Doomsday



""They started this fire. They can burn in it!""

- Dr. Marcus Kane

Doomsday is a gleefully derivative post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie, written and directed by Neil Marshall (director of Dog Soldiers and The Descent).

In the present day, after an outbreak of deadly killer face-rot in Glasgow, Scotland as a whole is walled off and the general population left to... well... rot. The rest of the world thinks this is going a little too far, and respond by turning their backs on Britain as whole. On the last helicopter out of Scotland is a little girl who's just taken a bullet to the face, given to the custody of soldiers by her desperate mother...

Fast forward to twenty-seven years later, and that little girl has grown up to be Major Eden Sinclair, eyepatch-wearing badass cop. Which is fortunate, because the Reaper Virus has arrived in London, and the evil government is ready to send a team of soldiers north of the border in the hope of finding a cure. Eden has forty-six hours to get to Glasgow, find the man who was working on a cure before the wall went up, and save the day.

Too bad the surviving population of Scotland are not feeling particularly fond of the nation that abandoned them...

"Sinclair: You like pain? Gimp: Yeeeah!"
 * Action Girl: Eden Sinclair. Kick-boxing sharp-shooting one-eyed Badass.
 * Alas, Poor Yorick: Done by Sol, who
 * The Apunkalypse: After The Plague, Scotland's walled off and everyone reverts to their tribal, punkish roots.
 * The Archer
 * Awesome McCoolname: Eden Sinclair.
 * Ax Crazy: Sol. First he beats you up for not talking to him, then he beats you up for talking to him...
 * An Axe to Grind
 * Badass: Aside from Eden, there's Sergeant Norton, a quietly competent professional... who fist-fights his way through an entire castle full of armed Mooks, punching faces and snapping necks. Then shoots the last man, just to show he could.
 * Bathing Beauty: some unnamed blonde chick in a bathtub that has a shot gun.
 * Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Goes a lot faster if you remember to bring along a very large axe. Whack!
 * California Doubling: South Africa for Scotland.
 * Call Back:
 * Chainsaw Good: Seen briefly in Sol's cellblocks.
 * Chased by Angry Natives: Occur here, with the natives being Violent Glaswegians.
 * Cool Car: Bentley Continental GT Speed
 * Dark Action Girl: Viper. Tattooed machete-wielding cannibal babe.
 * Driven to Suicide:
 * Dual-Wielding: Viper starts her fight with Eden with two machetes. Which is convenient for Eden...
 * Dystopia: Totalitarian Britain, tanks are almost Lost Technology...
 * Evil Chancellor: Chancellor Canaris, who cheerfully plans to allow the Reaper virus to ravage the general populace in order to reduce overpopulation.
 * Every Car Is a Pinto: Well, except the Bentley. There's a Transit van that explodes after hitting a downed motorbike and a caravan that's engulfed in a ball of flame after being hit by a gimp-wielding tricycle.
 * Eyepatch of Power: Eden Sinclair, but only some of the time.
 * Eye Scream: The film starts with a small girl getting her eye shot out. Later, during the car fight, the now-adult girl starts pushing her attacker's eye in to fight him off.
 * Eye Spy: A cybernetic version is used by Sinclair for covert ops.
 * Fan Service: The first action sequence features a random nude woman. With a shotgun. Then about halfway through the film come the strippers, and for some reason all the punks have this strange aversion to being fully clothed in Scotland...
 * Well, maybe that's global warming for you. It does take place in 2030-something...
 * Four Man Band: Eden (The Heroine), Norton (The Lancer and The Big Guy), Stirling (The Smart Guy) and Cally (The Chick).
 * Freeze-Frame Bonus/Shout-Out: In the underground bunker, just as one of the characters says "What were they keeping in here, the Lost Ark?", the camera shows a momentary flash of a wooden crate with a stencil that says "TOP SECRET -- ARMY INTEL 9906753 -- DO NOT OPEN", last seen in the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark
 * Full-Frontal Assault: The woman in the bathtub opens fire while naked.
 * Genre Shift: The film is advertised as a serious "after the plague" story kind of in the same vein as 28 Days Later, and plays it straight for about a half hour. Then we're off to over the top Mad Max land with an overnight in Live Action Role Play castle.
 * George Lucas Throwback: Marshall basically made this film to show off his love for dystopian science fiction movies from The Eighties.
 * Gorn
 * Great Wall: In response to the appearance of a deadly plague in Scotland the UK builds a sixty-foot wall with automated weapons emplacements to separate it from the rest of Great Britain.  While it's successful at keeping people from crossing, it doesn't stop the virus.
 * Have a Nice Death: The movie's establishing raid sequence includes, among other things, Eden shooting a hot naked chick dead in her bathtub...THROUGH THE CERAMIC.
 * Hey, It's That Guy!: It seems werewolves aren't the only thing Wells, Spoon, and Joe have to worry about...
 * Hatcher is Hamri Al-Assad.
 * ...and Dr Julian Bashir, Imad ad-Din and Philip Burton he must be immortal or something
 * Nelson is Eddie Valiant.
 * Runcorn is a corrupt politician.
 * Homage: To Mad Max, The Warriors and Escape from New York.
 * The song that plays after Sol has burned someone alive is remarkably similar to the Twenty Eight Days Later theme.
 * There is also a bit of Resident Evil in there.
 * Some of Damnation Alley is in there too.
 * Hot Amazon: Viper.
 * I Choose to Stay:
 * I'm a Humanitarian: Sol's gang. Being Glaswegians, they deep-fat fry their victims first.
 * Klingon Promotion:
 * The Lancer: Sergeant Norton
 * Mad Scientist: Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Marcus Kane. But then, with a name like Kane, what do you expect? Also his son Sol, which is presumably short for Solomon Kane.
 * Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Cally.
 * Made of Explodium: Eden drives a Bentley clean through a bus. Which explodes. And then a severed head flies out of the explosion and hits the camera.
 * Moe Greene Special: Young Eden. This is how and why she has an eyepatch and a cybernetic eye.
 * Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer lets on that this is an after-the-plague serious film. It only takes a half an hour of watching the film when you can check off every scene you saw in the trailer and things just get downright silly.
 * Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Lots, but the ultimate example is probably the cannibal punk Glaswegian strippers. Pole dancing to "Good Thing".
 * No Guy Wants an Amazon: Averted by Sol, who can't seem to let his go.
 * Off with His Head
 * One-Scene Wonder: Malcolm McDowell as King of Medieval Land, for about five seconds.
 * He's also the narrator at the beginning but by the time you get to his scene, you'll have long forgotten about it.
 * The Plague
 * Pre-Mortem One-Liner: In the Car Chase at the end.


 * Rule of Cool: Cyber-eyed badass, foam grenades, "Good Thing", cannibal BBQ, medieval castle in the future, random Bentley having a car chase with punk-built mutant cars and then the punks climb on the Bentley and fight while everyone's still driving, Made of Explodium, nude chick with shotgun, exploding bunny, random gimp, the Gimpmobile!, a severed head crashing into the camera, and the And just about everything else in between those moments.
 * Schizo-Tech: Knights in armour, longbows, steam trains, Mad Max-inspired death machines, APCs, video camera glass eyes, sword fights...
 * One group of survivors intentionally threw out all modern tech, and the other group doesn't have the means to reproduce the now-broken technology.
 * According to the director, this was the inspiration for the movie. He got a picture in his head of a medieval knight attacking a futuristic agent with gun and tried to figure out how to work that scene into a movie.
 * Shovel Strike
 * Soft Glass: Before they leave for Scotland, they are told how tough and state of the art their armored vehicle is. Once in Scotland, it doesn't take very long for a punk to break through the windshield as if it's a car window.
 * Spikes of Villainy
 * Suspiciously Apropos Music: The cannibal gang party before they feast is set to music of the Fine Young Cannibals.
 * This Is Gonna Suck: Eden, unarmed and unarmoured, is shoved into an arena and finds herself facing a heavily armed seven-foot monster in full plate armour. Her reaction? A quiet, deadpan, "bollocks."
 * Too Dumb to Live: One of the soldiers, while sitting inside his heavily armored APC, sees a female "survivor" outside and leaves to go rescue her, despite Eden warning him several times not to. The survivor turns out to be an infected punk, who promptly sneaks behind him and slits his throat when he isn't looking.
 * Train Escape
 * Unholy Matrimony: Sol and Viper.
 * Violent Glaswegian: An entire army of them.
 * Waif Fu: While Rhona Mitra is not exactly a waif, she pummels her way through a lot of much larger opponents throughout the film, including a seven-foot killer in full plate armour.
 * Walking Shirtless Scene: Sol.
 * You're Insane!