We’re Doomed

Video game movies are predetermined to fail as long as they insist on holding fast onto their video game roots instead of attempting to succeed as independent cinematic works. Looking at the track record, we see that the two best attempts thus far have been Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, both of which were directed by Paul Anderson. At best, both films were mediocre (as are all of Anderson’s films with the exception of Event Horizon): for every painfully awkward moment of fandom reference (Johnny Cage signing Scorpion an autograph) or fanboy appeasement (Milla Jovovich jump-kicking a dog), you had consistent storytelling or a buttload of genuinely cool effects to dismiss previous infractions.

So how does Doom fair?

Let’s start with the story. Having only played the first Doom and none of its sequels, I can only judge the merit of the plot alone. The movie tediously unfolds the bizarre research that scientists on Mars have been doing. Archaeologists have found skeletal remains on Mars which have an extra chromosome, chromosome 24. They also discover that these inhabitants of Mars also had super-human strength and a rapid healing ability! You can guess what happens next: they start importing convicts and testing them with the extra chromosome. That’s when things start to go wrong and their guinea pigs start mutating into horrific creatures with a fierce appetite for destruction and reproduction. But wait! Apparently, the chromosome’s effects on the body are different depending on the morality of the person infected. As Rosamund Pike’s character points out, 10% of the human genome has yet to be mapped and scientists say that this remaining trek is the “blueprint of soul.” Huh? I thought we mapped the genome in its entirety back in 2003? Anyway, assuming she’s right, the point is that if you’re a bad dude and you get injected with this chromosome or get beast-raped in the neck, you turn into one of the constantly mutating monsters. If you’re a good guy, you turn into a first-person shooter.

Which is the only part of the movie which shines. After an hour and a half of half-decent Aliens-wannabes moving through dark corridors with heavy artillery, we get the only original concept in this film to set it apart from other crappy movies: a first-person perspective. You heard me. The camera goes directly into the head of Karl Urban and for the next 5 minutes goes on a pretty awesome shooting spree, killing at least 7 zombies and one huge monster before leaving this view and ending the movie with an extremely lame WWE deathmatch with The Rock. If they had used the first person p.o.v. during the earlier action scenes of the movie instead of waiting at the end, it would have certainly elevated my opinion of the movie by way of innovation. But no: they save it for the end to show that when you are dying and get injected with Martian juice, you get gifted with first-person skills and can perform backbreakers.

Until Silent Hill comes out in April, Doom remains shelved with Anderson’s films as an almost-successful attempt at making a decent video game adaptation.

Grade: C-

Comment posted by Jay
at 5/12/2007 12:49:20 PM

that movie was awsome. i cant belive they made a movie about doom and it’s with the rock…sweet.I played the game doom 1-3 but 1&2 SSUUUCCCCCKKKKKEDDDD and i mean sucked but doom 3 was the best doom game EVER.It had so many weird and hard i mean hard monsters like the hellnight and the pinky.YOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! the was so weird it is like a monster dog with a motorized wheelchair for it’s back legs.I thought it was the weiredest monster ever.Well thats all by!!!!!!! YO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

Comment posted by DrSpengler
at 2/6/2006 1:36:30 PM

I’m not sure how to rate Doom.

It was BETTER than 90% of the video game movies out there, or anything Uwe Boll has flicked out of his nose and onto a piece of celluloid. But it wasn’t as good as, say, Mortal Kombat; a movie which, while bad by Billy Bob Somebody’s standards, was so accurate to the source material it was pretty much the video game come to life.

Doom has its innaccuracies, but it has plenty of familiarities, too. It’s stuck in that grey area between Uwe Boll disasters and Paul Anderson achievements.

I’ve only played Doom I (on my 32X) and Doom II: Hell on Earth (on my craptacular Apple Macintosh II), so I was pretty disappointed to find out that this game was basing most of it’s material off of the X-Box’s Doom III. So if you’re looking for Imps hurling fireballs and amorphous Cacodemons gang-raping you; look elsewhere.

And that brings me into my main problem with Doom the Movie: Not Enough Monsters! You’ve got zombies, Imps (which look nothing like they did in Doom 1 or 2), Barons (which you won’t even recognize since they look exactly like the Imps) and 1 single Demon, which was admittedly very cool since he’s the boss the main character fights in the badass 1st person segment.

So you only get ONE good monster and he doesn’t even show up until the very end of the movie. What’s Doom without the monsters?

Their excuse for the lack of monsters isn’t a very satisfying one, as you find out that there’s a major change from the game’s story. Instead of opening a portal to Hell on Mars, they simply reverse-engineer super powers from a bunch of martian fossils and give those powers to CONVICTS like a bunch of morons!

On the brightside, The Rock is the perfect embodiement of Sarge. The way *I* remember Sarge is as that little head at the bottom of the screen that would start bleeding whenever you got your ass kicked. But when he WASN’T bleeding out of his ears and spitting up teeth and telling me I was a homo for being so bad at the game, he was raising his eyebrows. Left and right, left and right…now who does that better than The Rock? It’s one of his trademarks, after all.

One thing I WILL praise the movie for is that it kept in the term “Big F***ing Gun”. That gave me a good chuckle of satisfaction. The BFG doesn’t get to do much damage, unfortunately. But then, I never liked playing Doom with the BFG anyway, since it made things too easy. Which is odd, since I sucked at the game and Barons From Hell were constantly taking my lunch money.

Doom the Movie changes the story and plot up about as much as Resident Evil the Movie did (which is one of the reasons I hated Resident Evil the Movie), but unlike Resident Evil, maintains at the very least the atmosphere of the game so as not to COMPLETELY alienate the fanbase…like Resident Evil did.

So that’s Doom: Better than Resident Evil but not as good as Mortal Kombat.

I give it a C.

It saved itself from a D-rating with the BFG and the 1st person sequence. But just barely