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Almost a year ago to the day, New Line Cinema hired Gerard Butler straight off his success as King Leonidas in the film 300 to play the role of Snake Plisskin in a planned remake of the John Carpenter film, Escape from New York.  For years, George Miller has been talking about putting together a fourth installment of his Mad Max franchise.  Escape from New York will probably never get made and George Miller seems to have decided to work on other projects.  Fans that have been looking forward to either of these films will get a darker, bloodier, more nihilistic, and updated version of the originals in Neil Marshall’s Doomsday.

Doomsday tells the story of a viral outbreak in Scotland that threatens to spread across Europe.  England’s response to the outbreak is to quarantine the entire country and to wall off its citizens from the rest of England.  The wall is manned and anyone attempting to escape is killed.  The outbreak is contained but in retaliation for its actions against Scotland, England is economically cut off from the rest of the world.  London becomes a slum with rampant unemployment, crime, and decay.  27 years after the outbreak, Major Eden Sinclair (Rona Mitra) works for the Department of Domestic Security and is chosen to go back into Scotland by her boss, Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins) when a small group of people infected by the same virus that wiped out the population of Scotland are found in London.  The political powers that be (O’Hara), and (Siddig) are aware of a few survivors in the quarantined zone and it is believed the survivors have a cure that could save England.  Major Sinclair takes a well armed group into Scotland hoping to find any survivors along with a scientist (McDowell) that may have been the inventor of the cure.  They are given 46 hours to complete their mission or told not to come back out.  Once inside, they find themselves in the middle of a war between a barbaric gang of cannibals and the rest of a society has that reverted back to the Middle Ages.

To say writer/director Neill Marshall used Escape from New York and Mad Max as inspirations for this film would be a gross understatement.  Neil Marshall has pulled major pieces from both films and applied them to a 21st century audience.  The first hint of what is to come is the moody synthesizer music that is used to introduce our one-eyed protagonist with a military background who is brought in to save an important figure, who in turn runs into a gang that sees the opportunity to use the outsider as a chance to get outside the walls of their prison.  Fans of the film will see entire scenes that seem pulled from the original.  The barbaric gang’s choice of weapons, vehicles, and even style of clothing could have been dusted off and reused from the Mad Max films.  The final 20 minutes of the film feels like it was shot 25 years ago in the Australian outback and digitized to match the rest of the movie.  The movie even pulls directly from John Carpenter’s film to warp everything together in a nice little bow.  The similarities are so blatant that you would expect to see both Carpenter and Miller’s name somewhere in the credits. 

While most of the film will remind even the casual movie watcher that they have seen this movie before, Doomsday does separate itself from the movies it is trying to emulate.  Neil Marshall’s film is violent, much more violent than either of the other films.  Its R rating is well deserved.  Where Escape from New York and the Mad Max films are dark and give a pretty brutal look at the future, Doomsday takes the theme to a new level of bleakness, depravity, and gore.  Fans of both Escape and Mad Max will probably enjoy this harder version of those films.  The people that won’t be disappointed by Doomsday are the ones who look back on those movies and think they are a bit campy and outdated. 

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