I cannot believe that this film was made, let alone distributed and released to theaters by a major studio. Compared to its contemporary brethren, Doomsday is a freakish anomaly that stomps all over filmmaking sensibility. Though director Neil Marshall showcases his influences without a trace of subtlety, it is hard to trace the lineage of this film's existence. Mixing up genres and throwing in enough violence and gore for a hard R-rating is common enough in film today, but Doomsday is stitched together with a legion of pieces and fragments that do not suggest fidelity. I just did not expect to ever see punk cannibals and medieval knights and futuristic commandoes and car chases and plague-ridden killers and horses and cybernetic implants all in a single film. As my colleague, D_Davis, said during the film, "It's like a cinematic amusement park."
Will you find this amusing? That depends upon your idea of fun. Yes, Marshall brings the gore and violence that earned him his reputation to this film, and adds a whole lot more. You will see beheadings and amputations and cuts and squibs and even a gruesome cannibal cook-out. Marshall keeps the camera on most of these moments and gives ample opportunity for you to take in the hit and the sound and the bloody aftermath. More than once the brutality in this film played my senses and made me exclaim aloud. That was good fun, and if you've stomached The Descent then you'll enjoy this, too.
If, however, you are the kind of person who swoons to the mastery with which Quentin Tarantino crafted his genre swan song, Kill Bill, and look forward to similar brilliance, you should leave those expectations at home and forget about them. Instead, Doomsday has more in common with films such as Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus, Tetsuro Takeuchi's Wild Zero, Brian Trenchard Smith's Escape 2000, Tim Kincaid's Robot Holocaust, and even Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo. Only Marshall shows no regard for bringing his variety of material together either smoothly or for effect, making Doomsday even more of a mess than these predecessors. Other than the technical know-how that makes pyrotechnics possible, there is little to no elegance at work here. Moreover, Marshall seems to be reveling in the resulting mess; it's as if he decided to have fun with all of the cinematic moments he grew up with, craftsmanship be damned.
I, for one, had an excellent time watching Marshall at play. There is so much to see in Doomsday, and while the cinematography and editing lack the precision that made Dog Soldiers and Descent fantastic, the enthusiasm that Marshall brought to his previous work is intact and free of any self-consciousness. Other directors achieve these kinds of messy results through lack of talent; I give Marshall the benefit of the doubt, and think that he knew exactly what he was doing and focused on shooting every type of action that he loves to see on screen. In this, he is successful, and I hope that he experiences enough financial success in this effort to continue making more films.
3/16/08
