SomeoneFilm Review: Doomed
June 19th 2009 23:41
Premise: 10 convicts are offered a full pardon and 50 million dollars if they can win a game show. They are split in to teams of two, and placed on a remote island with one goal: to reach the other side of the island. Sounds simple, except the island is crawling with zombies.
Now, the premise sounds pretty goofy, and that's exactly how I would describe this movie: Just plain goofy. While a couple of the characters are tolerable to watch, most of them are annoying and instead of sympathizing with the plight of the characters, you spend your time hoping that they will die. The rest are just... well, goofy.
At first, I thought the script would be the worst thing about the movie. I mean, come on. Surely they could be a bit more inventive with game show names than 'Survival Island 2020'. That about sums up all of the creativity that went into this one. However, once I had seen the movie, I was sold: the script isn't that bad, at least not in comparison to this films worst trait: it's direction.
The directing of this movie is possibly one of the most botched jobs ever done. There are so many things about it that annoy me, but I'll stick to the main points. Firstly, every time there was a zombie on screen, we got the super-shaky-hand-held camera effect... but it was like the cameraman was having a seizure, during an earthquake. About the best thing going for this movie is the zombie costumes, which actually look pretty cool. However, the audience has no time to appreciate this, because every single time there is a zombie on screen, the camera is doing it's best impression of clothes in the dryer. Well, actually in retrospect there is one single scene where we get to see a zombie with a steady camera, but that zombie is behind a force field (I'm not even kidding) so that doesn't really count.
If it was just the shaky camera overdose, I might be able to forgive it as a horrendous but forgivable mistake... but the crappiness doesn't stop there. Every time they want to change scene, we get a (badly animated) 3D map and zoom in to whichever character or location the next scene is set in. For every single damn scene change. Even if 2 teams are in the same part of the island, we get 2 separate zoom-ins into the same part of the island. Oh, and it doesn't stop there. Every time a character dies, we get this awfully annoying 'transmission lost' sequence, which by the end of the movie is just grating on your last nerve.
Oh that's not even the worst of it. The most annoying part of the movie is that during every action sequence, every time someone lands a blow, there's a little pause and a point value pops up on screen. For example, someone gets kicked in the side, and everything will freeze for a split seconds and text will appear saying 'body shot - 200 points). Sure, that might have been an interesting concept, but they just use it over and over and over again until it just gets annoying. Maybe if they used it for every kill, but watching 2 guys punch each other with the movie stopping and starting once every second isn't fun to watch, it's irritating.
I'm about done ranting now, but there is one more thing. Generally movies with good (or bad?) looking zombies have decent gore-effects, seeing as a higher effects budget generally means a higher costumes budget as well. However, Doomed is quite deceptive in this regard. Obviously the producers spent every last cent on their zombie costumes, and had no money left for effects. Their solution? Just don't have any effects. So we get the zombie-pileup effect, where the horde of zombies all jump on their victim, conveniently obscuring them from view and not requiring any special effects. So, we don't get any juicy headshots, missing limbs or disembowelment in this one... and for a zombie movie this bad, that's just adding insult to injury.
That's all from me folks. Maybe, with a script rewrite, a different director, some recasting, and some decent effects, this could have been a decent movie. However, it is not, so don't even bother.
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