Sunday, May 06, 2007

The Events of Doomsday

Neil Marshall has spilled plenty of Doomsday details in The Scotsman today:

In the £15m film, Scotland has been cut off from the outside world for about 30 years, following the outbreak of a deadly virus, caused by genetic tampering.

Hadrian's Wall has been rebuilt to keep the Scots out of England. But the Scots have a cure for the virus, and when England is threatened by a new outbreak, a crack military team goes over the wall to get it, led by Nip/Tuck's Rhona Mitra.

She goes through from the wall up to Glasgow and then farther north. The farther north she gets, the more back in time she goes. It's like a Heart Of Darkness journey. There's a Kurtz character running a feudal society and living in a castle. He used to be a scientist - he's the guy who found the cure and he's taken on this kind of God-like stature up there.

Marshall had tried to recruit Sean Connery for the Kane part, but, unsurprisingly, Connery declined. He was probably looking for a payday at least the size of the entire budget - and the part isn't so trivial that it could just be discarded, a la Indiana Jones Goes Fourth.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I checked in not too long ago about the SPLICE artwork.

I just finished reading the DOOMSDAY script and boy, this one's a stinker I'm sorry to say. The dialogue is plain bad. On top of that, Marshall quite literally rips off so many favorite films, so much so that at one point, I thought I'd mistaken picked up the original ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK script. It's like he cuts scenes from that film, MAD MAX, 28 DAYS LATER, and LADYHAWKE, mixed them up and dumped them into his screenplay.

I loved THE DESCENT but maybe it was because there wasn't much to it. Simple stealthy premise that had maximum impact...and little dialogue.

On the good script front, I did just finish KILLING ON CARNIVAL ROW and it's simply amazing. Again, nothing truly new but with Jordan hopefully at the reigns we'd be in for a treat.