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Reviews
Doomsday (2008)
AKA - Overly-Dramatic Exposition-Spewers Desperately Seeking a Cure for the Plot-Hole Virus
Let me get it out of the way right at the start - this film is bad. Like, really bad. But it's not -terrible-.
And there are a number of reasons why...
The budget and special effects are pretty reasonable. They're not great but they're certainly good enough.
The acting, given what they have to work with, is also pretty decent. Sean Pertwee is criminally underused and Bob Hoskins probably leaves this title off his CV but all in all the acting is okay. Even when the dialogue clunks, the actors give it a good go and do okay, so long as you listen more to their tone than what they're actually saying.
The photography and sound are also good - lighting levels are fine, the camera work and shots are good, the music fits and the sound effects are more than adequate.
Same goes for the stylings of the movie. Even if the bad guys are rather heavily inspired by Mad Max, their costumes look well-made and fit the movie; same goes for the armour wielded by the defence force expedition.
The plot - a viral mini-apocalypse - is more than a tad over-used of late (28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil, etc, etc.) but it's a slightly fresh spin on the idea. Fresh enough, at least, not to be unpalatable.
So what IS wrong with the movie? Well, I hinted at it when commenting on the acting - it's the script. I'll be blunt: it ****ing sucks. If there's one thing you really don't want to screw up in a movie, it's the script. Just as a well-written script can survive a low budget and wonky acting, even the best acting and budget cannot rescue a dire script and this is one of the worst scripts I've ever come across. Which amazes me, considering that this is from the same genius mind that brought us the mother of all werewolf movies - Dog Soldiers.
Where to start in saying where it's gone wrong? And where to finish?
There are plot holes that are more like chasms and exposition that seems to be aimed at people who live under rocks... A scientist working in a military base needs to have the term "line of fire" explained to him. The Prime Minister and his top advisers (who must have slept through the whole process of Scotland being quarantined) need Bob Hoskins to explain to them what might happen if half of London is closed off from the outside world and left to rot with a killer virus ("Rape, murder, arson, rioting, pillaging" to paraphrase). Soldiers fleeing a quarantine zone readily agree to rescue the wounded child of a woman they've never met before and of the soldiers even sacrifices his life for the kid, despite them having no idea whether or not she's infected with the same virus that's currently obliterating Scotland's population. Thirty years after the complete downfall of society and isolation from the rest of the world, there's still enough booze and petrol in Scotland for them to have a few thousand Molotov cocktails to hand and power a generator that's running a sound and light show, as well as have motorbikes zooming around; they also have a load of paper plates and cans of beer that appear to have been kept in time capsules for the past three decades. "Half the {English} capital" apparently consists of the borough of Hackney and not a lot else, and THAT has 12 million people living in it. And where the heck did the infected guy with the axe pop up from? And why did they not think to evacuate the Prime Minister and his buddies -before- trying to isolate London? I'd go on further but there's a word limit on these things ;)
Now, maybe it's a little picky of me to highlight and point out these rather glaring errors and if there were only a couple of them I'd probably just ignore them and enjoy what is an otherwise decent popcorn- muncher of a movie. But to have so many holes in the plot of just one movie and for them all to be rather gaping holes is a bit hard for me to ignore. That plus it just looks like absolutely no research or thought was put into the script and it was knocked out one rainy afternoon after a few beers and scribbled hastily on a pad, with no sort of editing process going on before being actualised. That said, the movie does start to pick up after they leave the city and end up accepting Malcolm McDowell's hospitality - though the flashes of "what's going on in London" do rather spoil what would otherwise be an acceptable attempt at rescuing the movie in the final third.
In a way, I feel bad. I really, really liked Dog Soldiers - it was fun, funny, sassy, knew its limitations and had some absolutely exceptional lines, all delivered brilliantly. So for me to lay into another work from the same man feels... cruel and ungrateful. But Doomsday really hasn't done much to warrant any sort of kindness from me.
So I gave it 4 - one because it's got Sean "I make mediocre movies GREAT" Pertwee in it (would have been two if he wasn't so frustratingly under- used); one because Rhona Mitra is pretty decently believable as the gruff, tough, hard-as-nails Maj. Sinclair; one because the action sequences are actually rather good if you don't think about them and the final point because I REALLY liked Dog Soldiers!
Sunshine (2007)
Probably the best sci-fi film I've seen in years.
Sunshine is, quite simply, brilliant. From the opening sequence - simple yet effective and revealing so much about the character in question - right through to the end, I was gripped.
Oddly for a sci-fi film, the power isn't in the effects or the sheer fantastic nature of the plot, it's in the people. From scary-eyed Cillian Murphy to pretty-boy Chris Evans, every performance is believable. Their reactions to events are so much more genuine-seeming than in just about every other film I've seen in recent years; be it joy, shock or grief, you can share it with them and this is something that a perfectly-worked score and some very accomplished camera-work add to handsomely. Whilst the personalities do lean towards certain conventions, none of them are so much so that they couldn't be explained away as being a result of or necessary to their profession - the slightly distant and isolated physicist; the cool-headed and pragmatic captain; the biologist who is passionate about their charges but emotionally-distant from their crew-mates.
The dialogue too is spot-on with nothing coming across as being too clichéd or too hammy. It all seems like real things that real people would say, from the casual banter to the emotional outpourings and everything in between. Unlike so many other films, the characters are human and they act like humans - there is no casual detachment and needless bandying of glib phrases.
The effects are exactly what they need to be in balance to this - believable but not distracting from eight very dynamic performances; complementing rather than show-stealing and over-awing.
All in all it's more of a psychological thriller than a traditional sci-fi extravaganza and whilst this has been done many times before - 2001: Space Odyssey, Solaris, Silent Runnings; to name a few - Sunshine does it superbly and without fault. I'd highly recommend this film to anyone who is looking for something more than just easy entertainment to kill a couple of hours. Conversely, if you ~are~ just looking for something light then keep on looking - this is not a film to be only half-watched.