain it, the authorities are forced to quarantine the entire country with a rapidly erected impenetrable barrier across the site of the old Roman wall. Cure proving to be unavailable the inhabitants of the northern land are left to die or destroyed attempting to escape, though one young girl - Eden Sinclair - is placed with soldiers by her desperate mother and airlifted from the wasteland as it descends into near self-destruction. Eden grows into a talented soldier and rises through the ranks after Scotland has long since been forgotten about but as the rest of Britain succumbs to widespread unemployment while its economy disintegrates (hold on, we are talking about the future here aren’t we?) the virus that afflicted Scotland reappears in London; death and panic once more become a serious problem. The government reveal to the military that they’ve discovered people surviving in Scotland years after everybody was thought dead, this having been revealed by photographs taken with satellite technology. Eden is deployed with a team of scientists/soldiers plus a couple of tanks, their mission to infiltrate Glasgow with the initial intention of finding out how the Scots have survived the virus and bring back the cure that they believe may have been developed by an eminent scientist who operated in the area. What they find is a society that has reverted to tribal mechanics operating through brutality and primordial instinct, creating an aggressive world through which the team must accomplish their mission to save the rest of Britain.

What’s immediately apparent with Doomsday is the fact that it will pull no punches when it comes to violence and bloodshed; the opening sequence is almost like something extracted from the middle of 28 Weeks Later, asserting a trend for the rest of the film. Rhona Mitra (as Eden) is an attractive and competent lead but difficult to accept as an army major somehow, feebly shouting out orders that a rookie would be hard pressed to bother following. While Malcolm McDowell iterates a strong opening narrative during the early scenes, when we finally meet him in the flesh it’s clear that his overly melodramatic approach isn’t quite so convincing, and compounds something that becomes apparent as the film unfolds: Neil Marshall’s dialogue just isn’t very good. The action sequences themselves are quite rousing and controlled well by the director but what first appears to be a dark apocalyptic action movie begins spiralling towards a comic book style reminiscent of Transformers or a James Bond film. Now there’s not much wrong with James Bond films but Doomsday seems to be masquerading as something more with its heavy-handed political commentary and extreme violence. After Eden and co. discover an unused Bentley underground the resulting car chase seriously made me begin to think this was some sort of prolonged advertisement for the vehicle, such is the super stylish method with which the sequence was shot - you could have taken a clip from this and easily used it in a commercial break during American Idol or something. Credibility was pretty much shot down the toilet when they discover a clan of people living in a castle, adopting the use of medieval gear and everything, and by this point I’d all but given up - it appears to me that Marshall has fallen into the trap of being ‘cool’ for the sake of it, something that rarely works with anyone with both an age and IQ over 25. Reading some comments from Marshall on the internet after watching the film I realise that he intended this to be a homage in some respects (it can’t help but remind the viewer of things like Escape From New York, No Escape, Mad Max, et al.) so perhaps the abundant clichés (people able to outrun motor vehicles, unarmed women able to defeat heavily armoured warriors, stereotype psychotic bad guys, etc.) shouldn’t be as painful as I found them and perhaps I approached this film with the wrong expectations, but the end result was not satisfactory.

I really wanted to like whatever Neil Marshall produced and I may well be guilty of approaching this piece in the wrong frame of mind but if you’re expecting a dark apocalyptic tale you may end up cringing with embarrassment on occasions - I don‘t think it was unfair to expect this either considering the pretty horrific and disturbing nature of the prologue! On the other hand, as the homage it may have been intended to be, it seems a tad pointless to me at the moment.