Review of Doom (2005) by Adam F — 13 Apr 2014

Everyone knows that movies based on video games are notorious for being bad (I'm looking at you, "Super Mario Brothers") but you have to stay optimistic when they announce these because they HAVE to get it right eventually. I mean it's not like they would take the already loose plot of a beloved shooter game and turn it into a generic space marine versus zombie movie right? Well you know where this is going already. We're talking about the 2005 film "Doom" which continues the fine legacy of video game movies that are only enjoyable if you enjoy them ironically and in this case it doesn't even rank highly on the "so bad it's good" scale. It's the year 2046 and man has finally reached Mars. Not through space travel, but through a mysterious portal that allows instantaneous transportation called the Ark. Scientists are sent to Mars and discover that it used to be populated by a race of people that have an uncanny resemblance to humans, except for a 24th "super gene" that gave them superior healing abilities, agility and strength... except when they turned into hideous monsters. When the laboratory on Mars sends a distress signal, a group of badass marines are sent to save the survivors and retrieve any important research. "Sarge" (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) leads an army of stereotypical marines: "Reaper" (Karl Urban), the one with the troubled past; the rugged veteran "Goat" (Ben Daniels) who has the added defining characteristic of being a crazy religious zealot; "The Kid" (Al Weaver) a rookie totally unqualified to join the team on this dangerous mission; creepy and desperate to get laid Dean Portman (Richard Brake), friendly black guy Duke (Raz Adoti) and his childhood best friend/the badass scary black guy "Destroyer" (Deobia Oparei) and finally the guy we can assume will do karate moves if we ever see him engage a baddie in hand-to-hand combat, the silent, but presumably deadly "Mac" (Yao Chin).

The biggest surprise that this movie holds is that one of those 8 marines gets killed before he can utter more than 5 lines; otherwise this movie is incredibly predictable and totally lacking in imagination. The question is not so much which marines will survive and which ones will die, it's "who is going to die in what order, and how long is it going to be before the compassionate marine has to face off against the by-the-books, stern leader that cares more about the corporation he is serving than the innocent people they are being sent to rescue?" The movie really tries hard to have cool, memorable characters by giving them identifying characteristics and catchy nicknames, but you know right away that these fools are just going to get eaten by the first monster they meet. The guys don't even wear helmets and two of the marines can barely hold it together once the action begins for goodness sake! Everyone is incredibly slow to catch on as to what exactly is going on with the whole monster infection plot, a plot that takes way too long to develop by the way. When we do get an explanation (finally) of what is going, it's absolutely ludicrous, it's non-science (that's nonsensical science) at its greatest. Apparently your DNA determines if you're evil or not and if you're evil, exposure to the virus turns you either into a zombie or a grotesque monster. I love the touch of stupidity found in Dr. Samantha Grimm's lab (she's played by Rosamund Pike): they have a fossil of a Martian female cowering in fear while holding her baby, neatly posed to show that she's clearly screaming and shielding her child. My question is, did they dig the fossil up in that exact pose and neatly chip away all of the stone around it so they could have a creepy display, or just pose together two skeletons in a creepy fashion to scare off the tourists? If the speech we hear from her concerning the fossil is true, then you have to believe that some kind of monster killed this woman and her baby... without breaking any of their bones and decided after the murder to pose them dramatically to spook archeologists millions of years into the future. Now that's scary. It's a miracle these morons don't connect the dots and figure out faster that something's really wrong here (seriously, the second someone laughs manically while tearing off their own ear, any sane person would just "accidentally" detonate a nuclear weapon in the building and call it a day).

Science and logic really take a backstage for this one; from electricity traveling along metal pipes at a different rate depending on who is supposed to win a fight to the space virus affecting different people differently depending on how far into the plot we are. It's all a big dumb action movie with amateurish space marines bumbling around while getting themselves killed. There is a single amazing sequence though, where the film replicates the first person shooter perspective of the game and we get to see our hero tromping through the corridors of the Mars station and gunning down his opponents. It's the only time the kills get creative and when the movie realizes how stupid it is and decides to inject some humor into the script. It's actually an original sequence too, something unique to this film. If you're watching the movie to make fun of it, the film is pretty slow in its setup but there are many, many opportunities to crack jokes and have a good time. Yell "Science!" out loud every time a scientist shows something scientific that makes no sense or is just so stupid you can't believe it made it all the way to the script and you can have a lot of laughs. Not quite as many as you would with a lot of the other bad video game movies but it's something.

You're thinking to yourself that I'm not focusing on the good stuff. What about the action, the horror, the monsters? In those departments too, the movie is a total disappointment. We get a grant total of three different monster designs, one of which appears only once. There's a big hulking brute whose intelligence varies from scene to scene, a creepy maggot-dog hybrid sorta thing (this is the one who makes a quick appearance, gets killed and then never comes up again) and some humanoid creatures. I guess if you were to get technical you could say that we also get your standard zombies, but I thought I was watching Karl Urban and The Rock in "Doom", not Milla Jovovich in "Resident Evil", so what the hell?! Ok, what about the violence? Once again, totally lame. A significant amount of the zombies are killed off-screen or dispatched the same way over and over. Just riddle them with bullets and move on. I may not be very familiar with the game of "Doom", but I'm pretty sure you had people punching demons (not alien zombies) with your bare hands, chopping them up with chainsaws, blasting them with shotguns, turning them to Swiss cheese with miniguns and using lasers and plasma launchers to reduce them to bubbling puddles of goop. Sure we get a "Big eFfin Gun" thrown in the movie, but its trigger gets pulled a grand total of three times, and twice, it doesn't even hit its target! At the very least you would think the action would be exciting, or the horror elements scary, but it's so easy to see the plot developments coming that there is absolutely no tension in the film whatsoever. For the rabid teenage audiences, the unrated/extended version of the film does have two scenes with some boobs, but it's nothing special. One is a quick shot of a dead girl with her shirt torn open and the other isn't the least bit sexy. It isn't even that violent or gory. You'll get more kicks out of playing that old videogame.

There's not really any reason to watch the film unless you want to prove that friend of yours that saw this as a teen and still claims it's an awesome movie that he or she is wrong. It feels like a dull clone of "Resident Evil" (which wasn't even that good to begin with, but at least got a whole whack of sequels) with a bunch of rejects from "Aliens" coming in and trying to play hero. Yeah it has some memorable moments, but your time would be better spent with some actual good action sci-films (how about "Dredd" if you like Karl Urban) or sci-fi horror films ("Southland Tales" if you want to be frightened out of your boots and see Dwayne Johnson) or even just playing the video game. The only thing you feel like shooting after watching "Doom" is your own brains out for being stupid enough to ignore the warnings. (Unrated/Extended Cut on Dvd, march 14, 2014).