The final entry in MasterChugs March Movie Mort Month is upon us. It’s loud. It’s painful. It’s got really big guns and possibly bigger muscles. It totally fits the theme for this year, which as some of you might have been able to tell, is “cinematic video-game adaptation bombs,” and boy howdy, is this movie ever a real life equivalent of Vampire Rain. That’s right, I’m talking about the one, the only, Doom. Step right in to feel the pain.
Having played all of the entries in the Doom game series, I can approach this movie from multiple viewpoints; however, I’m just going to approach it from the POV of a normal film-goer, as it tends to be the least headache-inducing.
The premise is that there is a scientific research station on Mars where things are going haywire. Earth sends the RRTS (Rapid Response Tactical Squad), a group of elite Marines, to investigate.
They soon find themselves in the middle of madness, where scientists cower in fear, apparently under attack from mutated creatures that are either possessed by aliens or are infected with a grotesque virus. The Marines have orders to contain the area, but never knowing who is going to turn into one of the creatures leads them to think they may have to exterminate all life in the compound before it gets out to the mass population. This differs a bit from the original script, wherein the game, a portal to Hell is created on Mars and demons from said netherworld cross the plane to wreck havoc upon the planet.
Herein lies a problem: in a day and age where one can turn on the news and see a growing death count, allegations of moral misconduct within religion, some of the cruelest acts of violence thrust upon human beings (because good parenting is putting a baby into a microwave, clearly), why exactly do demons need to be switched with aliens or a science-created virus that mutates the host? It boggles the mind a bit.
On Mars, we see terrified humans running from an unseen threat. Dr. Carmack (who will not be making you his bitch, despite claims otherwise) closes an automatic steel door on a young woman whose arm is onscreen longer than she is (thus giving one of two gifts to the audience that the game series was so famous for–buckets of gore and the first person perspective, though the latter is coming) and then he spends a lot of time huddled in the corner vibrating and whimpering. We meet Samantha Grimm, an anthropologist at the station, and who has reconstructed a complete skeleton of a humanoid Martian woman huddled protectively over her child. If you know your anthropology, you gotta say those are bones that have survived a lot of geological activity.
The original Martians were not merely humanoid, Dr. Grimm speculates, but super-human: They bio-engineered a 24th chromosome. We have 23. The extra chromosome made them super smart, super strong, super fast, and super quick to heal. But it turned some of them into monsters, which is presumably why the others built the portal to Earth, where–what? They became us, but left the 24th chromosome behind? Is that the kind of Intelligent Design we want our kids studying? Despite all of her chromosome counting, Dr. Grimm says at another point, “Ten percent of the human genome has not yet been mapped. Some say it’s the soul.” The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, something you would think a scientist like Dr. Grimm should know. Here’s where Doom makes another mistake: it takes its audience for the future where the movie takes place, which is apparently a place of unparalleled stupidity.
The Rock gives a nice performance but he can’t save the movie; he looks like he’s having a good time with his character. It’s interesting the role he’s taken. The Rock actually doesn’t play the lead. He was offered the lead, but chose the role of Sarge instead because he liked it better. Karl Urban plays the lead, a solider named Reaper who ends up saving everyone’s butt. Think Mark Dacascos with lots of muscles. Joining the men is English actress Rosamund Pike, best known for her work as a Bond girl. Her inclusion here is almost comic (she is a Shakespearian actress with a heavy British accent), and she is saddled with the thankless task of rattling off all of the pseudo-scientific claptrap that passes for explanation in the quiet moments of the film. She is as good as she can possibly be given the material, but can’t help the fact that she is responsible for trying to make sense of what amounts to a contrived reason to get monsters up and walking so the men can mow ’em down.
The most divisive part of the film—meaning you’ll love it or hate it—is likely to be the first-person shooter sequence that is near the end of the film. In it, Karl Urban’s character grabs a gun and the position of the camera shifts to his view. Of course, this is a tribute to the revolution that the game caused: Doom was the game that popularized the perspective that has spawned a widely-copied genre of games. But how does it work in the film? About as well as when Uwe Boll randomly intercut video-game sequences from The House of the Dead into the movie of the same name. With uninspired fight choreography and sequences so dimly lit the viewer has a hard time deciphering where and what anything is, director Andrzej Bartkowiak reveals he’s no Ridley Scott when it comes to tension and buildup.
Doom is a movie based on a video game that liberally borrows ideas from sci-fi, action and horror movies. Be forewarned that you’re going to see plot elements, story backgrounds, and characters similar to other, much better films that you’d probably be better off watching than dreck like this. It isn’t anywhere near the landmark work in the world of movies as it was when it changed the video game scene forever back in 1993.
“The original Martians were not merely humanoid, Dr. Grimm speculates, but super-human: They bio-engineered a 24th chromosome. We have 23.”
We actually have human beings on Earth with extra chromosomes. That genetic (er) surplus is what creates very Special athletes, as in Down’s Syndrome Special Olympiads.
Extra chromosomes do not make superhumans. The perfect combination of 23 chromosomes, however, does.
But as we’ve seen in the rest of your review, Doom has absolutely no scientific basis to it other than, “Let’s have some brainiacs piss their pants and rely on ‘dumb soldiers’ to save them.” Good closer for this series of horrible video game movies.