Doomsday's Doomed Concept
Does Homage to old B-Films Justify this new Film?
Neil Marshall’s latest movie Doomsday continues to exhibit thrill from faithful fans and moviegoers alike. The movie—centered around Caryn Peterson as a special agent (think of her the same way you would an action movie with Charlise Theron) who must infiltrate a walled-in society of miscreants broken off from an outside world searching for a cure to an epidemic—is shot with well-budgeted shots, plenty of action and gruesome bits in-between. The plot, however, is very scattered and, despite how glorious the cinematography is, it has left some thinking back to a poorly-edited movie inspired by L. Ron Hubbard that was made years ago called Battlefield Earth.
Battlefield Earth?!
Stating this is no minor feat for many. On IMDB, it is notoriously considered one of the worst movies made for its time. Movie lampooners have used this film as a form of mockery of sorts, and the humor company Rifftrax has a playlist of mockeries that lampoon the film's scale of unintentional silliness. The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation (think of it as an antithesis to the Oscars), remarked that it was the worst movie ever made in 25 years since their inception. Its main pastime has been used as a mark of fun mockery by movie fans who use it to laugh at and invent jokes based on its poorly-structured design. Acknowledging that, making such a comparison can breed a sort of anger and contempt from fans of Doomsday to pair these movies together.
But it is not unjustified when one considers Marshall’s homage to movies that die-hard movie lovers will recognize in style and placement. Marshall may have wanted this movie to be like those old pulp films that he grew up watching, ranging from the Road Warrior, to Snake Plisken's "Escape" series, 28 Days Later, and several other films belonging to the b-movie realm. These movies have been known to offer entertainment for the sacrifice of strong plots, logical explanations, and often are made with low budgets that often could not afford higher quality special effects to cover these issues up.
Doomsday has not only acknowledged this, unfortunately, but emphasized another problem that has been noteworthy in the movie industry both in the category of making movies based on multiple blockbusters and movies based on novels: in the process of its many references, Doomsday tries to combine too many subjects at once, often making the movie too heavy to follow its storyline seamlessly.
Justified Praise/Unjustified Criticism?
Why should Doomsday be praised if there is already so much going against it from a conventional standpoint? This seems to be the most difficult concept to accept. Should a movie be considered great for being cheesy and silly simply because the director wanted it to be this way? Is there really such an off-center decision behind what makes a movie good and bad? Moreso, does this mean that we should love the movies that we came to hate for their corniness to the point of mocking them? While the concept is conceivable, it is, at the same time, difficult to see the approval that the fans have.
Perhaps the one thing that makes it the most difficult to agree with them is the fact that these same fans not only approve of the homage to the films of Marshall's past, but also claim to validate Doomsday's merit by defending the film with scenes that patched bits of the coarse plot. These points have included:
- A fight scene of hundreds of stealthy frenzied cannibals that rather would rush the hero rather than maintain their stealth as a reflection of how inferiorly trained they are.
- A gasoline can full of usable fuel that is used to fuel up an unused Bentley that has been in storage for several years.
- A society of luddites that have blacksmiths who forge armor pieces that bear no sign of descending from the scraps of the society they abandoned.
- The concept that, despite there being an armored personnel carrier with 2 inches of steel shielding, it has a tiny window frame that could be broken into with a crossbow bolt.
If it truly is an escapist genre, then why offer tiny snippets of scenes that defend the stability of a very unbelievable scenario to begin with? Perhaps a more approvable approach would have been to abandon all logic from the beginning and run with that instead. Perhaps even to turn towards more grandiose scenes than ones that offered homage by building them up into even more aggrandized scenes. This is merely one viewer’s method to see beyond the madness, but even so there is too much there that just does not work with what the masses expect.
Conclusion
Perhaps this is what Marshall wanted all along. While there are many reasons to not agree with the supporters of Marshall’s work behind praising this film, one can not deny that it offered viewers more laughs than most of the comedies that have been out this year, not unlike the forementioned Battlefield Earth. It is still a recommended film to watch, at the very least to appreciate the cheesiness it embraces. However, one should not expect someone to call it anything more than cherishing what we normally mock from B-movie cinema.
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