Reasons I Liked the Film Doomsday

I recently watched the movie Doomsday. I wasn’t expecting much when I decided to see it. I’d been playing a lot of Fallout 3 and wanted to watch a movie set in post-apocalypse. It was between Doomsday and The Road, and Doomsday finished downloading first.

Did I say downloading? I meant I legally rented a copy of Doomsday at my local video entertainment rental emporium. Yes, that’s the ticket…

If you’re thinking of downloa—I mean exchanging money for a licensed copy of Doomsday, I highly recommend it. It’s legitimately good. Here are some reasons why.

Bob Hoskins Adds a Touch of Class to Everything He Does

The film has a lot of very classic relationship archetypes and Bob Hoskins pulls his off the best as the main character’s boss/mentor/father figure. This film would still be good without him, but as an actor he just brings a certain sense of legitimacy to the film that helps you enjoy it that much more.

See? Classy.

Doomsday Borrows a Lot from Other Movies and It Doesn’t Hide It

In the film a deadly hyper-contagious virus forces the government to wall-off Scotland and a talented British agent is sent back in several years later to look for a cure. The whole plot borrows a lot from 28 Days Later and Escape From New York (and Escape From L.A. but only because John Carpenter is a fucking hack). Not long into the film there’s a big speech amongst the crazed society of rebels where their leader whips his followers into a frenzy while they eat handfuls of really gross meat. This reminded me of Dennis Hopper’s speech to The Smokers in Waterworld. Just then I realized the whole scene was a blatant rip-off of the big gang meeting in The Warriors. Just when I was beginning to think the writers either A) didn’t realize all those films were still covered by copyright, or B) didn’t realize that they were stealing these concepts, I saw this:

That’s right. That's a fucking Baseball Fury.

The people behind Doomsday knew exactly what they were doing and not only did they not care, they happily reveled in it. I have to respect that.

This Movie Has a Sense of Humor

As you might have guessed, this movie knows not to take itself too seriously. It plays up tension and drama when it needs to, but most of the time it wants to have fun. Still, it manages to walk the delicate balance between not taking itself too seriously and outright laughing at you for wasting your time on it.

You reading this, Brendan Fraser? STOP MOCKING ME WITH YOU CAREER.

Most movies wouldn’t know how to both dedicate themselves to their own storyline and throw in gags about the villain driving around the corpse of his brutally evil girlfriend, but Doomsday does and it totally works.

Corpse humor: Often attempted, rarely perfected.

It Knows How to Portray a Strong Female Lead

Movies suck at portraying strong female characters. Maybe it’s because actual strong women scare the hell out of most people. Maybe it has something to do with a disproportionate ratio of the filmmaking workforce, from directors and writers to grips and sound engineers, being men. Maybe it’s that most actresses are cast for looks, not their actual ability to realistically portray combat ability.

No offense Milla Jovovich, you’re still a fine actress, but I’ve seen greyhound dogs with a higher BMI.

Most strong female characters are either so unrealistically stoic they make Christian Bale’s Batman look histrionic, or they break into tears the second some aspect of their childhood/shoe-horned romantic interest/any personal trauma is brought up.

Indiana Jones never cried this much and he once saw his father get shot by Nazis.

Doomsday avoids that emotional dichotomy brilliantly. The main character has personal investment in finding a cure for the virus and seeing what has happened to Scotland, but she never gets all weepy about it like an emo kid who just dropped his ice cream cone. Similarly, while she does have the classic little drama moment when her Redshirts die, she’s almost immediately back to killing bad guys while racing a BMW backwards. That’s neither callous nor over-emotional: It’s awesome.

Find something that is not awesome about this. I dare you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my over-analysis of a two-year old English B-movie. Come back next time when I’ll almost certainly be writing about more random crap.