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Doomsday (film)
Encyclopedia
Doomsday is a 2008 British science fiction film written and directed by Neil Marshall
. The film takes place in the future. Scotland
has been quarantined because of a deadly virus. When the virus is found in London
, political leaders send a team led by Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra
) to Scotland to find a possible cure. Sinclair's team runs into two types of survivors: marauders and medieval knights. Doomsday was conceived by Marshall based on the idea of futuristic soldiers facing medieval knights. In producing the film, he drew from various cinema, including Mad Max
and Escape from New York
.
Marshall had a budget three times the size of his previous two films, The Descent
and Dog Soldiers, and the director filmed the larger-scale Doomsday in Scotland and South Africa
. The film was released on 14 March 2008 in the United States and Canada and in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2008. Doomsday did not perform well at the box office, and critics gave the film mixed reviews.
The quarantine is deemed a success, with the remaining Scottish population and the virus apparently dying off. Decades later, though, the virus reappears in London. Prime Minister Hatcher and his righthand man Canaris share with domestic security chief Bill Nelson news of survivors in Scotland, and they believe a cure may exist. They order him to send a team into Scotland to find medical researcher Dr Kane, who was working on a cure when Scotland was quarantined. Nelson chooses Major Eden Sinclair, the little girl now grown up, to lead the team. She has a cybernetic eye that can be removed and used remotely for weapon aiming and video playback.
North of the wall, while searching for any survivors, Sinclair and her team are ambushed by a cannibalistic punk gang. Some team members are killed, while Sinclair and Dr Talbot are captured. Sergeant Norton and Dr Stirling manage to escape the attack. Sinclair is interrogated and tortured by the gang's leader, Sol. Dr Talbot is barbecued alive and eaten by the cannibalistic gang. During the "feast", Sinclair escapes from her cell and discovers Kane's daughter, Cally, in the next cell. Freed by Sinclair, Cally leads her to a waiting train manned by her friend Joshua, while Norton and Stirling meet up with them while they escape. They take the train into the mountains and take a shortcut through a hidden underground military facility, to the castle where Kane and his followers live. They are surrounded by Kane's medieval soldiers, Joshua is killed, and everyone else surrenders. Kane tells Sinclair that the survivors are naturally immune and that he has been warring with Sol, who is actually his son. There is no cure. Sinclair defeats Kane's executioner, Telamon, in an open arena and her teammates help her escape. They retreat to the underground facility and find a Bentley in storage to drive back to the quarantine wall and home, although Norton is killed covering their escape.
In London, political leaders plan to seal off the "hot spot" where the virus is spreading. Canaris convinces Hatcher to let the infected die off before sharing any cure found by Sinclair's team. That way the population would be controllable if there is a future infection. Although the government leaders are isolated, an infected man gets past security and infects Hatcher. Knowing that he has no future, Hatcher commits suicide and Canaris takes over as Acting Prime Minister.
In Scotland, Sinclair, Cally, and Stirling are in a high speed car chase with Sol's gang. Sol attempts to hijack the Bentley, but while he is clinging to the roof Sinclair ploughs the car through a bus, decapitating him. Using a satellite phone, Sinclair calls in a government gunship and hands over the cure: Cally, whose immune blood can be replicated into a vaccine. Canaris, who came with the gunship, shares his plan to withhold the cure for political reasons and invites Sinclair back to London.
She chooses to stay and goes to find her old home, using the address on the old envelope her mother had left her. Nelson meets her there since she gave him the envelope before she left. Sinclair shows Nelson the video of her conversation with Canaris, recorded with her cybernetic eye. Nelson takes it back to London and has it aired, exposing Canaris' plan to hold back the cure. Sinclair returns to the location where she and her team were first attacked by Sol's gang and holds up Sol's severed head. She is cheered as their new leader.
Also cast as part of Eden Sinclair's team were Adrian Lester
as Sergeant Norton, Chris Robson as Miller, and Leslie Simpson as Carpenter. The names Miller and Carpenter were nods to directors George Miller
and John Carpenter
, whose films influenced Marshall's Doomsday. Sean Pertwee
and Darren Morfitt
portrayed the team's medical scientists, Dr Talbot and Dr Stirling, respectively. MyAnna Buring
portrayed Kane's daughter Cally.
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 make 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 decimates 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.
The director intended Doomsday as a tribute to post-apocalyptic films from the 1970s and 1980s, explaining, "Right from the start, I wanted my film to be an homage to these sorts of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new generation of audience that hadn't seen those movies in the cinema—hadn't seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill that I got from watching them. But kind of contemporise it, pump up the action and the blood and guts." Cinematic influences on Doomsday include:
Marshall also cited Metalstorm
(1983), 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."
signed Marshall to direct Doomsday in October 2005, 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, an amount that was triple the combined total of Marshall's previous two films, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent
(2005). 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."
Production began in February 2007 in South Africa, 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
. The entire shoot, involving thousands of extras, included a series of complex fight scenes and pyrotechnical displays. The director sought to minimise the use of computer-generated elements in Doomsday, preferring to subscribe to "old-school filmmaking". In the course of production, several sequences were dropped due to budgetary concerns, including a scene in which helicopter gunships attacked a medieval 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. The filmmakers purchased three new Bentley
Continental GT
s for US$150,000 each since the car company did not do product placement
. The film also contains the director's trademark gore and violence from previous films, including a scene where a character is cooked alive and eaten. The production was designed by Simon Bowles
who had worked previously with Marshall on "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent". Paul Hyett, the prosthetic make-up designer who worked on The Descent, contributed to the production, researching diseases including sexually transmitted disease
s to design the make-up for victims of the Reaper virus.
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 emphasize its comic nature and avoid drawing unnecessary sympathy from audiences.
music in his film, but he found it difficult to combine the music with the intense action. Instead, composer Tyler Bates
composed a score using heavy orchestra music. The film also included songs from the bands Adam and the Ants
, Fine Young Cannibals
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
, and Kasabian. The song "Two Tribes
" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the only song to remain in the film from the first draft of the screenplay. "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a favorite song by the director, who sought to include it. Marshall also hoped to include the song "Into the Light" by the Banshees, but it was left out due to the producer disliking it and the cost being too high to license it.
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$11,008,770. The film opened in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
, and Malta
on 9 May 2008, grossing a total of US$2,027,749 in its entire run. 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$22,211,426.
reported that 48% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on a sample of 61, with an average
score of 5/10. At Metacritic
, which assigns a normalized
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 51, based on 14 reviews. 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 Doomsdays 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."
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 that dwelled 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."
Doomsday was not nominated nor considered as a possible contender at the BAFTA Scotland
awards despite being one of the largest productions in Scotland in recent memory; was spent on local services. Director Neil Marshall applied for membership with the organisation to add "fresh blood", but Doomsday was not mentioned during jury deliberations. According to a spokesperson from the organisation, the film was not formally submitted for consideration, and no one directly invited the filmmakers to discuss a possible entry. Several of BAFTA Scotland's jury members believed that the criteria and procedures for a Scottish film were unclear and could have been more formalised.
Doomsday is a 2008 British science fiction film written and directed by Neil Marshall
. The film takes place in the future. Scotland
has been quarantined because of a deadly virus. When the virus is found in London
, political leaders send a team led by Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra
) to Scotland to find a possible cure. Sinclair's team runs into two types of survivors: marauders and medieval knights. Doomsday was conceived by Marshall based on the idea of futuristic soldiers facing medieval knights. In producing the film, he drew from various cinema, including Mad Max
and Escape from New York
.
Marshall had a budget three times the size of his previous two films, The Descent
and Dog Soldiers, and the director filmed the larger-scale Doomsday in Scotland and South Africa
. The film was released on 14 March 2008 in the United States and Canada and in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2008. Doomsday did not perform well at the box office, and critics gave the film mixed reviews.
The quarantine is deemed a success, with the remaining Scottish population and the virus apparently dying off. Decades later, though, the virus reappears in London. Prime Minister Hatcher and his righthand man Canaris share with domestic security chief Bill Nelson news of survivors in Scotland, and they believe a cure may exist. They order him to send a team into Scotland to find medical researcher Dr Kane, who was working on a cure when Scotland was quarantined. Nelson chooses Major Eden Sinclair, the little girl now grown up, to lead the team. She has a cybernetic eye that can be removed and used remotely for weapon aiming and video playback.
North of the wall, while searching for any survivors, Sinclair and her team are ambushed by a cannibalistic punk gang. Some team members are killed, while Sinclair and Dr Talbot are captured. Sergeant Norton and Dr Stirling manage to escape the attack. Sinclair is interrogated and tortured by the gang's leader, Sol. Dr Talbot is barbecued alive and eaten by the cannibalistic gang. During the "feast", Sinclair escapes from her cell and discovers Kane's daughter, Cally, in the next cell. Freed by Sinclair, Cally leads her to a waiting train manned by her friend Joshua, while Norton and Stirling meet up with them while they escape. They take the train into the mountains and take a shortcut through a hidden underground military facility, to the castle where Kane and his followers live. They are surrounded by Kane's medieval soldiers, Joshua is killed, and everyone else surrenders. Kane tells Sinclair that the survivors are naturally immune and that he has been warring with Sol, who is actually his son. There is no cure. Sinclair defeats Kane's executioner, Telamon, in an open arena and her teammates help her escape. They retreat to the underground facility and find a Bentley in storage to drive back to the quarantine wall and home, although Norton is killed covering their escape.
In London, political leaders plan to seal off the "hot spot" where the virus is spreading. Canaris convinces Hatcher to let the infected die off before sharing any cure found by Sinclair's team. That way the population would be controllable if there is a future infection. Although the government leaders are isolated, an infected man gets past security and infects Hatcher. Knowing that he has no future, Hatcher commits suicide and Canaris takes over as Acting Prime Minister.
In Scotland, Sinclair, Cally, and Stirling are in a high speed car chase with Sol's gang. Sol attempts to hijack the Bentley, but while he is clinging to the roof Sinclair ploughs the car through a bus, decapitating him. Using a satellite phone, Sinclair calls in a government gunship and hands over the cure: Cally, whose immune blood can be replicated into a vaccine. Canaris, who came with the gunship, shares his plan to withhold the cure for political reasons and invites Sinclair back to London.
She chooses to stay and goes to find her old home, using the address on the old envelope her mother had left her. Nelson meets her there since she gave him the envelope before she left. Sinclair shows Nelson the video of her conversation with Canaris, recorded with her cybernetic eye. Nelson takes it back to London and has it aired, exposing Canaris' plan to hold back the cure. Sinclair returns to the location where she and her team were first attacked by Sol's gang and holds up Sol's severed head. She is cheered as their new leader.
Also cast as part of Eden Sinclair's team were Adrian Lester
as Sergeant Norton, Chris Robson as Miller, and Leslie Simpson as Carpenter. The names Miller and Carpenter were nods to directors George Miller
and John Carpenter
, whose films influenced Marshall's Doomsday. Sean Pertwee
and Darren Morfitt
portrayed the team's medical scientists, Dr Talbot and Dr Stirling, respectively. MyAnna Buring
portrayed Kane's daughter Cally.
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 make 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 decimates 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.
The director intended Doomsday as a tribute to post-apocalyptic films from the 1970s and 1980s, explaining, "Right from the start, I wanted my film to be an homage to these sorts of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new generation of audience that hadn't seen those movies in the cinema—hadn't seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill that I got from watching them. But kind of contemporise it, pump up the action and the blood and guts." Cinematic influences on Doomsday include:
Marshall also cited Metalstorm
(1983), 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."
signed Marshall to direct Doomsday in October 2005, 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, an amount that was triple the combined total of Marshall's previous two films, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent
(2005). 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."
Production began in February 2007 in South Africa, 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
. The entire shoot, involving thousands of extras, included a series of complex fight scenes and pyrotechnical displays. The director sought to minimise the use of computer-generated elements in Doomsday, preferring to subscribe to "old-school filmmaking". In the course of production, several sequences were dropped due to budgetary concerns, including a scene in which helicopter gunships attacked a medieval 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. The filmmakers purchased three new Bentley
Continental GT
s for US$150,000 each since the car company did not do product placement
. The film also contains the director's trademark gore and violence from previous films, including a scene where a character is cooked alive and eaten. The production was designed by Simon Bowles
who had worked previously with Marshall on "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent". Paul Hyett, the prosthetic make-up designer who worked on The Descent, contributed to the production, researching diseases including sexually transmitted disease
s to design the make-up for victims of the Reaper virus.
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 emphasize its comic nature and avoid drawing unnecessary sympathy from audiences.
music in his film, but he found it difficult to combine the music with the intense action. Instead, composer Tyler Bates
composed a score using heavy orchestra music. The film also included songs from the bands Adam and the Ants
, Fine Young Cannibals
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
, and Kasabian. The song "Two Tribes
" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the only song to remain in the film from the first draft of the screenplay. "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a favorite song by the director, who sought to include it. Marshall also hoped to include the song "Into the Light" by the Banshees, but it was left out due to the producer disliking it and the cost being too high to license it.
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$11,008,770. The film opened in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
, and Malta
on 9 May 2008, grossing a total of US$2,027,749 in its entire run. 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$22,211,426.
reported that 48% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on a sample of 61, with an average
score of 5/10. At Metacritic
, which assigns a normalized
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 51, based on 14 reviews. 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 Doomsdays 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."
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 that dwelled 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."
Doomsday was not nominated nor considered as a possible contender at the BAFTA Scotland
awards despite being one of the largest productions in Scotland in recent memory; was spent on local services. Director Neil Marshall applied for membership with the organisation to add "fresh blood", but Doomsday was not mentioned during jury deliberations. According to a spokesperson from the organisation, the film was not formally submitted for consideration, and no one directly invited the filmmakers to discuss a possible entry. Several of BAFTA Scotland's jury members believed that the criteria and procedures for a Scottish film were unclear and could have been more formalised.
Doomsday is a 2008 British science fiction film written and directed by Neil Marshall
. The film takes place in the future. Scotland
has been quarantined because of a deadly virus. When the virus is found in London
, political leaders send a team led by Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra
) to Scotland to find a possible cure. Sinclair's team runs into two types of survivors: marauders and medieval knights. Doomsday was conceived by Marshall based on the idea of futuristic soldiers facing medieval knights. In producing the film, he drew from various cinema, including Mad Max
and Escape from New York
.
Marshall had a budget three times the size of his previous two films, The Descent
and Dog Soldiers, and the director filmed the larger-scale Doomsday in Scotland and South Africa
. The film was released on 14 March 2008 in the United States and Canada and in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2008. Doomsday did not perform well at the box office, and critics gave the film mixed reviews.
The quarantine is deemed a success, with the remaining Scottish population and the virus apparently dying off. Decades later, though, the virus reappears in London. Prime Minister Hatcher and his righthand man Canaris share with domestic security chief Bill Nelson news of survivors in Scotland, and they believe a cure may exist. They order him to send a team into Scotland to find medical researcher Dr Kane, who was working on a cure when Scotland was quarantined. Nelson chooses Major Eden Sinclair, the little girl now grown up, to lead the team. She has a cybernetic eye that can be removed and used remotely for weapon aiming and video playback.
North of the wall, while searching for any survivors, Sinclair and her team are ambushed by a cannibalistic punk gang. Some team members are killed, while Sinclair and Dr Talbot are captured. Sergeant Norton and Dr Stirling manage to escape the attack. Sinclair is interrogated and tortured by the gang's leader, Sol. Dr Talbot is barbecued alive and eaten by the cannibalistic gang. During the "feast", Sinclair escapes from her cell and discovers Kane's daughter, Cally, in the next cell. Freed by Sinclair, Cally leads her to a waiting train manned by her friend Joshua, while Norton and Stirling meet up with them while they escape. They take the train into the mountains and take a shortcut through a hidden underground military facility, to the castle where Kane and his followers live. They are surrounded by Kane's medieval soldiers, Joshua is killed, and everyone else surrenders. Kane tells Sinclair that the survivors are naturally immune and that he has been warring with Sol, who is actually his son. There is no cure. Sinclair defeats Kane's executioner, Telamon, in an open arena and her teammates help her escape. They retreat to the underground facility and find a Bentley in storage to drive back to the quarantine wall and home, although Norton is killed covering their escape.
In London, political leaders plan to seal off the "hot spot" where the virus is spreading. Canaris convinces Hatcher to let the infected die off before sharing any cure found by Sinclair's team. That way the population would be controllable if there is a future infection. Although the government leaders are isolated, an infected man gets past security and infects Hatcher. Knowing that he has no future, Hatcher commits suicide and Canaris takes over as Acting Prime Minister.
In Scotland, Sinclair, Cally, and Stirling are in a high speed car chase with Sol's gang. Sol attempts to hijack the Bentley, but while he is clinging to the roof Sinclair ploughs the car through a bus, decapitating him. Using a satellite phone, Sinclair calls in a government gunship and hands over the cure: Cally, whose immune blood can be replicated into a vaccine. Canaris, who came with the gunship, shares his plan to withhold the cure for political reasons and invites Sinclair back to London.
She chooses to stay and goes to find her old home, using the address on the old envelope her mother had left her. Nelson meets her there since she gave him the envelope before she left. Sinclair shows Nelson the video of her conversation with Canaris, recorded with her cybernetic eye. Nelson takes it back to London and has it aired, exposing Canaris' plan to hold back the cure. Sinclair returns to the location where she and her team were first attacked by Sol's gang and holds up Sol's severed head. She is cheered as their new leader.
Also cast as part of Eden Sinclair's team were Adrian Lester
as Sergeant Norton, Chris Robson as Miller, and Leslie Simpson as Carpenter. The names Miller and Carpenter were nods to directors George Miller
and John Carpenter
, whose films influenced Marshall's Doomsday. Sean Pertwee
and Darren Morfitt
portrayed the team's medical scientists, Dr Talbot and Dr Stirling, respectively. MyAnna Buring
portrayed Kane's daughter Cally.
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 make 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 decimates 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.
The director intended Doomsday as a tribute to post-apocalyptic films from the 1970s and 1980s, explaining, "Right from the start, I wanted my film to be an homage to these sorts of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new generation of audience that hadn't seen those movies in the cinema—hadn't seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill that I got from watching them. But kind of contemporise it, pump up the action and the blood and guts." Cinematic influences on Doomsday include:
Marshall also cited Metalstorm
(1983), 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."
signed Marshall to direct Doomsday in October 2005, 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, an amount that was triple the combined total of Marshall's previous two films, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent
(2005). 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."
Production began in February 2007 in South Africa, 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
. The entire shoot, involving thousands of extras, included a series of complex fight scenes and pyrotechnical displays. The director sought to minimise the use of computer-generated elements in Doomsday, preferring to subscribe to "old-school filmmaking". In the course of production, several sequences were dropped due to budgetary concerns, including a scene in which helicopter gunships attacked a medieval 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. The filmmakers purchased three new Bentley
Continental GT
s for US$150,000 each since the car company did not do product placement
. The film also contains the director's trademark gore and violence from previous films, including a scene where a character is cooked alive and eaten. The production was designed by Simon Bowles
who had worked previously with Marshall on "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent". Paul Hyett, the prosthetic make-up designer who worked on The Descent, contributed to the production, researching diseases including sexually transmitted disease
s to design the make-up for victims of the Reaper virus.
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 emphasize its comic nature and avoid drawing unnecessary sympathy from audiences.
music in his film, but he found it difficult to combine the music with the intense action. Instead, composer Tyler Bates
composed a score using heavy orchestra music. The film also included songs from the bands Adam and the Ants
, Fine Young Cannibals
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
, and Kasabian. The song "Two Tribes
" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the only song to remain in the film from the first draft of the screenplay. "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a favorite song by the director, who sought to include it. Marshall also hoped to include the song "Into the Light" by the Banshees, but it was left out due to the producer disliking it and the cost being too high to license it.
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$11,008,770. The film opened in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
, and Malta
on 9 May 2008, grossing a total of US$2,027,749 in its entire run. 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$22,211,426.
reported that 48% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on a sample of 61, with an average
score of 5/10. At Metacritic
, which assigns a normalized
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 51, based on 14 reviews. 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 Doomsdays 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."
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 that dwelled 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."
Doomsday was not nominated nor considered as a possible contender at the BAFTA Scotland
awards despite being one of the largest productions in Scotland in recent memory; was spent on local services. Director Neil Marshall applied for membership with the organisation to add "fresh blood", but Doomsday was not mentioned during jury deliberations. According to a spokesperson from the organisation, the film was not formally submitted for consideration, and no one directly invited the filmmakers to discuss a possible entry. Several of BAFTA Scotland's jury members believed that the criteria and procedures for a Scottish film were unclear and could have been more formalised.
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. 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.
Neil Marshall
Neil Marshall is an English film director, editor and screenwriter. Marshall began his career in editing and in 2002 directed his first feature film Dog Soldiers, which became a cult film. He followed up with the critically acclaimed horror film The Descent in 2005...
. The film takes place in the future. Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
has been quarantined because of a deadly virus. When the virus is found in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, political leaders send a team led by Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra
Rhona Mitra
Rhona Natasha Mitra , sometimes credited as Rona Mitra, is an English actress, model and singer.-Early life:Mitra was born in Paddington, London, England, the daughter of Anthony Mitra, a cosmetic surgeon, and Nora Downey...
) to Scotland to find a possible cure. Sinclair's team runs into two types of survivors: marauders and medieval knights. Doomsday was conceived by Marshall based on the idea of futuristic soldiers facing medieval knights. In producing the film, he drew from various cinema, including Mad Max
Mad Max
Mad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and revised by Miller and Byron Kennedy over the original script by James McCausland. The film stars Mel Gibson, who was unknown at the time. Its narrative based around the traditional western genre, Mad Max tells a story...
and Escape from New York
Escape from New York
Escape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Castle. The film is set in the near future in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security...
.
Marshall had a budget three times the size of his previous two films, The Descent
The Descent
The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. The film follows six women who, having entered an unmapped cave system, become trapped, and are hunted by subterranean flesh-eating humanoids....
and Dog Soldiers, and the director filmed the larger-scale Doomsday in Scotland and South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
. The film was released on 14 March 2008 in the United States and Canada and in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2008. Doomsday did not perform well at the box office, and critics gave the film mixed reviews.
Plot
In 2008, the Reaper virus infects Scotland, so the country is walled off by the British government. A Scottish woman begs retreating soldiers to take her injured little girl with them. Her daughter has an eye injury but is healthy otherwise. The mother gives her daughter an envelope just as the soldiers' helicopter lifts off.The quarantine is deemed a success, with the remaining Scottish population and the virus apparently dying off. Decades later, though, the virus reappears in London. Prime Minister Hatcher and his righthand man Canaris share with domestic security chief Bill Nelson news of survivors in Scotland, and they believe a cure may exist. They order him to send a team into Scotland to find medical researcher Dr Kane, who was working on a cure when Scotland was quarantined. Nelson chooses Major Eden Sinclair, the little girl now grown up, to lead the team. She has a cybernetic eye that can be removed and used remotely for weapon aiming and video playback.
North of the wall, while searching for any survivors, Sinclair and her team are ambushed by a cannibalistic punk gang. Some team members are killed, while Sinclair and Dr Talbot are captured. Sergeant Norton and Dr Stirling manage to escape the attack. Sinclair is interrogated and tortured by the gang's leader, Sol. Dr Talbot is barbecued alive and eaten by the cannibalistic gang. During the "feast", Sinclair escapes from her cell and discovers Kane's daughter, Cally, in the next cell. Freed by Sinclair, Cally leads her to a waiting train manned by her friend Joshua, while Norton and Stirling meet up with them while they escape. They take the train into the mountains and take a shortcut through a hidden underground military facility, to the castle where Kane and his followers live. They are surrounded by Kane's medieval soldiers, Joshua is killed, and everyone else surrenders. Kane tells Sinclair that the survivors are naturally immune and that he has been warring with Sol, who is actually his son. There is no cure. Sinclair defeats Kane's executioner, Telamon, in an open arena and her teammates help her escape. They retreat to the underground facility and find a Bentley in storage to drive back to the quarantine wall and home, although Norton is killed covering their escape.
In London, political leaders plan to seal off the "hot spot" where the virus is spreading. Canaris convinces Hatcher to let the infected die off before sharing any cure found by Sinclair's team. That way the population would be controllable if there is a future infection. Although the government leaders are isolated, an infected man gets past security and infects Hatcher. Knowing that he has no future, Hatcher commits suicide and Canaris takes over as Acting Prime Minister.
In Scotland, Sinclair, Cally, and Stirling are in a high speed car chase with Sol's gang. Sol attempts to hijack the Bentley, but while he is clinging to the roof Sinclair ploughs the car through a bus, decapitating him. Using a satellite phone, Sinclair calls in a government gunship and hands over the cure: Cally, whose immune blood can be replicated into a vaccine. Canaris, who came with the gunship, shares his plan to withhold the cure for political reasons and invites Sinclair back to London.
She chooses to stay and goes to find her old home, using the address on the old envelope her mother had left her. Nelson meets her there since she gave him the envelope before she left. Sinclair shows Nelson the video of her conversation with Canaris, recorded with her cybernetic eye. Nelson takes it back to London and has it aired, exposing Canaris' plan to hold back the cure. Sinclair returns to the location where she and her team were first attacked by Sol's gang and holds up Sol's severed head. She is cheered as their new leader.
Cast
- Rhona MitraRhona MitraRhona Natasha Mitra , sometimes credited as Rona Mitra, is an English actress, model and singer.-Early life:Mitra was born in Paddington, London, England, the daughter of Anthony Mitra, a cosmetic surgeon, and Nora Downey...
as Major Eden Sinclair of the Department of Domestic Security, selected to lead a team to find a cure. The heroine was inspired by the character Snake PlisskenSnake PlisskenS.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
. 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". - Bob HoskinsBob HoskinsRobert William "Bob" Hoskins, Jr. is an English actor known for playing Cockney rough diamonds, psychopaths and gangsters, in films such as The Long Good Friday , and Mona Lisa , and lighter roles in family films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook .- Early life :Hoskins was born in Bury St...
as Bill Nelson, Eden Sinclair's boss. Marshall sought to have Hoskins emulate his "bulldog" role from the 1980 film The Long Good FridayThe Long Good FridayThe Long Good Friday is a British gangster film starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. It was completed in 1979 but, because of release delays, it is generally credited as a 1980 film...
. - Malcolm McDowellMalcolm McDowellMalcolm McDowell is an English actor with a career spanning over forty years.McDowell is principally known for his roles in the controversial films If...., O Lucky Man!, A Clockwork Orange and Caligula...
as Marcus Kane, a former scientist who now lives as a feudal lord in an abandoned castle. McDowell described his character as a King LearKing LearKing Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...
. According to Marshall, Kane is based on KurtzKurtz (Heart of Darkness)Mr. Kurtz is a central fictional character in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. A trader of ivory in Africa and commander of a trading post, he monopolises his position as a demigod among native Africans. Kurtz meets with the protagonist, Marlow, who returns him to the coast via steamboat...
from Joseph ConradJoseph ConradJoseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
's Heart of DarknessHeart of DarknessHeart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
. The director originally sought to bring Sean ConnerySean ConnerySir Thomas Sean Connery , better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globes Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930), better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy...
out of retirement to play Kane but was unsuccessful. - Alexander SiddigAlexander SiddigSiddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi is a Sudanese-born English actor, also known as Siddig El Fadil and his stage name Alexander Siddig. He is known for playing Dr...
as Prime Minister John Hatcher. Marshall originally wrote Hatcher as a sympathetic character misguided by Canaris, but revised the character to be more like Canaris in embracing political manipulation. - David O'HaraDavid O'HaraDavid O'Hara is a Scottish actor.-Life and career:O'Hara was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Martha and Patrick O'Hara, a construction worker....
as Michael Canaris, a senior official within the British government whose position is never stated, who acts as Hatcher's puppeteer. Canaris was depicted to have a fascistFascismFascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
background, speaking lines that paralleled Adolf HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's mindset of cleansing. (Cf. CanarisWilhelm CanarisWilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and member of the German Resistance.- Early life and World War I :...
.) - Craig ConwayCraig Conway (actor)Craig Conway is a British actor. Conway has appeared in a number of stage plays and British television series in addition to his film work.Conway is the husband of actress Jill Halfpenny, with whom he has a son.-Filmography:...
as Sol, Kane's son and the leader of the marauders. He has a biohazard sign tattooed on his back and a large scar across his chest. - Lee-Anne Liebenberg as Viper, the wild woman
Also cast as part of Eden Sinclair's team were Adrian Lester
Adrian Lester
-Personal life:Lester was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Jamaican immigrants Monica, a medical secretary, and Reginald, a manager for a contract cleaning company. He sang as a boy treble in the choir of St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham...
as Sergeant Norton, Chris Robson as Miller, and Leslie Simpson as Carpenter. The names Miller and Carpenter were nods to directors George Miller
George Miller (producer)
George Miller is an Australian film director, screenwriter, producer, and former medical doctor. He is most well known for his work on the Mad Max movies, but has been involved in a wide range of projects, including the Oscar-winning Happy Feet and "Babe" family films.Miller is the older brother...
and John Carpenter
John Carpenter
John Howard Carpenter is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.- Early life :Carpenter was born...
, whose films influenced Marshall's Doomsday. Sean Pertwee
Sean Pertwee
Sean Pertwee is an English actor known for his television, film and voice-over work.-Career:In the early 80s, he auditioned for a place at the Surrey County Youth Theatre where he was cast as Captain Fitzpatrick in the play Tom Jones, based on the novel by Henry Fielding...
and Darren Morfitt
Darren Morfitt
Darren Morfitt is an actor who has appeared in 55 Degrees North, Grafters, Red Cap, Warriors, Making Waves, The Government Inspector and the cult werewolf movie Dog Soldiers. Most recently he starred as Jesus in the Manchester Passion and in the science fiction action film Doomsday as Dr...
portrayed the team's medical scientists, Dr Talbot and Dr Stirling, respectively. MyAnna Buring
MyAnna Buring
MyAnna Buring is a Swedish actress best known for appearing in the 2005 horror film The Descent.- Early life :Buring was born in Sweden but grew up in the Middle East...
portrayed Kane's daughter Cally.
Conception
Director Neil MarshallNeil Marshall
Neil Marshall is an English film director, editor and screenwriter. Marshall began his career in editing and in 2002 directed his first feature film Dog Soldiers, which became a cult film. He followed up with the critically acclaimed horror film The Descent in 2005...
lived near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall was a defensive fortification in Roman Britain. Begun in AD 122, during the rule of emperor Hadrian, it was the first of two fortifications built across Great Britain, the second being the Antonine Wall, lesser known of the two because its physical remains are less evident today.The...
, a Roman fortification built to defend England against Scotland's tribes. The director fantasised about what conditions would make 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
28 Days Later
28 Days Later is an acclaimed 2002 British horror film directed by Danny Boyle. The screenplay was written by Alex Garland, and the film stars Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns, and Christopher Eccleston...
and 28 Weeks Later
28 Weeks Later
28 Weeks Later is a 2007 British/Spanish film sequel to the 2002 post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later. 28 Weeks Later was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and released in the United Kingdom and United States on 11 May 2007...
by being an authentic plague that actually decimates 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.
The director intended Doomsday as a tribute to post-apocalyptic films from the 1970s and 1980s, explaining, "Right from the start, I wanted my film to be an homage to these sorts of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new generation of audience that hadn't seen those movies in the cinema—hadn't seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill that I got from watching them. But kind of contemporise it, pump up the action and the blood and guts." Cinematic influences on Doomsday include:
- Mad MaxMad MaxMad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and revised by Miller and Byron Kennedy over the original script by James McCausland. The film stars Mel Gibson, who was unknown at the time. Its narrative based around the traditional western genre, Mad Max tells a story...
(1979), The Road WarriorMad Max 2: The Road WarriorMad Max 2 is a 1981 Australian post-apocalyptic action film directed by George Miller. The film is the second installment in the Mad Max film series, with Mel Gibson starring as Max Rockatansky...
(1981), and Mad Max Beyond ThunderdomeMad Max Beyond ThunderdomeMad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a 1985 Australian post-apocalyptic film directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie, written by Miller, Doug Mitchell and Terry Hayes, and starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner. It is the third installment in the action movie Mad Max franchise...
(1985): Marshall drew inspiration from the punk style of the films and also shaped Rhona Mitra's character after Max RockatanskyMax Rockatansky"Mad" Max Rockatansky, sometimes referred to as The Road Warrior and The Man with No Name, is the main character from director George Miller's Mad Max franchise, appearing in the films Mad Max, Mad Max 2, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome...
as a police officer with a history. - Escape from New YorkEscape from New YorkEscape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Castle. The film is set in the near future in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security...
(1981): The director drew from the concepts of gang warfare and the experience of being walled-in. Rhona Mitra's character has an eye patch like Snake PlisskenSnake PlisskenS.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
, though the director sought to create a plot point for the eye of Mitra's character to reinforce its inclusion. - ExcaliburExcalibur (film)Excalibur is a 1981 dramatic fantasy film directed, produced and co-written by John Boorman that retells the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Adapted from the 15th century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, Excalibur features the music of Richard Wagner...
(1981): Marshall enjoyed John BoormanJohn BoormanJohn Boorman is a British filmmaker who is a long time resident of Ireland and is best known for his feature films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, The General and The Tailor of Panama.-Early life:Boorman was born in Shepperton, Surrey,...
's artistry in the film and sought to include its medieval aspects in Doomsday. - The Warriors (1979): The director enjoyed the tough and violent films of Walter Hill, including the "visual style of the gang warfare".
- No Blade of GrassNo Blade of Grass (film)No Blade of Grass is a 1970 British-American apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Cornel Wilde and starring Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace and John Hamill. It is an adaptation of the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher...
(1970): Marshall perceived the film as a predecessor to 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, though he sought to make Doomsday less straight-faced. - The Omega ManThe Omega ManThe Omega Man is a 1971 American science fiction film directed by Boris Sagal and starring Charlton Heston. It is based on the novel I Am Legend by American writer Richard Matheson...
(1971): The director was inspired by the "empty city" notion of the film and drew upon its dark and gritty nature. - A Boy and His DogA Boy and His DogA Boy and His Dog is a cycle of narratives and films including or stemming from works of science fiction author Harlan Ellison.Ellison began the cycle with the 1969 short story of the same title, and a revised and expanded novella-length version was published in Ellison's story collection The Beast...
(1974): Marshall created a homage to the 1974 film's ending by including a scene of a human being cooked in Doomsday. - WaterworldWaterworldWaterworld is a 1995 post-apocalyptic science fiction film. The film was directed by Kevin Reynolds and co-written by Peter Rader and David Twohy. It is based on Rader's original 1986 screenplay and stars Kevin Costner, who also produced it. It was distributed by Universal Pictures...
(1995): The director enjoyed the gritty atmosphere and how people scavenge to survive and adapt in their new world. - GladiatorGladiator (2000 film)Gladiator is a 2000 historical epic film directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Ralf Möller, Oliver Reed, Djimon Hounsou, Derek Jacobi, John Shrapnel and Richard Harris. Crowe portrays the loyal Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius, who is betrayed...
(2000): Like in Gladiator, Marshall sought to put Mitra's character through a trial by combat. - Children of MenChildren of MenChildren of Men is a 2006 science fiction film loosely adapted from P. D. James's 1992 novel The Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. In 2027, two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Illegal immigrants seek sanctuary in England, where the last...
(2006): With the film coming out during the development of Doomsday, the director realised the similarity of the premises and sought to make his film "more bloody and more fun".
Marshall also cited Metalstorm
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is a 1983 science fiction movie starring Jeffrey Byron, Michael Preston, Tim Thomerson, Kelly Preston and Richard Moll. It was directed and produced by Charles Band who is possibly better known for his other, rather low-budget science fiction and horror...
(1983), Zulu
Zulu (film)
Zulu is a 1964 historical war film depicting the Battle of Rorke's Drift between the British Army and the Zulus in January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War....
(1964), and works of director Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam
Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil , The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , The Fisher King , and 12 Monkeys...
like The Fisher King
The Fisher King (film)
The Fisher King is a 1991 American comedy-drama film written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Terry Gilliam. It stars Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer and Michael Jeter...
(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."
Filming
Rogue PicturesRogue Pictures
Rogue is a subsidiary of Relativity Media. The company has about 25 titles in its library.- Background :In 1997, Rogue Pictures was formed as a division of PolyGram Pictures but the name was dropped in 2000 after Universal Pictures bought PolyGram...
signed Marshall to direct Doomsday in October 2005, and in November 2006, actress Rhona Mitra was signed to star in Doomsday as the leader of the elite team. Production was budgeted at £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
17 million, an amount that was triple the combined total of Marshall's previous two films, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent
The Descent
The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. The film follows six women who, having entered an unmapped cave system, become trapped, and are hunted by subterranean flesh-eating humanoids....
(2005). 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."
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
, including Haghill in the city's East End and at Blackness Castle
Blackness Castle
Blackness Castle is a 15th century fortress, near the village of Blackness, Scotland, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth. It was built, probably on the site of an earlier fort, by Sir George Crichton in the 1440s. At this time, Blackness was the main port serving the Royal Burgh of...
in West Lothian, the latter chosen when filmmakers were unable to shoot at Doune Castle
Doune Castle
Doune Castle is a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune, in the Stirling district of central Scotland. The castle is sited on a wooded bend where the Ardoch Burn flows into the River Teith. It lies north-west of Stirling, where the Teith flows into the River Forth...
. The entire shoot, involving thousands of extras, included a series of complex fight scenes and pyrotechnical displays. The director sought to minimise the use of computer-generated elements in Doomsday, preferring to subscribe to "old-school filmmaking". In the course of production, several sequences were dropped due to budgetary concerns, including a scene in which helicopter gunships attacked a medieval castle.
A massive car chase scene was filmed for Doomsday, described by Marshall to be one part Mad Max, one part Bullitt
Bullitt
Bullitt is a 1968 American police procedural film starring Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset and Robert Vaughn. It was directed by Peter Yates and distributed by Warner Bros. The story was adapted for the screen by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner, based on the 1963 novel Mute Witness by Robert L....
(1968), and one part "something else entirely different". Marshall had seen the Aston Martin DBS V12
Aston Martin DBS V12
The modern Aston Martin DBS is a high performance GT sports car from the UK manufacturer Aston Martin. Aston has used the DBS name once before on their 1967–72 grand tourer coupe...
used in the James Bond film Casino Royale
Casino Royale (2006 film)
Casino Royale is the twenty-first film in the James Bond film series and the first to star Daniel Craig as fictional MI6 agent James Bond...
(2006) and sought to implement a similarly "sexy" car. The filmmakers purchased three new Bentley
Bentley
Bentley Motors Limited is a British manufacturer of automobiles founded on 18 January 1919 by Walter Owen Bentley known as W.O. Bentley or just "W O". Bentley had been previously known for his range of rotary aero-engines in World War I, the most famous being the Bentley BR1 as used in later...
Continental GT
Bentley Continental GT
-Flying Spur:The four door Continental Flying Spur saloon was first displayed at the 2005 Geneva Motor Show. The Flying Spur utilizes most of the technical underpinnings of the Bentley Continental GT, and was introduced to European and North American markets in the summer of 2005...
s for US$150,000 each since the car company did not do product placement
Product placement
Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, music videos, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the...
. The film also contains the director's trademark gore and violence from previous films, including a scene where a character is cooked alive and eaten. The production was designed by Simon Bowles
Simon Bowles
Simon Bowles is a British production designer, who got his start in the film industry in 1993, working as an art department runner and then standby art director...
who had worked previously with Marshall on "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent". Paul Hyett, the prosthetic make-up designer who worked on The Descent, contributed to the production, researching diseases including sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease , also known as a sexually transmitted infection or venereal disease , is an illness that has a significant probability of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior, including vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and anal sex...
s to design the make-up for victims of the Reaper virus.
Visual effects
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 emphasize its comic nature and avoid drawing unnecessary sympathy from audiences.
Music
Marshall originally intended to include 1980s synthSynthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
music in his film, but he found it difficult to combine the music with the intense action. Instead, composer Tyler Bates
Tyler Bates
Tyler Bates is a music producer and composer for films. His most known work includes "The Hangman's Song" and various other tracks from the zombie horror film Dawn of the Dead, and 2008's Day of the Dead...
composed a score using heavy orchestra music. The film also included songs from the bands Adam and the Ants
Adam and the Ants
Adam and the Ants were a British rock band active during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The original group, which existed from 1977 to 1980, became notable as a cult band marking the transition from the late-1970s punk rock era to the post-punk and New Wave era...
, Fine Young Cannibals
Fine Young Cannibals
Fine Young Cannibals were a British band formed in Birmingham, England, in 1984, by bassist David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox , and singer Roland Gift...
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Frankie Goes to Hollywood were a British dance-pop band popular in the mid-1980s. The group was fronted by Holly Johnson , with Paul Rutherford , Peter Gill , Mark O'Toole , and Brian Nash .The group's debut single "Relax" was banned by the BBC in 1984 while at number six in the charts and...
, and Kasabian. The song "Two Tribes
Two Tribes
"Two Tribes" is the second single by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, released in the UK by ZTT Records in May 1984 . The song was later included on the album Welcome to the Pleasuredome....
" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the only song to remain in the film from the first draft of the screenplay. "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a favorite song by the director, who sought to include it. Marshall also hoped to include the song "Into the Light" by the Banshees, but it was left out due to the producer disliking it and the cost being too high to license it.
Theatrical run
For its theatrical run, the film was originally intended to be distributed by Focus FeaturesFocus Features
Focus Features is the art house films division of NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, and acts as both a producer and distributor for its own films and a distributor for foreign films....
under Rogue Pictures
Rogue Pictures
Rogue is a subsidiary of Relativity Media. The company has about 25 titles in its library.- Background :In 1997, Rogue Pictures was formed as a division of PolyGram Pictures but the name was dropped in 2000 after Universal Pictures bought PolyGram...
, but the company transferred Doomsday among other films to Universal Pictures
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
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
Box Office Mojo
Box Office Mojo is a website that tracks box office revenue in a systematic, algorithmic way. Brandon Gray started the site in 1999. In 2002, Gray partnered with Sean Saulsbury and they grew the site to nearly two million readers when, in July 2008, the company was purchased by Amazon.com through...
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$11,008,770. The film opened in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
, and Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
on 9 May 2008, grossing a total of US$2,027,749 in its entire run. 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$22,211,426.
Critical reception
Doomsday was not screened for critics in advance of its commercial opening in cinemas. The film received mixed and average reviews from critics. Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that 48% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on a sample of 61, with an average
Weighted mean
The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...
score of 5/10. At Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
, which assigns a normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 51, based on 14 reviews. Alison Rowat of The Herald
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...
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
The Northern Echo
The Northern Echo is a leading daily regional morning newspaper, serving the North East of England. The paper is based in Priestgate, Darlington. Its covers national as well as regional news. It is one of the UK's most famous provincial newspaper titles....
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
Liverpool Daily Post
The Liverpool Daily Post is a newspaper published by Trinity Mirror in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. It is published Monday to Friday and is published in Merseyside, Cheshire, and North Wales editions, and is a morning paper...
described the film, "Doomsday is a badly thought-out science fiction saga which leaves more questions than answers."
Alonso Duralde of MSNBC
MSNBC
MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...
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
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Philadelphia Inquirer is a morning daily newspaper that serves the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area of the United States. The newspaper was founded by John R. Walker and John Norvell in June 1829 as The Pennsylvania Inquirer and is the third-oldest surviving daily newspaper in the...
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
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli is an American online film critic.-Personal life:Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and spent his early childhood in Morristown, New Jersey. At the age of nine years, he relocated to the township of Cherry Hill, New Jersey...
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
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
said Neil Marshall's "flair for visceral action" made up for Doomsdays 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
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
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
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
saw Rhona Mitra's character as a mere impersonation of Snake Plissken
Snake Plissken
S.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
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 reception
Scotland's tourism agency VisitScotlandVisitScotland
VisitScotland is Scotland's national tourism agency. It is a public body, with offices in Edinburgh, Inverness, London as well as other parts of Scotland...
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
Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen is the national body for film and television in Scotland, established in April 1997. It took on the functions of the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Film Production Fund, Scottish Screen Locations and Scottish Broadcast and Film Training, forming a unitary organisation.Scottish...
, had contributed £300,000 to the production of Doomsday, which provided economic benefits for the cast and crew that dwelled 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
Angus MacNeil
Angus Brendan MacNeil is the Scottish National Party Member of Parliament for Na h-Eileanan an Iar...
, member of the Scottish National Party
Scottish National Party
The Scottish National Party is a social-democratic political party in Scotland which campaigns for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom....
, 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."
Doomsday was not nominated nor considered as a possible contender at the BAFTA Scotland
BAFTA Scotland
BAFTA in Scotland is the Scottish branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Formed in 1997, the branch holds an annual awards ceremony, the British Academy Scotland Awards , to recognise achievement by performers and production staff in Scottish film, television and video games...
awards despite being one of the largest productions in Scotland in recent memory; was spent on local services. Director Neil Marshall applied for membership with the organisation to add "fresh blood", but Doomsday was not mentioned during jury deliberations. According to a spokesperson from the organisation, the film was not formally submitted for consideration, and no one directly invited the filmmakers to discuss a possible entry. Several of BAFTA Scotland's jury members believed that the criteria and procedures for a Scottish film were unclear and could have been more formalised.
Doomsday is a 2008 British science fiction film written and directed by Neil Marshall
Neil Marshall
Neil Marshall is an English film director, editor and screenwriter. Marshall began his career in editing and in 2002 directed his first feature film Dog Soldiers, which became a cult film. He followed up with the critically acclaimed horror film The Descent in 2005...
. The film takes place in the future. Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
has been quarantined because of a deadly virus. When the virus is found in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, political leaders send a team led by Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra
Rhona Mitra
Rhona Natasha Mitra , sometimes credited as Rona Mitra, is an English actress, model and singer.-Early life:Mitra was born in Paddington, London, England, the daughter of Anthony Mitra, a cosmetic surgeon, and Nora Downey...
) to Scotland to find a possible cure. Sinclair's team runs into two types of survivors: marauders and medieval knights. Doomsday was conceived by Marshall based on the idea of futuristic soldiers facing medieval knights. In producing the film, he drew from various cinema, including Mad Max
Mad Max
Mad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and revised by Miller and Byron Kennedy over the original script by James McCausland. The film stars Mel Gibson, who was unknown at the time. Its narrative based around the traditional western genre, Mad Max tells a story...
and Escape from New York
Escape from New York
Escape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Castle. The film is set in the near future in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security...
.
Marshall had a budget three times the size of his previous two films, The Descent
The Descent
The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. The film follows six women who, having entered an unmapped cave system, become trapped, and are hunted by subterranean flesh-eating humanoids....
and Dog Soldiers, and the director filmed the larger-scale Doomsday in Scotland and South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
. The film was released on 14 March 2008 in the United States and Canada and in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2008. Doomsday did not perform well at the box office, and critics gave the film mixed reviews.
Plot
In 2008, the Reaper virus infects Scotland, so the country is walled off by the British government. A Scottish woman begs retreating soldiers to take her injured little girl with them. Her daughter has an eye injury but is healthy otherwise. The mother gives her daughter an envelope just as the soldiers' helicopter lifts off.The quarantine is deemed a success, with the remaining Scottish population and the virus apparently dying off. Decades later, though, the virus reappears in London. Prime Minister Hatcher and his righthand man Canaris share with domestic security chief Bill Nelson news of survivors in Scotland, and they believe a cure may exist. They order him to send a team into Scotland to find medical researcher Dr Kane, who was working on a cure when Scotland was quarantined. Nelson chooses Major Eden Sinclair, the little girl now grown up, to lead the team. She has a cybernetic eye that can be removed and used remotely for weapon aiming and video playback.
North of the wall, while searching for any survivors, Sinclair and her team are ambushed by a cannibalistic punk gang. Some team members are killed, while Sinclair and Dr Talbot are captured. Sergeant Norton and Dr Stirling manage to escape the attack. Sinclair is interrogated and tortured by the gang's leader, Sol. Dr Talbot is barbecued alive and eaten by the cannibalistic gang. During the "feast", Sinclair escapes from her cell and discovers Kane's daughter, Cally, in the next cell. Freed by Sinclair, Cally leads her to a waiting train manned by her friend Joshua, while Norton and Stirling meet up with them while they escape. They take the train into the mountains and take a shortcut through a hidden underground military facility, to the castle where Kane and his followers live. They are surrounded by Kane's medieval soldiers, Joshua is killed, and everyone else surrenders. Kane tells Sinclair that the survivors are naturally immune and that he has been warring with Sol, who is actually his son. There is no cure. Sinclair defeats Kane's executioner, Telamon, in an open arena and her teammates help her escape. They retreat to the underground facility and find a Bentley in storage to drive back to the quarantine wall and home, although Norton is killed covering their escape.
In London, political leaders plan to seal off the "hot spot" where the virus is spreading. Canaris convinces Hatcher to let the infected die off before sharing any cure found by Sinclair's team. That way the population would be controllable if there is a future infection. Although the government leaders are isolated, an infected man gets past security and infects Hatcher. Knowing that he has no future, Hatcher commits suicide and Canaris takes over as Acting Prime Minister.
In Scotland, Sinclair, Cally, and Stirling are in a high speed car chase with Sol's gang. Sol attempts to hijack the Bentley, but while he is clinging to the roof Sinclair ploughs the car through a bus, decapitating him. Using a satellite phone, Sinclair calls in a government gunship and hands over the cure: Cally, whose immune blood can be replicated into a vaccine. Canaris, who came with the gunship, shares his plan to withhold the cure for political reasons and invites Sinclair back to London.
She chooses to stay and goes to find her old home, using the address on the old envelope her mother had left her. Nelson meets her there since she gave him the envelope before she left. Sinclair shows Nelson the video of her conversation with Canaris, recorded with her cybernetic eye. Nelson takes it back to London and has it aired, exposing Canaris' plan to hold back the cure. Sinclair returns to the location where she and her team were first attacked by Sol's gang and holds up Sol's severed head. She is cheered as their new leader.
Cast
- Rhona MitraRhona MitraRhona Natasha Mitra , sometimes credited as Rona Mitra, is an English actress, model and singer.-Early life:Mitra was born in Paddington, London, England, the daughter of Anthony Mitra, a cosmetic surgeon, and Nora Downey...
as Major Eden Sinclair of the Department of Domestic Security, selected to lead a team to find a cure. The heroine was inspired by the character Snake PlisskenSnake PlisskenS.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
. 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". - Bob HoskinsBob HoskinsRobert William "Bob" Hoskins, Jr. is an English actor known for playing Cockney rough diamonds, psychopaths and gangsters, in films such as The Long Good Friday , and Mona Lisa , and lighter roles in family films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook .- Early life :Hoskins was born in Bury St...
as Bill Nelson, Eden Sinclair's boss. Marshall sought to have Hoskins emulate his "bulldog" role from the 1980 film The Long Good FridayThe Long Good FridayThe Long Good Friday is a British gangster film starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. It was completed in 1979 but, because of release delays, it is generally credited as a 1980 film...
. - Malcolm McDowellMalcolm McDowellMalcolm McDowell is an English actor with a career spanning over forty years.McDowell is principally known for his roles in the controversial films If...., O Lucky Man!, A Clockwork Orange and Caligula...
as Marcus Kane, a former scientist who now lives as a feudal lord in an abandoned castle. McDowell described his character as a King LearKing LearKing Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...
. According to Marshall, Kane is based on KurtzKurtz (Heart of Darkness)Mr. Kurtz is a central fictional character in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. A trader of ivory in Africa and commander of a trading post, he monopolises his position as a demigod among native Africans. Kurtz meets with the protagonist, Marlow, who returns him to the coast via steamboat...
from Joseph ConradJoseph ConradJoseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
's Heart of DarknessHeart of DarknessHeart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
. The director originally sought to bring Sean ConnerySean ConnerySir Thomas Sean Connery , better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globes Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930), better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy...
out of retirement to play Kane but was unsuccessful. - Alexander SiddigAlexander SiddigSiddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi is a Sudanese-born English actor, also known as Siddig El Fadil and his stage name Alexander Siddig. He is known for playing Dr...
as Prime Minister John Hatcher. Marshall originally wrote Hatcher as a sympathetic character misguided by Canaris, but revised the character to be more like Canaris in embracing political manipulation. - David O'HaraDavid O'HaraDavid O'Hara is a Scottish actor.-Life and career:O'Hara was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Martha and Patrick O'Hara, a construction worker....
as Michael Canaris, a senior official within the British government whose position is never stated, who acts as Hatcher's puppeteer. Canaris was depicted to have a fascistFascismFascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
background, speaking lines that paralleled Adolf HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's mindset of cleansing. (Cf. CanarisWilhelm CanarisWilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and member of the German Resistance.- Early life and World War I :...
.) - Craig ConwayCraig Conway (actor)Craig Conway is a British actor. Conway has appeared in a number of stage plays and British television series in addition to his film work.Conway is the husband of actress Jill Halfpenny, with whom he has a son.-Filmography:...
as Sol, Kane's son and the leader of the marauders. He has a biohazard sign tattooed on his back and a large scar across his chest. - Lee-Anne Liebenberg as Viper, the wild woman
Also cast as part of Eden Sinclair's team were Adrian Lester
Adrian Lester
-Personal life:Lester was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Jamaican immigrants Monica, a medical secretary, and Reginald, a manager for a contract cleaning company. He sang as a boy treble in the choir of St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham...
as Sergeant Norton, Chris Robson as Miller, and Leslie Simpson as Carpenter. The names Miller and Carpenter were nods to directors George Miller
George Miller (producer)
George Miller is an Australian film director, screenwriter, producer, and former medical doctor. He is most well known for his work on the Mad Max movies, but has been involved in a wide range of projects, including the Oscar-winning Happy Feet and "Babe" family films.Miller is the older brother...
and John Carpenter
John Carpenter
John Howard Carpenter is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.- Early life :Carpenter was born...
, whose films influenced Marshall's Doomsday. Sean Pertwee
Sean Pertwee
Sean Pertwee is an English actor known for his television, film and voice-over work.-Career:In the early 80s, he auditioned for a place at the Surrey County Youth Theatre where he was cast as Captain Fitzpatrick in the play Tom Jones, based on the novel by Henry Fielding...
and Darren Morfitt
Darren Morfitt
Darren Morfitt is an actor who has appeared in 55 Degrees North, Grafters, Red Cap, Warriors, Making Waves, The Government Inspector and the cult werewolf movie Dog Soldiers. Most recently he starred as Jesus in the Manchester Passion and in the science fiction action film Doomsday as Dr...
portrayed the team's medical scientists, Dr Talbot and Dr Stirling, respectively. MyAnna Buring
MyAnna Buring
MyAnna Buring is a Swedish actress best known for appearing in the 2005 horror film The Descent.- Early life :Buring was born in Sweden but grew up in the Middle East...
portrayed Kane's daughter Cally.
Conception
Director Neil MarshallNeil Marshall
Neil Marshall is an English film director, editor and screenwriter. Marshall began his career in editing and in 2002 directed his first feature film Dog Soldiers, which became a cult film. He followed up with the critically acclaimed horror film The Descent in 2005...
lived near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall was a defensive fortification in Roman Britain. Begun in AD 122, during the rule of emperor Hadrian, it was the first of two fortifications built across Great Britain, the second being the Antonine Wall, lesser known of the two because its physical remains are less evident today.The...
, a Roman fortification built to defend England against Scotland's tribes. The director fantasised about what conditions would make 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
28 Days Later
28 Days Later is an acclaimed 2002 British horror film directed by Danny Boyle. The screenplay was written by Alex Garland, and the film stars Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns, and Christopher Eccleston...
and 28 Weeks Later
28 Weeks Later
28 Weeks Later is a 2007 British/Spanish film sequel to the 2002 post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later. 28 Weeks Later was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and released in the United Kingdom and United States on 11 May 2007...
by being an authentic plague that actually decimates 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.
The director intended Doomsday as a tribute to post-apocalyptic films from the 1970s and 1980s, explaining, "Right from the start, I wanted my film to be an homage to these sorts of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new generation of audience that hadn't seen those movies in the cinema—hadn't seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill that I got from watching them. But kind of contemporise it, pump up the action and the blood and guts." Cinematic influences on Doomsday include:
- Mad MaxMad MaxMad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and revised by Miller and Byron Kennedy over the original script by James McCausland. The film stars Mel Gibson, who was unknown at the time. Its narrative based around the traditional western genre, Mad Max tells a story...
(1979), The Road WarriorMad Max 2: The Road WarriorMad Max 2 is a 1981 Australian post-apocalyptic action film directed by George Miller. The film is the second installment in the Mad Max film series, with Mel Gibson starring as Max Rockatansky...
(1981), and Mad Max Beyond ThunderdomeMad Max Beyond ThunderdomeMad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a 1985 Australian post-apocalyptic film directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie, written by Miller, Doug Mitchell and Terry Hayes, and starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner. It is the third installment in the action movie Mad Max franchise...
(1985): Marshall drew inspiration from the punk style of the films and also shaped Rhona Mitra's character after Max RockatanskyMax Rockatansky"Mad" Max Rockatansky, sometimes referred to as The Road Warrior and The Man with No Name, is the main character from director George Miller's Mad Max franchise, appearing in the films Mad Max, Mad Max 2, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome...
as a police officer with a history. - Escape from New YorkEscape from New YorkEscape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Castle. The film is set in the near future in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security...
(1981): The director drew from the concepts of gang warfare and the experience of being walled-in. Rhona Mitra's character has an eye patch like Snake PlisskenSnake PlisskenS.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
, though the director sought to create a plot point for the eye of Mitra's character to reinforce its inclusion. - ExcaliburExcalibur (film)Excalibur is a 1981 dramatic fantasy film directed, produced and co-written by John Boorman that retells the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Adapted from the 15th century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, Excalibur features the music of Richard Wagner...
(1981): Marshall enjoyed John BoormanJohn BoormanJohn Boorman is a British filmmaker who is a long time resident of Ireland and is best known for his feature films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, The General and The Tailor of Panama.-Early life:Boorman was born in Shepperton, Surrey,...
's artistry in the film and sought to include its medieval aspects in Doomsday. - The Warriors (1979): The director enjoyed the tough and violent films of Walter Hill, including the "visual style of the gang warfare".
- No Blade of GrassNo Blade of Grass (film)No Blade of Grass is a 1970 British-American apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Cornel Wilde and starring Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace and John Hamill. It is an adaptation of the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher...
(1970): Marshall perceived the film as a predecessor to 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, though he sought to make Doomsday less straight-faced. - The Omega ManThe Omega ManThe Omega Man is a 1971 American science fiction film directed by Boris Sagal and starring Charlton Heston. It is based on the novel I Am Legend by American writer Richard Matheson...
(1971): The director was inspired by the "empty city" notion of the film and drew upon its dark and gritty nature. - A Boy and His DogA Boy and His DogA Boy and His Dog is a cycle of narratives and films including or stemming from works of science fiction author Harlan Ellison.Ellison began the cycle with the 1969 short story of the same title, and a revised and expanded novella-length version was published in Ellison's story collection The Beast...
(1974): Marshall created a homage to the 1974 film's ending by including a scene of a human being cooked in Doomsday. - WaterworldWaterworldWaterworld is a 1995 post-apocalyptic science fiction film. The film was directed by Kevin Reynolds and co-written by Peter Rader and David Twohy. It is based on Rader's original 1986 screenplay and stars Kevin Costner, who also produced it. It was distributed by Universal Pictures...
(1995): The director enjoyed the gritty atmosphere and how people scavenge to survive and adapt in their new world. - GladiatorGladiator (2000 film)Gladiator is a 2000 historical epic film directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Ralf Möller, Oliver Reed, Djimon Hounsou, Derek Jacobi, John Shrapnel and Richard Harris. Crowe portrays the loyal Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius, who is betrayed...
(2000): Like in Gladiator, Marshall sought to put Mitra's character through a trial by combat. - Children of MenChildren of MenChildren of Men is a 2006 science fiction film loosely adapted from P. D. James's 1992 novel The Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. In 2027, two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Illegal immigrants seek sanctuary in England, where the last...
(2006): With the film coming out during the development of Doomsday, the director realised the similarity of the premises and sought to make his film "more bloody and more fun".
Marshall also cited Metalstorm
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is a 1983 science fiction movie starring Jeffrey Byron, Michael Preston, Tim Thomerson, Kelly Preston and Richard Moll. It was directed and produced by Charles Band who is possibly better known for his other, rather low-budget science fiction and horror...
(1983), Zulu
Zulu (film)
Zulu is a 1964 historical war film depicting the Battle of Rorke's Drift between the British Army and the Zulus in January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War....
(1964), and works of director Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam
Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil , The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , The Fisher King , and 12 Monkeys...
like The Fisher King
The Fisher King (film)
The Fisher King is a 1991 American comedy-drama film written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Terry Gilliam. It stars Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer and Michael Jeter...
(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."
Filming
Rogue PicturesRogue Pictures
Rogue is a subsidiary of Relativity Media. The company has about 25 titles in its library.- Background :In 1997, Rogue Pictures was formed as a division of PolyGram Pictures but the name was dropped in 2000 after Universal Pictures bought PolyGram...
signed Marshall to direct Doomsday in October 2005, and in November 2006, actress Rhona Mitra was signed to star in Doomsday as the leader of the elite team. Production was budgeted at £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
17 million, an amount that was triple the combined total of Marshall's previous two films, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent
The Descent
The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. The film follows six women who, having entered an unmapped cave system, become trapped, and are hunted by subterranean flesh-eating humanoids....
(2005). 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."
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
, including Haghill in the city's East End and at Blackness Castle
Blackness Castle
Blackness Castle is a 15th century fortress, near the village of Blackness, Scotland, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth. It was built, probably on the site of an earlier fort, by Sir George Crichton in the 1440s. At this time, Blackness was the main port serving the Royal Burgh of...
in West Lothian, the latter chosen when filmmakers were unable to shoot at Doune Castle
Doune Castle
Doune Castle is a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune, in the Stirling district of central Scotland. The castle is sited on a wooded bend where the Ardoch Burn flows into the River Teith. It lies north-west of Stirling, where the Teith flows into the River Forth...
. The entire shoot, involving thousands of extras, included a series of complex fight scenes and pyrotechnical displays. The director sought to minimise the use of computer-generated elements in Doomsday, preferring to subscribe to "old-school filmmaking". In the course of production, several sequences were dropped due to budgetary concerns, including a scene in which helicopter gunships attacked a medieval castle.
A massive car chase scene was filmed for Doomsday, described by Marshall to be one part Mad Max, one part Bullitt
Bullitt
Bullitt is a 1968 American police procedural film starring Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset and Robert Vaughn. It was directed by Peter Yates and distributed by Warner Bros. The story was adapted for the screen by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner, based on the 1963 novel Mute Witness by Robert L....
(1968), and one part "something else entirely different". Marshall had seen the Aston Martin DBS V12
Aston Martin DBS V12
The modern Aston Martin DBS is a high performance GT sports car from the UK manufacturer Aston Martin. Aston has used the DBS name once before on their 1967–72 grand tourer coupe...
used in the James Bond film Casino Royale
Casino Royale (2006 film)
Casino Royale is the twenty-first film in the James Bond film series and the first to star Daniel Craig as fictional MI6 agent James Bond...
(2006) and sought to implement a similarly "sexy" car. The filmmakers purchased three new Bentley
Bentley
Bentley Motors Limited is a British manufacturer of automobiles founded on 18 January 1919 by Walter Owen Bentley known as W.O. Bentley or just "W O". Bentley had been previously known for his range of rotary aero-engines in World War I, the most famous being the Bentley BR1 as used in later...
Continental GT
Bentley Continental GT
-Flying Spur:The four door Continental Flying Spur saloon was first displayed at the 2005 Geneva Motor Show. The Flying Spur utilizes most of the technical underpinnings of the Bentley Continental GT, and was introduced to European and North American markets in the summer of 2005...
s for US$150,000 each since the car company did not do product placement
Product placement
Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, music videos, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the...
. The film also contains the director's trademark gore and violence from previous films, including a scene where a character is cooked alive and eaten. The production was designed by Simon Bowles
Simon Bowles
Simon Bowles is a British production designer, who got his start in the film industry in 1993, working as an art department runner and then standby art director...
who had worked previously with Marshall on "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent". Paul Hyett, the prosthetic make-up designer who worked on The Descent, contributed to the production, researching diseases including sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease , also known as a sexually transmitted infection or venereal disease , is an illness that has a significant probability of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior, including vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and anal sex...
s to design the make-up for victims of the Reaper virus.
Visual effects
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 emphasize its comic nature and avoid drawing unnecessary sympathy from audiences.
Music
Marshall originally intended to include 1980s synthSynthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
music in his film, but he found it difficult to combine the music with the intense action. Instead, composer Tyler Bates
Tyler Bates
Tyler Bates is a music producer and composer for films. His most known work includes "The Hangman's Song" and various other tracks from the zombie horror film Dawn of the Dead, and 2008's Day of the Dead...
composed a score using heavy orchestra music. The film also included songs from the bands Adam and the Ants
Adam and the Ants
Adam and the Ants were a British rock band active during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The original group, which existed from 1977 to 1980, became notable as a cult band marking the transition from the late-1970s punk rock era to the post-punk and New Wave era...
, Fine Young Cannibals
Fine Young Cannibals
Fine Young Cannibals were a British band formed in Birmingham, England, in 1984, by bassist David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox , and singer Roland Gift...
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Frankie Goes to Hollywood were a British dance-pop band popular in the mid-1980s. The group was fronted by Holly Johnson , with Paul Rutherford , Peter Gill , Mark O'Toole , and Brian Nash .The group's debut single "Relax" was banned by the BBC in 1984 while at number six in the charts and...
, and Kasabian. The song "Two Tribes
Two Tribes
"Two Tribes" is the second single by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, released in the UK by ZTT Records in May 1984 . The song was later included on the album Welcome to the Pleasuredome....
" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the only song to remain in the film from the first draft of the screenplay. "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a favorite song by the director, who sought to include it. Marshall also hoped to include the song "Into the Light" by the Banshees, but it was left out due to the producer disliking it and the cost being too high to license it.
Theatrical run
For its theatrical run, the film was originally intended to be distributed by Focus FeaturesFocus Features
Focus Features is the art house films division of NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, and acts as both a producer and distributor for its own films and a distributor for foreign films....
under Rogue Pictures
Rogue Pictures
Rogue is a subsidiary of Relativity Media. The company has about 25 titles in its library.- Background :In 1997, Rogue Pictures was formed as a division of PolyGram Pictures but the name was dropped in 2000 after Universal Pictures bought PolyGram...
, but the company transferred Doomsday among other films to Universal Pictures
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
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
Box Office Mojo
Box Office Mojo is a website that tracks box office revenue in a systematic, algorithmic way. Brandon Gray started the site in 1999. In 2002, Gray partnered with Sean Saulsbury and they grew the site to nearly two million readers when, in July 2008, the company was purchased by Amazon.com through...
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$11,008,770. The film opened in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
, and Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
on 9 May 2008, grossing a total of US$2,027,749 in its entire run. 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$22,211,426.
Critical reception
Doomsday was not screened for critics in advance of its commercial opening in cinemas. The film received mixed and average reviews from critics. Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that 48% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on a sample of 61, with an average
Weighted mean
The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...
score of 5/10. At Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
, which assigns a normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 51, based on 14 reviews. Alison Rowat of The Herald
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...
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
The Northern Echo
The Northern Echo is a leading daily regional morning newspaper, serving the North East of England. The paper is based in Priestgate, Darlington. Its covers national as well as regional news. It is one of the UK's most famous provincial newspaper titles....
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
Liverpool Daily Post
The Liverpool Daily Post is a newspaper published by Trinity Mirror in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. It is published Monday to Friday and is published in Merseyside, Cheshire, and North Wales editions, and is a morning paper...
described the film, "Doomsday is a badly thought-out science fiction saga which leaves more questions than answers."
Alonso Duralde of MSNBC
MSNBC
MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...
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
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Philadelphia Inquirer is a morning daily newspaper that serves the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area of the United States. The newspaper was founded by John R. Walker and John Norvell in June 1829 as The Pennsylvania Inquirer and is the third-oldest surviving daily newspaper in the...
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
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli is an American online film critic.-Personal life:Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and spent his early childhood in Morristown, New Jersey. At the age of nine years, he relocated to the township of Cherry Hill, New Jersey...
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
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
said Neil Marshall's "flair for visceral action" made up for Doomsdays 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
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
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
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
saw Rhona Mitra's character as a mere impersonation of Snake Plissken
Snake Plissken
S.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
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 reception
Scotland's tourism agency VisitScotlandVisitScotland
VisitScotland is Scotland's national tourism agency. It is a public body, with offices in Edinburgh, Inverness, London as well as other parts of Scotland...
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
Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen is the national body for film and television in Scotland, established in April 1997. It took on the functions of the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Film Production Fund, Scottish Screen Locations and Scottish Broadcast and Film Training, forming a unitary organisation.Scottish...
, had contributed £300,000 to the production of Doomsday, which provided economic benefits for the cast and crew that dwelled 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
Angus MacNeil
Angus Brendan MacNeil is the Scottish National Party Member of Parliament for Na h-Eileanan an Iar...
, member of the Scottish National Party
Scottish National Party
The Scottish National Party is a social-democratic political party in Scotland which campaigns for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom....
, 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."
Doomsday was not nominated nor considered as a possible contender at the BAFTA Scotland
BAFTA Scotland
BAFTA in Scotland is the Scottish branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Formed in 1997, the branch holds an annual awards ceremony, the British Academy Scotland Awards , to recognise achievement by performers and production staff in Scottish film, television and video games...
awards despite being one of the largest productions in Scotland in recent memory; was spent on local services. Director Neil Marshall applied for membership with the organisation to add "fresh blood", but Doomsday was not mentioned during jury deliberations. According to a spokesperson from the organisation, the film was not formally submitted for consideration, and no one directly invited the filmmakers to discuss a possible entry. Several of BAFTA Scotland's jury members believed that the criteria and procedures for a Scottish film were unclear and could have been more formalised.
Doomsday is a 2008 British science fiction film written and directed by Neil Marshall
Neil Marshall
Neil Marshall is an English film director, editor and screenwriter. Marshall began his career in editing and in 2002 directed his first feature film Dog Soldiers, which became a cult film. He followed up with the critically acclaimed horror film The Descent in 2005...
. The film takes place in the future. Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
has been quarantined because of a deadly virus. When the virus is found in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, political leaders send a team led by Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra
Rhona Mitra
Rhona Natasha Mitra , sometimes credited as Rona Mitra, is an English actress, model and singer.-Early life:Mitra was born in Paddington, London, England, the daughter of Anthony Mitra, a cosmetic surgeon, and Nora Downey...
) to Scotland to find a possible cure. Sinclair's team runs into two types of survivors: marauders and medieval knights. Doomsday was conceived by Marshall based on the idea of futuristic soldiers facing medieval knights. In producing the film, he drew from various cinema, including Mad Max
Mad Max
Mad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and revised by Miller and Byron Kennedy over the original script by James McCausland. The film stars Mel Gibson, who was unknown at the time. Its narrative based around the traditional western genre, Mad Max tells a story...
and Escape from New York
Escape from New York
Escape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Castle. The film is set in the near future in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security...
.
Marshall had a budget three times the size of his previous two films, The Descent
The Descent
The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. The film follows six women who, having entered an unmapped cave system, become trapped, and are hunted by subterranean flesh-eating humanoids....
and Dog Soldiers, and the director filmed the larger-scale Doomsday in Scotland and South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
. The film was released on 14 March 2008 in the United States and Canada and in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2008. Doomsday did not perform well at the box office, and critics gave the film mixed reviews.
Plot
In 2008, the Reaper virus infects Scotland, so the country is walled off by the British government. A Scottish woman begs retreating soldiers to take her injured little girl with them. Her daughter has an eye injury but is healthy otherwise. The mother gives her daughter an envelope just as the soldiers' helicopter lifts off.The quarantine is deemed a success, with the remaining Scottish population and the virus apparently dying off. Decades later, though, the virus reappears in London. Prime Minister Hatcher and his righthand man Canaris share with domestic security chief Bill Nelson news of survivors in Scotland, and they believe a cure may exist. They order him to send a team into Scotland to find medical researcher Dr Kane, who was working on a cure when Scotland was quarantined. Nelson chooses Major Eden Sinclair, the little girl now grown up, to lead the team. She has a cybernetic eye that can be removed and used remotely for weapon aiming and video playback.
North of the wall, while searching for any survivors, Sinclair and her team are ambushed by a cannibalistic punk gang. Some team members are killed, while Sinclair and Dr Talbot are captured. Sergeant Norton and Dr Stirling manage to escape the attack. Sinclair is interrogated and tortured by the gang's leader, Sol. Dr Talbot is barbecued alive and eaten by the cannibalistic gang. During the "feast", Sinclair escapes from her cell and discovers Kane's daughter, Cally, in the next cell. Freed by Sinclair, Cally leads her to a waiting train manned by her friend Joshua, while Norton and Stirling meet up with them while they escape. They take the train into the mountains and take a shortcut through a hidden underground military facility, to the castle where Kane and his followers live. They are surrounded by Kane's medieval soldiers, Joshua is killed, and everyone else surrenders. Kane tells Sinclair that the survivors are naturally immune and that he has been warring with Sol, who is actually his son. There is no cure. Sinclair defeats Kane's executioner, Telamon, in an open arena and her teammates help her escape. They retreat to the underground facility and find a Bentley in storage to drive back to the quarantine wall and home, although Norton is killed covering their escape.
In London, political leaders plan to seal off the "hot spot" where the virus is spreading. Canaris convinces Hatcher to let the infected die off before sharing any cure found by Sinclair's team. That way the population would be controllable if there is a future infection. Although the government leaders are isolated, an infected man gets past security and infects Hatcher. Knowing that he has no future, Hatcher commits suicide and Canaris takes over as Acting Prime Minister.
In Scotland, Sinclair, Cally, and Stirling are in a high speed car chase with Sol's gang. Sol attempts to hijack the Bentley, but while he is clinging to the roof Sinclair ploughs the car through a bus, decapitating him. Using a satellite phone, Sinclair calls in a government gunship and hands over the cure: Cally, whose immune blood can be replicated into a vaccine. Canaris, who came with the gunship, shares his plan to withhold the cure for political reasons and invites Sinclair back to London.
She chooses to stay and goes to find her old home, using the address on the old envelope her mother had left her. Nelson meets her there since she gave him the envelope before she left. Sinclair shows Nelson the video of her conversation with Canaris, recorded with her cybernetic eye. Nelson takes it back to London and has it aired, exposing Canaris' plan to hold back the cure. Sinclair returns to the location where she and her team were first attacked by Sol's gang and holds up Sol's severed head. She is cheered as their new leader.
Cast
- Rhona MitraRhona MitraRhona Natasha Mitra , sometimes credited as Rona Mitra, is an English actress, model and singer.-Early life:Mitra was born in Paddington, London, England, the daughter of Anthony Mitra, a cosmetic surgeon, and Nora Downey...
as Major Eden Sinclair of the Department of Domestic Security, selected to lead a team to find a cure. The heroine was inspired by the character Snake PlisskenSnake PlisskenS.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
. 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". - Bob HoskinsBob HoskinsRobert William "Bob" Hoskins, Jr. is an English actor known for playing Cockney rough diamonds, psychopaths and gangsters, in films such as The Long Good Friday , and Mona Lisa , and lighter roles in family films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook .- Early life :Hoskins was born in Bury St...
as Bill Nelson, Eden Sinclair's boss. Marshall sought to have Hoskins emulate his "bulldog" role from the 1980 film The Long Good FridayThe Long Good FridayThe Long Good Friday is a British gangster film starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. It was completed in 1979 but, because of release delays, it is generally credited as a 1980 film...
. - Malcolm McDowellMalcolm McDowellMalcolm McDowell is an English actor with a career spanning over forty years.McDowell is principally known for his roles in the controversial films If...., O Lucky Man!, A Clockwork Orange and Caligula...
as Marcus Kane, a former scientist who now lives as a feudal lord in an abandoned castle. McDowell described his character as a King LearKing LearKing Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...
. According to Marshall, Kane is based on KurtzKurtz (Heart of Darkness)Mr. Kurtz is a central fictional character in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. A trader of ivory in Africa and commander of a trading post, he monopolises his position as a demigod among native Africans. Kurtz meets with the protagonist, Marlow, who returns him to the coast via steamboat...
from Joseph ConradJoseph ConradJoseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
's Heart of DarknessHeart of DarknessHeart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
. The director originally sought to bring Sean ConnerySean ConnerySir Thomas Sean Connery , better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globes Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930), better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy...
out of retirement to play Kane but was unsuccessful. - Alexander SiddigAlexander SiddigSiddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi is a Sudanese-born English actor, also known as Siddig El Fadil and his stage name Alexander Siddig. He is known for playing Dr...
as Prime Minister John Hatcher. Marshall originally wrote Hatcher as a sympathetic character misguided by Canaris, but revised the character to be more like Canaris in embracing political manipulation. - David O'HaraDavid O'HaraDavid O'Hara is a Scottish actor.-Life and career:O'Hara was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Martha and Patrick O'Hara, a construction worker....
as Michael Canaris, a senior official within the British government whose position is never stated, who acts as Hatcher's puppeteer. Canaris was depicted to have a fascistFascismFascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
background, speaking lines that paralleled Adolf HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's mindset of cleansing. (Cf. CanarisWilhelm CanarisWilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and member of the German Resistance.- Early life and World War I :...
.) - Craig ConwayCraig Conway (actor)Craig Conway is a British actor. Conway has appeared in a number of stage plays and British television series in addition to his film work.Conway is the husband of actress Jill Halfpenny, with whom he has a son.-Filmography:...
as Sol, Kane's son and the leader of the marauders. He has a biohazard sign tattooed on his back and a large scar across his chest. - Lee-Anne Liebenberg as Viper, the wild woman
Also cast as part of Eden Sinclair's team were Adrian Lester
Adrian Lester
-Personal life:Lester was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Jamaican immigrants Monica, a medical secretary, and Reginald, a manager for a contract cleaning company. He sang as a boy treble in the choir of St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham...
as Sergeant Norton, Chris Robson as Miller, and Leslie Simpson as Carpenter. The names Miller and Carpenter were nods to directors George Miller
George Miller (producer)
George Miller is an Australian film director, screenwriter, producer, and former medical doctor. He is most well known for his work on the Mad Max movies, but has been involved in a wide range of projects, including the Oscar-winning Happy Feet and "Babe" family films.Miller is the older brother...
and John Carpenter
John Carpenter
John Howard Carpenter is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.- Early life :Carpenter was born...
, whose films influenced Marshall's Doomsday. Sean Pertwee
Sean Pertwee
Sean Pertwee is an English actor known for his television, film and voice-over work.-Career:In the early 80s, he auditioned for a place at the Surrey County Youth Theatre where he was cast as Captain Fitzpatrick in the play Tom Jones, based on the novel by Henry Fielding...
and Darren Morfitt
Darren Morfitt
Darren Morfitt is an actor who has appeared in 55 Degrees North, Grafters, Red Cap, Warriors, Making Waves, The Government Inspector and the cult werewolf movie Dog Soldiers. Most recently he starred as Jesus in the Manchester Passion and in the science fiction action film Doomsday as Dr...
portrayed the team's medical scientists, Dr Talbot and Dr Stirling, respectively. MyAnna Buring
MyAnna Buring
MyAnna Buring is a Swedish actress best known for appearing in the 2005 horror film The Descent.- Early life :Buring was born in Sweden but grew up in the Middle East...
portrayed Kane's daughter Cally.
Conception
Director Neil MarshallNeil Marshall
Neil Marshall is an English film director, editor and screenwriter. Marshall began his career in editing and in 2002 directed his first feature film Dog Soldiers, which became a cult film. He followed up with the critically acclaimed horror film The Descent in 2005...
lived near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall was a defensive fortification in Roman Britain. Begun in AD 122, during the rule of emperor Hadrian, it was the first of two fortifications built across Great Britain, the second being the Antonine Wall, lesser known of the two because its physical remains are less evident today.The...
, a Roman fortification built to defend England against Scotland's tribes. The director fantasised about what conditions would make 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
28 Days Later
28 Days Later is an acclaimed 2002 British horror film directed by Danny Boyle. The screenplay was written by Alex Garland, and the film stars Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns, and Christopher Eccleston...
and 28 Weeks Later
28 Weeks Later
28 Weeks Later is a 2007 British/Spanish film sequel to the 2002 post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later. 28 Weeks Later was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and released in the United Kingdom and United States on 11 May 2007...
by being an authentic plague that actually decimates 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.
The director intended Doomsday as a tribute to post-apocalyptic films from the 1970s and 1980s, explaining, "Right from the start, I wanted my film to be an homage to these sorts of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new generation of audience that hadn't seen those movies in the cinema—hadn't seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill that I got from watching them. But kind of contemporise it, pump up the action and the blood and guts." Cinematic influences on Doomsday include:
- Mad MaxMad MaxMad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and revised by Miller and Byron Kennedy over the original script by James McCausland. The film stars Mel Gibson, who was unknown at the time. Its narrative based around the traditional western genre, Mad Max tells a story...
(1979), The Road WarriorMad Max 2: The Road WarriorMad Max 2 is a 1981 Australian post-apocalyptic action film directed by George Miller. The film is the second installment in the Mad Max film series, with Mel Gibson starring as Max Rockatansky...
(1981), and Mad Max Beyond ThunderdomeMad Max Beyond ThunderdomeMad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a 1985 Australian post-apocalyptic film directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie, written by Miller, Doug Mitchell and Terry Hayes, and starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner. It is the third installment in the action movie Mad Max franchise...
(1985): Marshall drew inspiration from the punk style of the films and also shaped Rhona Mitra's character after Max RockatanskyMax Rockatansky"Mad" Max Rockatansky, sometimes referred to as The Road Warrior and The Man with No Name, is the main character from director George Miller's Mad Max franchise, appearing in the films Mad Max, Mad Max 2, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome...
as a police officer with a history. - Escape from New YorkEscape from New YorkEscape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Castle. The film is set in the near future in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security...
(1981): The director drew from the concepts of gang warfare and the experience of being walled-in. Rhona Mitra's character has an eye patch like Snake PlisskenSnake PlisskenS.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
, though the director sought to create a plot point for the eye of Mitra's character to reinforce its inclusion. - ExcaliburExcalibur (film)Excalibur is a 1981 dramatic fantasy film directed, produced and co-written by John Boorman that retells the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Adapted from the 15th century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, Excalibur features the music of Richard Wagner...
(1981): Marshall enjoyed John BoormanJohn BoormanJohn Boorman is a British filmmaker who is a long time resident of Ireland and is best known for his feature films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, The General and The Tailor of Panama.-Early life:Boorman was born in Shepperton, Surrey,...
's artistry in the film and sought to include its medieval aspects in Doomsday. - The Warriors (1979): The director enjoyed the tough and violent films of Walter Hill, including the "visual style of the gang warfare".
- No Blade of GrassNo Blade of Grass (film)No Blade of Grass is a 1970 British-American apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Cornel Wilde and starring Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace and John Hamill. It is an adaptation of the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher...
(1970): Marshall perceived the film as a predecessor to 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, though he sought to make Doomsday less straight-faced. - The Omega ManThe Omega ManThe Omega Man is a 1971 American science fiction film directed by Boris Sagal and starring Charlton Heston. It is based on the novel I Am Legend by American writer Richard Matheson...
(1971): The director was inspired by the "empty city" notion of the film and drew upon its dark and gritty nature. - A Boy and His DogA Boy and His DogA Boy and His Dog is a cycle of narratives and films including or stemming from works of science fiction author Harlan Ellison.Ellison began the cycle with the 1969 short story of the same title, and a revised and expanded novella-length version was published in Ellison's story collection The Beast...
(1974): Marshall created a homage to the 1974 film's ending by including a scene of a human being cooked in Doomsday. - WaterworldWaterworldWaterworld is a 1995 post-apocalyptic science fiction film. The film was directed by Kevin Reynolds and co-written by Peter Rader and David Twohy. It is based on Rader's original 1986 screenplay and stars Kevin Costner, who also produced it. It was distributed by Universal Pictures...
(1995): The director enjoyed the gritty atmosphere and how people scavenge to survive and adapt in their new world. - GladiatorGladiator (2000 film)Gladiator is a 2000 historical epic film directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Ralf Möller, Oliver Reed, Djimon Hounsou, Derek Jacobi, John Shrapnel and Richard Harris. Crowe portrays the loyal Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius, who is betrayed...
(2000): Like in Gladiator, Marshall sought to put Mitra's character through a trial by combat. - Children of MenChildren of MenChildren of Men is a 2006 science fiction film loosely adapted from P. D. James's 1992 novel The Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. In 2027, two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Illegal immigrants seek sanctuary in England, where the last...
(2006): With the film coming out during the development of Doomsday, the director realised the similarity of the premises and sought to make his film "more bloody and more fun".
Marshall also cited Metalstorm
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is a 1983 science fiction movie starring Jeffrey Byron, Michael Preston, Tim Thomerson, Kelly Preston and Richard Moll. It was directed and produced by Charles Band who is possibly better known for his other, rather low-budget science fiction and horror...
(1983), Zulu
Zulu (film)
Zulu is a 1964 historical war film depicting the Battle of Rorke's Drift between the British Army and the Zulus in January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War....
(1964), and works of director Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam
Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil , The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , The Fisher King , and 12 Monkeys...
like The Fisher King
The Fisher King (film)
The Fisher King is a 1991 American comedy-drama film written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Terry Gilliam. It stars Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer and Michael Jeter...
(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."
Filming
Rogue PicturesRogue Pictures
Rogue is a subsidiary of Relativity Media. The company has about 25 titles in its library.- Background :In 1997, Rogue Pictures was formed as a division of PolyGram Pictures but the name was dropped in 2000 after Universal Pictures bought PolyGram...
signed Marshall to direct Doomsday in October 2005, and in November 2006, actress Rhona Mitra was signed to star in Doomsday as the leader of the elite team. Production was budgeted at £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
17 million, an amount that was triple the combined total of Marshall's previous two films, Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent
The Descent
The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. The film follows six women who, having entered an unmapped cave system, become trapped, and are hunted by subterranean flesh-eating humanoids....
(2005). 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."
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
, including Haghill in the city's East End and at Blackness Castle
Blackness Castle
Blackness Castle is a 15th century fortress, near the village of Blackness, Scotland, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth. It was built, probably on the site of an earlier fort, by Sir George Crichton in the 1440s. At this time, Blackness was the main port serving the Royal Burgh of...
in West Lothian, the latter chosen when filmmakers were unable to shoot at Doune Castle
Doune Castle
Doune Castle is a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune, in the Stirling district of central Scotland. The castle is sited on a wooded bend where the Ardoch Burn flows into the River Teith. It lies north-west of Stirling, where the Teith flows into the River Forth...
. The entire shoot, involving thousands of extras, included a series of complex fight scenes and pyrotechnical displays. The director sought to minimise the use of computer-generated elements in Doomsday, preferring to subscribe to "old-school filmmaking". In the course of production, several sequences were dropped due to budgetary concerns, including a scene in which helicopter gunships attacked a medieval castle.
A massive car chase scene was filmed for Doomsday, described by Marshall to be one part Mad Max, one part Bullitt
Bullitt
Bullitt is a 1968 American police procedural film starring Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset and Robert Vaughn. It was directed by Peter Yates and distributed by Warner Bros. The story was adapted for the screen by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner, based on the 1963 novel Mute Witness by Robert L....
(1968), and one part "something else entirely different". Marshall had seen the Aston Martin DBS V12
Aston Martin DBS V12
The modern Aston Martin DBS is a high performance GT sports car from the UK manufacturer Aston Martin. Aston has used the DBS name once before on their 1967–72 grand tourer coupe...
used in the James Bond film Casino Royale
Casino Royale (2006 film)
Casino Royale is the twenty-first film in the James Bond film series and the first to star Daniel Craig as fictional MI6 agent James Bond...
(2006) and sought to implement a similarly "sexy" car. The filmmakers purchased three new Bentley
Bentley
Bentley Motors Limited is a British manufacturer of automobiles founded on 18 January 1919 by Walter Owen Bentley known as W.O. Bentley or just "W O". Bentley had been previously known for his range of rotary aero-engines in World War I, the most famous being the Bentley BR1 as used in later...
Continental GT
Bentley Continental GT
-Flying Spur:The four door Continental Flying Spur saloon was first displayed at the 2005 Geneva Motor Show. The Flying Spur utilizes most of the technical underpinnings of the Bentley Continental GT, and was introduced to European and North American markets in the summer of 2005...
s for US$150,000 each since the car company did not do product placement
Product placement
Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, music videos, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the...
. The film also contains the director's trademark gore and violence from previous films, including a scene where a character is cooked alive and eaten. The production was designed by Simon Bowles
Simon Bowles
Simon Bowles is a British production designer, who got his start in the film industry in 1993, working as an art department runner and then standby art director...
who had worked previously with Marshall on "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent". Paul Hyett, the prosthetic make-up designer who worked on The Descent, contributed to the production, researching diseases including sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted disease , also known as a sexually transmitted infection or venereal disease , is an illness that has a significant probability of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior, including vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and anal sex...
s to design the make-up for victims of the Reaper virus.
Visual effects
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 emphasize its comic nature and avoid drawing unnecessary sympathy from audiences.
Music
Marshall originally intended to include 1980s synthSynthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
music in his film, but he found it difficult to combine the music with the intense action. Instead, composer Tyler Bates
Tyler Bates
Tyler Bates is a music producer and composer for films. His most known work includes "The Hangman's Song" and various other tracks from the zombie horror film Dawn of the Dead, and 2008's Day of the Dead...
composed a score using heavy orchestra music. The film also included songs from the bands Adam and the Ants
Adam and the Ants
Adam and the Ants were a British rock band active during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The original group, which existed from 1977 to 1980, became notable as a cult band marking the transition from the late-1970s punk rock era to the post-punk and New Wave era...
, Fine Young Cannibals
Fine Young Cannibals
Fine Young Cannibals were a British band formed in Birmingham, England, in 1984, by bassist David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox , and singer Roland Gift...
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Frankie Goes to Hollywood were a British dance-pop band popular in the mid-1980s. The group was fronted by Holly Johnson , with Paul Rutherford , Peter Gill , Mark O'Toole , and Brian Nash .The group's debut single "Relax" was banned by the BBC in 1984 while at number six in the charts and...
, and Kasabian. The song "Two Tribes
Two Tribes
"Two Tribes" is the second single by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, released in the UK by ZTT Records in May 1984 . The song was later included on the album Welcome to the Pleasuredome....
" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the only song to remain in the film from the first draft of the screenplay. "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a favorite song by the director, who sought to include it. Marshall also hoped to include the song "Into the Light" by the Banshees, but it was left out due to the producer disliking it and the cost being too high to license it.
Theatrical run
For its theatrical run, the film was originally intended to be distributed by Focus FeaturesFocus Features
Focus Features is the art house films division of NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, and acts as both a producer and distributor for its own films and a distributor for foreign films....
under Rogue Pictures
Rogue Pictures
Rogue is a subsidiary of Relativity Media. The company has about 25 titles in its library.- Background :In 1997, Rogue Pictures was formed as a division of PolyGram Pictures but the name was dropped in 2000 after Universal Pictures bought PolyGram...
, but the company transferred Doomsday among other films to Universal Pictures
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
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
Box Office Mojo
Box Office Mojo is a website that tracks box office revenue in a systematic, algorithmic way. Brandon Gray started the site in 1999. In 2002, Gray partnered with Sean Saulsbury and they grew the site to nearly two million readers when, in July 2008, the company was purchased by Amazon.com through...
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$11,008,770. The film opened in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
, and Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
on 9 May 2008, grossing a total of US$2,027,749 in its entire run. 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$22,211,426.
Critical reception
Doomsday was not screened for critics in advance of its commercial opening in cinemas. The film received mixed and average reviews from critics. Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that 48% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on a sample of 61, with an average
Weighted mean
The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...
score of 5/10. At Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
, which assigns a normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 51, based on 14 reviews. Alison Rowat of The Herald
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...
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
The Northern Echo
The Northern Echo is a leading daily regional morning newspaper, serving the North East of England. The paper is based in Priestgate, Darlington. Its covers national as well as regional news. It is one of the UK's most famous provincial newspaper titles....
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
Liverpool Daily Post
The Liverpool Daily Post is a newspaper published by Trinity Mirror in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. It is published Monday to Friday and is published in Merseyside, Cheshire, and North Wales editions, and is a morning paper...
described the film, "Doomsday is a badly thought-out science fiction saga which leaves more questions than answers."
Alonso Duralde of MSNBC
MSNBC
MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...
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
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Philadelphia Inquirer is a morning daily newspaper that serves the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area of the United States. The newspaper was founded by John R. Walker and John Norvell in June 1829 as The Pennsylvania Inquirer and is the third-oldest surviving daily newspaper in the...
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
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli is an American online film critic.-Personal life:Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and spent his early childhood in Morristown, New Jersey. At the age of nine years, he relocated to the township of Cherry Hill, New Jersey...
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
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
said Neil Marshall's "flair for visceral action" made up for Doomsdays 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
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
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
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
saw Rhona Mitra's character as a mere impersonation of Snake Plissken
Snake Plissken
S.D. Bob "Snake" Plissken is a fictional character in John Carpenter's films Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., played by Kurt Russell. He is an ex-special forces commando/war hero in World War III turned criminal...
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 reception
Scotland's tourism agency VisitScotlandVisitScotland
VisitScotland is Scotland's national tourism agency. It is a public body, with offices in Edinburgh, Inverness, London as well as other parts of Scotland...
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
Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen is the national body for film and television in Scotland, established in April 1997. It took on the functions of the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Film Production Fund, Scottish Screen Locations and Scottish Broadcast and Film Training, forming a unitary organisation.Scottish...
, had contributed £300,000 to the production of Doomsday, which provided economic benefits for the cast and crew that dwelled 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
Angus MacNeil
Angus Brendan MacNeil is the Scottish National Party Member of Parliament for Na h-Eileanan an Iar...
, member of the Scottish National Party
Scottish National Party
The Scottish National Party is a social-democratic political party in Scotland which campaigns for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom....
, 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."
Doomsday was not nominated nor considered as a possible contender at the BAFTA Scotland
BAFTA Scotland
BAFTA in Scotland is the Scottish branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Formed in 1997, the branch holds an annual awards ceremony, the British Academy Scotland Awards , to recognise achievement by performers and production staff in Scottish film, television and video games...
awards despite being one of the largest productions in Scotland in recent memory; was spent on local services. Director Neil Marshall applied for membership with the organisation to add "fresh blood", but Doomsday was not mentioned during jury deliberations. According to a spokesperson from the organisation, the film was not formally submitted for consideration, and no one directly invited the filmmakers to discuss a possible entry. Several of BAFTA Scotland's jury members believed that the criteria and procedures for a Scottish film were unclear and could have been more formalised.
Home media
Doomsday was the first Blu-rayBlu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
title released by Universal Pictures
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
after the studio's initial support of the now-folded HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
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. IGN
IGN
IGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...
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.