Review of Doom (2005) by Harry W — 20 Jun 2014

As I was a small fan of the video game Doom and was a larger fan of Dwayne Johnson films, a movie adaptation of the game sounded less likely to disappoint me than many other video game adaptations have.

Doom covered my expectations in many areas as a film adaptation of a video game while disappointing me in many other areas.

The premise of the film is dull. It deviates away from the general plot of the video game, and although that really did not bother me all that much, it was just a seriously formulaic and boring concept which somehow ended up feeling derivative of the previous video game film adaptation Resident Evil. I was actually surprised how many comparisons I ended up finding between the two films as they are both films set in a generic science fiction setting about inhuman creatures set out to kill human beings. So Doom pretty much does nothing but cover the same territory that was already sorted out by Resident Evil which despite not being a great film was able to deal superior entertainment value to the lackluster quality of Doom.

The video game Doom is both a breakthrough first person shooter and a shoot em up film, so the angle that the film adaptation takes is all wrong because it follows a moreo Predator style. By that I mean instead of spending the $60 million budget of the film on shooting up a bunch of bad creatures and having them splatter everywhere, it attempts and fails constantly to build tension by having its characters wait around in shadows of the confined darkness and poor lighting for enemies to approach. Instead of going in and blazing guns, the enemies stalk the protagonists like in a slasher film which is just all wrong because it means that the action quantity for Doom is just excessively low.

The lighting in Doom is just terrible. I can't tell if this is because the filmmakers wanted to disguise their inability to craft decent action sequences or simply because they had no idea how to turn on a f*cking lamp once in a while, but either way the weakest aspect of Doom's visual experience is the lighting. The lighting isn't as bad as Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, but it follows in the footsteps of it well by making everything impossible to see and then editing it at such a ridiculous pace that everything flashes past the eyes of viewers like a series of subliminal messages. Whatever potential Doom had to be remotely entertaining is ruined by the fact that it is a challenge to actually see anything in the film. The only good visual moments in the film are scenes which mimic the visual style of a first-person shooter video game and have the protagonist using weapons like the player does in the game. That was one of the central reasons I was excited to see the film, yet it was both excessively small in quantity and lacking in quantity. So the one decent highlight of the film was too short in length to have any real impact.

Frankly, Doom just got everything wrong. It deviated away from the story of the video game and followed a formulaic path only to plague it with a more slasher themed approach than an action one, meaning that the quantity of action is too minimal while the quality of it is haunted by terrible lighting and shoddy editing. And there is nothing else than the action in Doom to provide any form of entertainment value, not even the gimmick of having Dwayne Johnson in the lead role. Doom is just terrible, and while it is likely to piss off big fans of the game more than I, the simple fact is that there was potential here to be a half-decent silly action flick that became squandered on the fact that director Andrzej Bartkowiak took the film way too seriously instead of deciding to have fun with it. A little bit more fun could have gone a long way in Doom, and the one fun scene in the film proved that. Sadly, that was not the case.

And when it comes down to the cast, there is nothing to be proud of.

Dwayne Johnson is a terrible lead in Doom. You can't put too much pressure on him because in actual fact he was a former wrestler transitioning into an actor at the time and Doom was clearly too much for him because he really goes over the top with his line delivery and makes everything into tedious melodrama. His performance is essentially so bad that it's good because he says everything as if he is seriously constipated. It is clearly his worst performance to date, and it doesn't bother me too much because it is entertaining for being laughably poor quality. But still, considering that he has come so far today it is good to see him getting the bad acting out of his system early on.

Portia De Rossey is memorably awful in Doom. To put it simply, her line delivery is so artificial that it is harder to believe her as being a scientist than it was to believe Brook Mueller as one in The World is Not Enough. The problem is that Portia de Rossey just does not know what she is doing, and although nobody else does, considering that she is the same great actress who gave a hilarious performance on the comedy series Arrested Development, I had hoped for more from her. Portia de Rossey is just dull.

Karl Urban is the only slightly decent cast member in Doom. He is nothing great and his line delivery is as hollow as the rest of the cast, but he is not actually as bad as them. His role is that of a blank action hero, and by comparison Karl Urban brings more to his role than anybody else did, and he holds his weapons well.

So Doom is another example of a poor film adaptation of a video game, except that this time a lot of potential is wasted to be shoot-em-up fun on a poorly lit, weakly acted slasher film bereft of action or any fun whatsoever.