DOOMSDAY

In 2008, a deadly virus spreads in Glasgow and decimates the population. The government makes a drastic decision and builds a fence around the city to contain the virus and prevent the contagion from spreading to the rest of Great Britain. Twenty-five years later, the virus reappears beyond the barricade and threatens another global outbreak. The British prime minister then organizes a special team, composed of soldiers and scientists, with the task of penetrating Glasgow and tracking down Dr. Kane, a scientist trapped in the first site of the outbreak who is presumed to have been working on a cure for the virus. The team is led by Eden Sinclair, a woman of action who has her origins in Glasgow; but the team's task will not be very simple because beyond the barricade the survivors have founded a new civilization regressed to a punk-medieval condition in which anyone coming from "outside" is considered an enemy to be captured, cooked, and eaten! If Tarantino and Rodriguez's "Grindhouse" had been composed of three films, the trilogy would certainly have been completed by "Doomsday." Neil Marshall, in fact, in his third film, carries out an operation not dissimilar to that which involved the directors of "Death Proof" and "Planet Terror" and creates a delicious, adrenaline-filled and brilliant homage to the mythical post-apocalyptic action cinema of the 1980s. Everything begins with a virus, ominously baptized "Reaper," which turns those infected into pustulous, staggering, and ferocious beings comparable to the infected of "Planet Terror" who derived directly from Italian B-movies of the early 1980s. After the necessary prologue set in 2008, Marshall dives headfirst into constructing a plot that sews together the typical situations of cinema from that period, and so we immediately start with "1997: Escape from New York," a Carpenter masterpiece, from which the spark of the action, some narrative solutions (the computerized map with which the narrator's voice shows the viewer the situation) and the main character, Eden Sinclair, are recovered. Because Major Sinclair, played by an attractive and ironic Rhona Mitra ("Highwayman"; "Skinwalkers"), is nothing more than the female version of Jena Plissken, a "tough" and cynical woman, lacking the right eye and constantly searching for a cigarette; a lone cowgirl recruited to fight a war that does not belong to her. Later "Doomsday" becomes respectively "Aliens - Scontro finale," again "Escape from New York," "The Warriors," "Interceptor - The Road Warrior," and who knows what else (not coincidentally two of the characters are named Carpenter and Miller), an enormous amused and amusing collage of all that today is rightly the object of cinematic cult. Someone, however, has maliciously insinuated that behind this enormous mosaic hides only a lack of ideas and narrative emptiness (as was said of the two episodes of "Grindhouse"); certainly, abusing the formula adopted by Marshall (as well as by Tarantino and Rodriguez) could really be a facile cinematic expedient to tell a story already told, but as long as the cases are isolated and represent a declared act of love for a magnificent cinema that was, these products cannot be appreciated by those who have a minimum of cinematic memory and a passion for those films. Marshall thus creates a film that is completely outside of time, an anti-fashionable film that in some way also reminds one of the Firefly family diptych ("House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects") directed by Rob Zombie for the shameless way in which it goes against the grain. Marshall was courageous: he directed a film that with every probability would not have pleased the mainstream public (and in fact "Doomsday" was a box office flop), but he directed a film that pleased him, a product that openly manifested his passion for cinema and his cinematic culture. But it is reductive to speak of "Doomsday" only in terms of citation/homage, "Doomsday" is still a magnificent fantasy-action film that entertains with clever intelligence the viewer, an action film with adrenaline-filled scenes, fierce fights, various oddities and long and beautiful chases on foot, by car and by motorcycle. The only flaw that can be noticed in an otherwise entirely fluid story is the brief central medieval parenthesis, in tune with the citation operation, but definitely out of place in the whole story. The director's intention was to pay homage to the cinema of knights and neo-peplums of those years, inserting into the story a new Captain Kurtz (Marshall himself says he was inspired by Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" for the figure of Kane), played by Malcolm McDowell ("A Clockwork Orange"; "Halloween - The Beginning"), a man of science who has converted to the obscurantism of reason, but that moment was still avoidable. The scenes involving the neo-punks are among the best seen in action cinema in recent years, spectacular and extremely violent, well-choreographed and ironic. Marshall, moreover, does not disappoint and fills the film with splatter scenes that will delight those who appreciated the hemoglobin excesses of his previous two films, "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent." In short, Neal Marshall has fired three shots and has hit three targets, demonstrating (rather confirming) himself to be one of the most versatile and interesting directors of today's genre cinema. And you detractors of citation cinema remember that "copying" from a single film means committing a plagiarism, but "copying" from many films means having done research!