Dressing for the Apocalypse: How to build a believable dystopia.

This is actually the sequel to a post I made in 2011, way back when this blog was still a baby. My love for dystopian/post-apocalyptic movies never grows old. And so today we're gonna look at some dystopian sci-fi movies that somehow have even less believable premises than "dragons erupt from the London Underground". (Seriously: Reign of Fire. Watch it. Dragons.)
I'm talking about the Uncanny Valley of filmmaking. This term usually refers to robots, in that the closer a robot gets to looking "human", the more unsettling it becomes. Roombas are cute because we can anthropomorphise them into being sweet little cartoon pets, while mannequin-like humandroids are totally creepy because they're not quite human enough. And the same thing goes for sci-fi worldbuilding, kind of. Unless your worldbuilding is 100% on point, going into too much detail is a recipe for disaster. It just gives audiences more time the audience has to think about how much you're failing to explain.

Take Star Wars. There's a reason why so many first-generation fans were pissed about the whole "midichlorians" thing: the prequels were attempting to rationalise something that, from a narrative standpoint, really didn't need rationalising. The explanations provided by The Phantom Menace and, to a much greater degree, Prometheus (WHY TRY TO EXPLAIN ALIEN?), are about as useful as making a Back To The Future prequel that tries to make scientific sense of the Delorean. Meanwhile, Children of Men and 28 Days Later (both ~serious~ dystopian sci-fi movies) both start in media res with minimal explanations for their technically impossible scenarios, but are nonetheless totally believable.
Many dystopian movies fall solidly into the Uncanny Valley because someone thought up a vaguely ~plausible idea for a futuristic dystopia, but then failed to think any further. Case in point: Gattaca. Set in a society where everyone's lives are governed by their genetic destiny, Gattaca is working from a sci-fi idea that has the potential to make some kind of sense. The basic premise is that the competent yet genetically unmodified Ethan Hawke can't get a decent job unless he slathers himself in Jude Law's pureblood DNA to avoid detection: so far, so good. (And slightly homoerotic, mostly because that's Jude Law's forte.) Unfortunately, the first half hour of the movie is one long, unnecessary expositiory flashback, giving you ample time to ponder things like why the hell an entire society of rich, successful superhumans would all decide to get the same haircut. While a short story can get away with creating a fictional society based on a thought experiment, you can't really do that in a feature film.
The costumes in Gattaca are great fashion, but they're not great worldbuilding. In the interests of propping up the whole genetic predestination bit, everyone dresses in identical, monochromatic Calvin Klein-esque businesswear. An easy visual cue to let audiences to know that conformity is key, but not something that seems terribly plausible in an apparently capitalist society with a thriving class system. Ditto for Equilibrium, although the costumes in that movie are a lot more stylised and a lot less interesting. Gattaca was designed by Colleen Atwood, who has like 57 Oscars and is basically The Best, whereas the costumes in Equilibrium look more like early-2000s teen boy fantasies of what Cool Guys dress like: ie, long black coats and lots of hair gel. Thanks, The Matrix. (N.B. I find it doubly entertaining that in Equilibrium, the supposed martial arts badasses are dressed in the most restrictive clothing ever, to the extent that they may not have been able to move their legs properly. How on earth did Christian Bale manage?)
The visuals of movies like Equilibrium and Gattaca (and Aeon Flux, and Ultraviolet...) are, to me, the costuming equivalent of all those thousands of hard sci-fi novels that concentrate on the science fiction but forget to give the characters human personalities. Even in a world where everyone is genetically engineered to perfection (Gattaca) or everyone is drugged with emotional inhibitors (Equilibrium), it's never really articulated why people look so similar. And if they were pressured to wear identical outfits every day, they wouldn't be dressed to the same degree of neatness, a trait that varies enormously from person to person. Not that this really makes much difference to the overall quality of the film: it's just something that bugs me, personally. The most frustrating case is probably The Hunger Games, where the supposedly outlandish clothes worn by the super-rich Capitol citizens are ultimately quite formulaic.
Like all great sci-fi, Gattaca causes us to ask questions. Questions like, Why does this have an 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, when every single line of dialogue is such a stinker? Why is noted non-actor Gore Vidal here, acting in a lead role? Why does everyone in this kind of sci-fi future movie always seem to live inside a giant stainless steel refrigerator? It's definitely one of those 1950s thought experiment short story movies, which does shine through in some of the weirdly mid-20th-century retrofuturism visuals. (ie, Jude Law wears a lot of waistcoats, presumably because it's written into all his movie contracts.) The writer/director went on to win an Oscar for The Truman Show so I assume he got better, but Gattaca's problems can probably be summed up in this picture of Jude Law looking forlorn in his wheelchair, loitering at the bottom of a DNA helix-shaped staircase, I see what you did there:
I'm not saying it's impossible to write a dystopia where everyone wears near-identical outfits. All you have to do is create a scenario that explicitly shows us why people are motivated to look so similar, either because they'd be socially ostracised for looking too different (which I think is what Gattaca was going for), or because they only have access to a limited type of clothing. The former is so similar to the real world that all you'd have to do is show what happens to people who don't fit in, while the latter means you can show all the ways people try to express themselves while constrained by a dress code. Just look at Alien, where everyone modifies their standard-issue uniform to the extent that they all look completely different.

Strange Days, 1995.

Urban cyberpunk dystopias are always gonna be my favourite for costume design, because they acknowledge the diversity of street fashion -- albeit usually as a slightly dated nod to Japanese micro-trends. Once cheap, mass-produced clothes are available then people are going to start experimenting with fashion, particularly when we're talking about the kind of clearly Westernised (usually USA-based) societies we see in most dystopia movies. So for me, a quick shortcut to working out whether an onscreen dystopia is plausible is: Does it look plausible? Because unless you're lining everyone up at gunpoint every morning to make sure their government-issue jumpsuit is buttoned correctly, everyone is not going to look the same.

Postscript: I just rewatched the trailer to Equilibrium, and immediately thought, "This movie looks awesome." Am now fruitlessly trying to remind myself that it isn't. If you find yourself falling under its spell, just watch the scene where Christian Bale rescues a puppy: that's probably the best bit. 

Previously: Dressing for the Apocalypse, Part 1. 

Read More

A "take your mind off the election" fashion special: Part 2.

Link to Part 1: Thierry Mugler and Viktor & Rolf.

Can I tag this with "apocalypse fashion"? Sure, why not; I do what I want. These clothes may not fulfill my strict requirements of looking like they were dragged from the dismal rubble of a dystopian cityscape and/or desert, but I think the spirit is definitely there.

This season's Yohji Yamamoto was rather grimmer than usual, full of frayed edges and the black, draped fabrics of mourning clothes. While Yamamoto has a history of dressing his models like bag-ladies (his term, not mine), this season had a more graceful look to it -- even though there were still a lot of rough fabrics and scruffy hemlines on show. The only acknowledgement of the Spring season was the amount of skin on show, but thanks to the models' aggressive demeanour and the chilly colour palette, it didn't seem like a very warm or cheerful Spring.

The accessories were one of my favourite things about this collection. They looked like a cross between caveman tools and something constructed directly from a haphazard crayon-drawing by a child.

OK, I'm going to be straight with you here: Yohji Yamamoto is pretty much the real-life Derelicte. If you don't know what that means because you haven't seen Zoolander: go watch Zoolander now, because it's awesome. If you do know what that means and are all, "But HelloTailor, John Galliano is surely the real-life Derelicte!" then I say NO, for John Galliano was too glamourous. Yamamoto really goes for it, you know? Year after year, season after season... countless hundreds of outfits made up of ill-fitting Charlie Chaplin trousers with the cuffs rolled up, and accessories made from rags. And to be honest, Yamamoto is really the only designer who can manage this look without it coming across as a gross mockery of reverse-classism.

I'm quadruple psyched about this grey outfit because I'm hoping it's what Tilda Swinton will wear to our commitment ceremony. Which will take place in a forest and be officiated by a wolf.

Read More

Gareth Pugh, Spring 2013 Ready-To-Wear.

It's important to remember that no matter how obscure your demographic, the world of fashion will have something tailored specifically to fit you. Gareth Pugh primarily designs for the alien robot market, a small but apparently significant group that's managed to keep him in business for several years. It's so hard to find clothes that flatter one's chitinous exoskeleton, you know?

This show was considerably more relaxed than anything else I've seen by Gareth Pugh. It definitely qualifies as Ready To Wear, but is that really what one wants from this particular designer? I miss the metallic robot outfits and the black-and-white pierrot gowns. And quite apart from that, Pugh just doesn't seem to be all that good at more conservative designs like these. By the previous standards of his own work this show was surprisingly wearable, but not necessarily very interesting.

This leather outfit was the low point of the show. Strapless corsets almost always look cheap, and this one is extremely poorly fitted -- a real surprise, coming from a designer who is usually so adept when it comes to structured clothing. In all, the outfit came across as a Halloween costume of some mid-level character in The Matrix.

The latter half of the show reminded me of Jean Paul Gaultier's costumes for The Fifth Element -- or a pale imitation thereof. The bell-bottom trousers seemed particularly dated, a little too close to the late '90s/early '00s to be considered a retro pastiche as of yet. The styling also seemed like something from an early '00s music video, with the models all having jagged side-partings and exaggerated eyeshadow.

The most noticeable development this season was Pugh's reluctant admission of a single colour to his previously monochromatic palette. The end result did allow for some extra variety, but I found that there was a distinct aura of White Stripes stage costume to some of the outfits, particularly this frilled-collar shirt.

The high point of the collection was undoubtedly these ribbed jersey dresses. Although they're far softer than the designs one usually sees from Gareth Pugh, the fabric choice was excellent and their flowing structure made the otherwise rather conservative silhouette into something far more interesting. Ready-To-Wear, but with enough weirdness to qualify as a worthwhile Gareth Pugh design.

Read More

The new Judge Dredd movie is a great chick-flick.

Most people have a favourite genre of fiction, one where they'll watch or read any old crap as long as it ticks the right boxes. For my mother, it's those crime novels that always have a dark picture of an alleyway on the cover and a blurb including the phrase "web of deceit". My friend Alex is a great aficionado of any and all vintage SF/F where the sets and costumes look like they were made out of cereal boxes. My own speciality is dystopic sci-fi/action movies, meaning that I got near-equal quantities of entertainment from the truly brilliant Children Of Men as I did from the baffling cinematic fart that is The Spirit. (For those of you who haven't seen The Spirit, it's basically what would happen if someone tried to remake Sin City while tripping balls. And allowed Samuel L Jackson full creative control over all of his and Scarlett Johansson's costumes. Seriously, ask me about The Spirit sometime. It has a bellydancer/Nazi/dentistry scene that you would not believe.)

My point is, you could not pay me to watch a three-star movie about a middle-aged white guy angsting over his divorce from Kate Hudson, but a three-star movie where the exact same guy duels a malfunctioning android in a city made entirely from neon striplighting and concrete rubble? I'm sold.

The problem is that my own outlook on the world often seems to clash with that of the filmmakers I love, ie: I generally view women to be people, and the creators of the films I watch give every impression of disagreeing with this viewpoint. Of course, I could try watching nothing but feminist documentaries and serious real-life dramas about women overcoming personal tragedies, but quite frankly those kinds of movies don't fulfill my needs vis-a-vis mutant zombie hordes, improbable leather body-armour, and soundtracks that sound like twelve-ton steel girders being banged together by Skrillex. Sadly, if I want to sit down and watch some ridiculous bullshit about a bunch of murderous idiots rappelling down the ruins of a post-apocalyptic megacity, then I generally have to put up with the only female characters in the movie either being Lara Croft clones, or a roomful of strippers who get gunned down in the second act.

My knowledge of the Judge Dredd comics is fairly limited (I'm more of a Halo Jones girl), but the trailers for the new movie were generic enough that I had every reason to suspect that it was your average run-of-the-mill "guy goes on a brainless killing-spree in the name of Justice" story. The surprising 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating and the presence of Cersei Lannister as the primary villain (!!!), however, were enough for me to give it a try. And you know what? This is an ideal girl-nerd action movie. It has all the exploding-head violence you'd expect from a movie about a capital punishment-obsessed cop battling drug-dealers in a futuristic towerblock, but none of the sexism you'd expect from, well, any film with that premise. Lena Headey is sneeringly excellent in her somewhat typecast role as a villainess perched at the top of the criminal food-chain, ordering her lackeys to rain death upon any commoners who get in her way. Dredd's rookie sidekick (Olivia Thirlby) may be young and inexperienced but she's also competent and professional, and actually gets more screentime and character development than Dredd himself.

Dredd (or Dredd 3D, because the 3D-movie marketing people are apparently still trying to make Fetch Happen) effectively shoots down the assumption that if you're going to see a brainless action movie, you're going to have to put up with some offensive shit as well. A lot of the time when people complain about Transformers and how it's, you know, sexist and all-round badly written, the comeback is that it's "just a stupid blockbuster". And this doubly counts for movies with higher age-ratings, where the filmmakers have a green light to show as much T&A as they want. In the case of Dredd, however, you have a relatively simple comicbook adaptation that's dark and gory enough to receive an 18 rating and yet mysteriously contains zero scenes where the camera lovingly pans over naked and/or recently-murdered strippers. The thing is, I'm not even advocating some kind of puritanical no-boobs law for cheesy action movies, I'd just like filmmakers to class up the boobs scenes a little, you know? Like maybe giving the lady characters a personality other than "daddy issues" or "likes to blow things up while wearing hotpants". 

After watching Dredd, I realised that the reason why it seemed so... weird, I guess... is that it didn't follow the kind of predictable cliches I was expecting. This type of movie -- especially one with an adults-only rating -- usually has very poorly-drawn characters and a lot of throwbacks to grindhouse cinema, but despite Dredd's plethora of extreme violence it never really went that route. Although it has the basic plot of a shoot-em-up videogame, the decision and emotional reactions made by the characters were far, far more intelligent and realistic than other movies of the genre. Which makes sense when you find out that it was written by the screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Never Let Me Go, all sci-fi movies with a broader appeal outside the main target audience of teenage boys and genre fans.

Judge Dredd has more in common with the emotionless killing-machines of '80s action movies than with the wrong-place-wrong-time John McClanes you see in most modern blockbusters. I'm kinda hoping this movie is successful enough for a sequel, actually, since the director has already stated that he'd like to explore the idea of Dredd as a fascist. Judge Dredd is in the unique position of being an adult comicbook antihero who hasn't been neutered or simplified by his film adaptation, filling a role that's almost a parody of the kind of right-wing American cop characters who glorify the idea of hyper-violent law enforcement. In some ways, Dredd 3D reminded me more of sophisticated films like Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly than it did of more thematically similar movies like Demolition Man. The vision for Mega City One was founded in the real world rather than looking like the type of cartoonish, larger-than-life post-apocalyptic settings where most leather-clad antiheroes seem to reside. The aesthetic was solidly reminiscent of inncer-city towerblocks in the real world, neglected and graffiti-spattered, with charmless breezeblock slums sporting ironically chirpy names like "Peach Trees".

Upon reflection, I'd rate Dredd as being significantly better than The Dark Knight Rises because it's so much more consistent and self-aware. Obviously Nolan's Batman trilogy is more complex than any Judge Dredd series is likely to be, but TDKR missed its mark by such a wide margin that I'd put it below a simpler but more clearly thought-out movie like Dredd. And -- surprisingly enough considering Judge Dredd's total absence of backstory or character-development -- I found him to be a more appealing and engaging character than the most recent appearance of Nolan's Bruce Wayne. The two characters fill the same basic niche, but Dredd is virtually ego-free while the Dark Knight movies gradually became more and more about Bruce Wayne's manpain until we reached a point where the actions of side-characters and villains seemed tailored exclusively to inspire an emotional reaction from him. Judge Dredd is motivated so purely by dedication to the Law that we never even see his entire face, yet he somehow seemed more authentic than TDKR's Bruce Wayne.

Links
The full Dredd soundtrack is available to stream online, and I'd highly recommend it for any and all criminal ventures out into your friendly neighbourhood post-apocalyptic megacity. Also available is the equally excellent but rather more '80s-influenced Drokk: Music Inspired By Mega City One, by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow of Portishead.

Interview with Alex Garland, the writer and producer of Dredd. Having read this, I can really see how the film turned out so well and so faithful to the comics.

Previously on Hello, Tailor: Dressing for the Apocalypse, and Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Doomsday.

Read More

Dressing for the Apocalypse

Glasgow is currently experiencing one of those Grey Christmasses that are so often inexplicably ignored by song and story. Grey because the sun only rises for about two hours per day; grey because of the unrelenting sleet. Today, a trip to the shops was not unlike one of those Lord Of The Rings scenes where Frodo and Sam are trudging up Mount Doom. Or The Road:

As a further illustration of how much of a Feral Sweater Person one becomes in this climate, this is what I was wearing to go out on said shopping trip:

Caveat: I haven't actually seen The Road. However, I know what it looks like, and was reminded of this when I met up with my friend J the other day. I should mention at this point that J has been living in a forest for the last six months, although in the interests of fairness I should also mention that he kind of dresses like this anyway. It's awesome:

Yes, those are thermal longjohns underneath a pair of rolled-up jeans. And the tarpaulin-like oilskin jacket is belted shut with an Army Surplus belt that he'd found in a changing room. This is tip-top apocalypse dressing, people. He could easily be hanging out with Viggo & co. at a moment's notice:

So, I have a lot of thoughts about apocalypse dressing. There are so many dystopic/post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows that there are a myriad of different costuming directions for one to take. At one extreme we have The Road, very realistic in the sense that their clothes are picked purely for practicality and are a complete mess. At the other end we have movies like Mad Max, Tank Girl and Escape From New York in which everyone has suddenly developed an obsession with fetishwear. 

Black leather and rubber: perfect materials for the desert. Young man, where is your sunhat?

Thanks, 1980s-90s DYI street-style aesthetic! You have influenced the apocalypse-movie genre to such an extent that Burning Man is rife with ripoffs of it to this day.

The one thing that all post-apocalypse movies can agree on is that boots are important. Big boots. Shit-kickers, in fact. Boots that are suitable either for grim hikes across the bleak landscape of humanity's collapse, or for when the evil empress of the post-zombie sex club/motorcycle gang/escaped prisoner enclave kidnaps our dear hero and ties them to something while dancing around in leather and fake fur. Somewhere in the middle of this sliding scale we have the "artfully-distressed" look of films like Waterworld, where we are supposed to believe that the action takes place so far in the future that all stocks of supermarket-brand clothing have been used up and humanity is reduced to wearing beige off-cuts of stuff tied together with seaweed.

Some slightly higher-class"everything is tied together with string because it's the end of the world"-inspired styling from Gareth Pugh. Note the apoca-boots! Accompanying expression of dismal hopelessness: essential.

For some reason, nobody in Waterworld-esque movies ever bothers teaching themselves to weave. Which is odd, because the two types of people who are likely to survive an apocalypse are people with lots of practical skills and a willingness to adapt to trying circumstances (ie, the type of people who would teach themselves to fucking weave), and people who are utterly ruthless (ie, the type of people who would threaten someone else until they taught themselves to fucking weave). But does apocalyptic fiction need realism in order to succeed? No. No, it does not. In fact, the best dystopic/end-of-civilisation film I've ever seen -- Children Of Men -- relies upon a premise that is not only never properly explained, but is probably impossible in real life.

As I previously mentioned in my Fan's Introduction To Costume Design, sometimes accuracy is overrated.

The old favourite "bits of stuff tied to other stuff" aesthetic, so favoured by steampunks.

The other thing both types of post-apocalyptic film can agree on is that everything should be dirty and/or torn -- the difference being that for serious movies, things are torn where they'd be likely to tear in real life, whereas in things like Tank Girl you can be absolutely sure that the ripping will occur over the cleavage, Captain Kirk-style. Either that, or entire sleeves or trouser-legs will go missing. When you think about it, the dystopic future/apocalypse genre is a surprisingly egalitarian one when it comes to gendered costuming. In most media, "ridiculous, flesh-baring outfit that nobody in real life would dream of wearing" is restricted to the ladies, but the noble traditions of unfeasible movie dystopias dictate that everyone can, and should, dress like this. Case in point, Escape From New York:

Leather vest? Knee boots? Skin-tight non-camouflaging camouflage trousers? Tell me that isn't unisex. Not to mention Isaac Hayes:

In a way, Isaac Hayes' outfits aren't too unreasonable. What deranged dictator of an isolated and insular society doesn't love snazzy epaulettes? It's practically a requirement. Although Sol Kane's "biohazard tattoo + mohawk + horde of kilt-wearing Scottish cannibal punks" ensemble from Doomsday (one of the best movies ever, as you'll learn if you read its Hello, Tailor review) holds a special place in my heart, I do admit.

The Matrix runs the full gamut of silly post-apocalyptic fashions to best effect. In the real world, everyone is living in relative squalor, the population is tiny and constantly beset by difficulty, and everyone wears raggedly recycled (presumably) knitted jumpers while eating gruel and talking about the revolution. That's the "realistic" side, providing you don't think too hard about, well, anything. 

from here.

Then in the real world everyone gets to wear their preposterous goths-of-1999 cyber gear, all of which is inconceivably shiny, not to mention uncomfortable and a hindrance to any martial arts they might be required to do. But at least they have the excuse that they can wear literally anything they care to dream up, unlike the multitudes of other movie characters who mysteriously manage to source perfectly-fitted catsuits from... well, it's never entirely clear, much like the origin of Peter Parker's professional-grade Spidey Suit once he's graduated on from the "spider logo stencilled onto a red hoodie" stage.

Stealthy.

As you may have deduced from the title, this is merely Part 1 of a series of apocalypse fashion posts. I realised about two movies in that I'm clearly not going to fit everything in here. Reduce the Mad Max trilogy to a mere one picture? A travesty! I've not even seen the third one yet, and that one has Tina Turner

To finish things off on the note with which they started, I turn to a dreary-looking film, set in Britain, that featured altogether too many sensible jackets and a colour palette evidently inspired by drizzle and mud.

Reign Of Fire. Heard of it? It stars Christian Bale, Matthew McConnaughey and Gerard Butler, and tells the tale of a world overrun by dragons. Dragons that hatched out of the London Underground. In terms of bad-moviehood, this is one of the most wasted premises of the last decade. Here you have three famous Hollywood beefcakes -- at least one-and-a-half of whom are good actors -- and you're making a movie where dragons hatch out of the London Underground and throw the world into chaos. The dragons are such a threat that they more or less destroy civilisation. American Matthew McConnaughey is practically hailed as the messiah when he shows up with guns and a helicopter at the tiny castle settlement (OF COURSE) where Gerard Butler and Christian Bale live. This selection of concepts adds up to what should have been a gloriously preposterous B-movie cult hit, but the filmmakers ruined it by trying to make it too serious. All the actors play it completely straight, as you can probably tell just by looking at these pictures. Everything is so gritty. Guys, gritty is for The Road. Gritty is for Children Of Men. Gritty is for films whose main plotline doesn't hinge upon dragons hatching out of the London Underground.

Reign of Fire's only concession to the ridiculousness it deserved was the fact that Matthew McConnaughey, because he was American, drove a tank while chewing on a cigar. I don't remember exactly, but I hope he lit the cigar off some dragon-fire at some point. If he didn't, then that was truly a wasted opportunity.

I'm not saying that Reign Of Fire is abysmal or anything, but it doesn't maintain the correct level of illogical glee required to make this type of movie truly entertaining. Once you've got dragons, why not just go the whole hog? The protagonists' main enemy breathes fire! That's like a GOLD-PLATED INVITATION FOR EVERYONE TO WEAR LEATHER CATSUITS! The one situation in which it's a good idea to wear something non-flammable (LEATHER CATSUITS), and they let it slide. Tragic. Tragic. Then all you have to do is throw in some dragon-worshipping cultists who all wear red leather catsuits and flame-helmets or something, and you've got yourself a proper post-apocalyptic dragon hunter movie.

Seriously. They should hire me to write this shit.

Read More

Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Doomsday

photo from here.

At some point I'll go back to writing serious reviews, but having spent the day wandering around Glasgow, my thoughts turned to Doomsday instead. In this film the costumes, like everything else, are nonsense and should be taken with a pinch of critical salt. Doomsday is the film that would happen if someone put every 1980s dystopic/apocalyptic movie in a blender and then set the resulting mish-mash in mid-21st-Century Scotland. This quote from Cheri Priest will hopefully give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

"...it’s got humanity-eating plagues, tribes of cannibal punks, medieval-style fiefs with knights and torture chambers, rubber-wrapped gimps, futuristic soldiers with wacky hardware, cyborg eyeballs, embittered but noble old cops, corrupt and power-mad politicians, tanks, humorous decapitations, and Malcolm McDowell dressed like Henry the Eighth."

Also there's a dance sequence set to Adam Ant. This film came out in 2008, by the way. Not back when Adam Ant was still on the cutting edge of the anachronistic pop-culture zeitgeist. To ease you gently into the logic-free world of Doomsday, here's comparatively subdued screenshot:

Screencap from here. All screencaps are from there or HotFlick.net unless marked otherwise.

Important note: there is no time-travel in this film. Doomsday is set in the real world, albeit one where a plague wiped out most of Scotland and the British government then came up with the tip-top scheme of rebuilding Hadrian's Wall to keep the plague (ie, the remaining survivors) from entering England. Make of that what you will, metaphor-fans. In a characteristic example of Neil Marshall movie subtlety, the new wall looks like this:

The one surprising aspect to this photo is the fact that the wall didn't read "RIP, motherfuckers".

Regarding the earlier picture of our hero (Eden Sinclair, played by Rhona Mitra) facing off against what appears to be a medieval knight on horseback, holding a dragonhide shield... I'll get back to that later. Although probably not the shield. I'm not really clear on what that's supposed to be made of, unless there really was a dragon hanging around somewhere offscreen and they were saving it for a sequel that tragically never got made. This would not surprise me.

Eden is a cop. In a rather unusual move for this type of film, she's dressed very sensibly throughout. Tough boots. Body armour. That sort of thing. It's all black, because she's Serious, and has a Dark Past.

She also has a cyborg eyeball that records video and can be removed to look around corners, because WHY NOT?

.gif from this tumblr.

The plague reappears in London 20 years after the first outbreak, and the prime minister (played by Alexander Siddig, Star Trek fans!) needs someone to go to Scotland and find out if there's a cure. Eden, along with a ragtag bunch of British regional military stereotypes, cross the new Wall to Scotland in search of plague survivors.

Doomsday contains a lot of visual/thematic references to cheesy apocalypse cinema (Escape From New York, etc), and frequently borrows from video games and video game adaptations, none more obvious than the armoured suits Eden and her allies wear when they first reach Scotland:

Pic from here.

Once in Scotland, Eden and her crew of cliches discover that there are two groups of survivors: punk cannibals (in Glasgow), and medievalists (in a castle, of course). See, I told you I'd get back to the dude on the horse! The whole medieval thing... almost makes sense? I mean, castles are very durable, and once you've been cut off from imported fuel and other supplies then a 1000-year-old castle isn't the worst choice when it comes to warm-ish, defensible positions. Except...

Wait, what? WHY ARE YOU DRESSED LIKE IT'S 1300? Living in a castle: maybe. But it's only been 20 years since Scotland got cut off! And the population is tiny! You could probably continue to wear clothes looted from Primark and Topshop for at least another few decades, right? But no. Instead, they've gone to the trouble of weaving medieval-style natural-dyed clothes to match their castle. And adopt MEDIEVAL "FASHIONS". AND KNIGHTS ON HORSEBACK. AND....

The fact that he's wearing fur is probably the only thing about this that makes any sense. WARMTH IS KEY.

In a post-apocalyptic environment, surely your priority is survival, right? Not STAINED-GLASS WINDOWS WITH THE BIOHAZARD SYMBOL ON THEM. And TRAINED FALCONS.

YOU'RE WASTING CANDLES, MALCOLM MCDOWELL!

Malcolm McDowell's character is a prime example of the impracticality of the Evil Overlord mindset. Instead of, you know, trying to find a few generators and getting someone to set up WiFi so the surviving Scots can start a Twitter feed about how shit it is being trapped in a country full of plague corpses, he concentrates on making sure that everyone who lives in his castle is dressed with historical accuracy.

This picture is such a perfect example of the ridiculousness of both Malcolm McDowell's horrendous leadership techniques, and the movie Doomsday in general. You can't tell here, but Eden's about to engage in single combat with an armoured knight wielding a huge mace/morningstar. In the background, everyone is wearing velvet caps and cloaks and there are BIOHAZARD SYMBOL WALL-HANGINGS. What are your priorities Malcolm McDowell? Have you learnt nothing from when your evil plans were scuppered by that other badass post-apocalyptic heroine, Tank Girl, back in 1995?

Note: Tank Girl is awesome, but probably not as brilliant as Doomsday in terms of sheer extravagance.

(N.B. McDowell really is good value, isn't he? He can brandish a cyborg arm while sucking humans dry in Tank Girl, then do interviews like this where he describes his role in Doomsday as "a cross between Lear and MacBeth". MAGNIFICENT. Can you believe that this role was originally intended to be for Sean Connery? Surely he's not menacing enough! And he doesn't have that all-important futuristic megalomaniac experience that McDowell embodies.)

Maroon velvet: the fabric of OPPRESSION.

I actually have a theory about the silly medieval costumes. The castle where these scenes take place is clearly a castle that's been converted into a musem, as evidenced by the fact that there are still "EXIT" signs in doorways here and there (presumably because... they filmed it in a Scottish castle museum...). Maybe there were some re-enactment costumes left over when they moved in? It's probably best to not think about these things too much, and just revel in Doomsday's complete balls-to-the-wall lack of restraint instead.

I guess the armour KIND OF makes sense? And longbows are a very efficient weapon!

Let's take a look at the urban survivors. Surely they can't manage to have a crazier survival strategy than the medieval knight guys, right?

 No.

The people of Glasgow appear to have adopted a kind of goth/urban-tribal look, complete with intricate face-painting (somewhat celtic...?) and hairstyles that look bloody impossible to sleep in. The goth thing I'll allow because Glasgow has a fairly high punk/goth population, and in general I find that the further North you go in Europe, the more goths you find. I'd argue that in Glasgow any tough-yet-unbalance survivors are more likely to be neds, but let's not quibble. People in spiny fetishwear are more visually arresting than people wearing Burberry and Adidas, plus they're an homage to countless classics of the apocalypse genre, such as Mad Max and Escape From New York.

In addition to the whole inexplicable goth/urban-tribal infected-piercings extravaganza, these guys are cannibals. CANNIBALS. Cannibalism? Not a viable survival strategy. Their leader is a punk psycho who gets to ham it up to epic proportions during this party scene, which includes: guys in kilts doing the can-can, pole-dancers, chainsaws, a fire show, and... look, just watch it.

In the great genre movie tradition: He's wearing messy eyeliner, and therefore is probably evil.

I suppose if you were going to try and be smart about it, you could say that Doomsday has some interesting theories about how subcultures might develop in a closed-off society that until recently had all the stylistic influences one expects from first-world media and advertising. Once locked into the pressure-cooker of post-apocalyptic Scotland, the population divides itself into two disparate groups: the snarling, fashion-forward goth savages of the city, and the conservative croft-dwellers of the Highlands. People are so desperate to maintain a sense of belonging that they go to increasingly extreme lengths to prove that they are part of the tribe. Of course, it'd take more than 20 years for this type of society to emerge, but Doomsday isn't really concerned with boring shit like realism. Here's one final example of that beautiful truth: a woman from the start of the film who genuinely seems to have been transported directly from 1975, for no reason other than it seemed like an awesome idea at the time:

Read More