"Rip and tear your way out of the theater, before the lights go down!"
Being a visual medium, video games are chock-a-block with movie references, inspirations, and sometimes downright theft. At some point, movies were due to return the favor. Super Mario Bros. (1993) was a rough start to that relationship - like having a first date at your colonoscopy - but Mortal Kombat (1995) saw Paul W.S. Anderson direct the first hit video game movie, making several times it's budget. The turn of the Willennium saw a rising trend; Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) was the biggest hit at Paramount in 2001, with a total gross just behind the original Fast and Furious. (It was also the highest opening debut - 40 million - for a movie headlined by a woman ever at the time). Resident Evil - also by Paul W.S. Anderson, who directs so many movies with his wife, Milla Jovovich, in skintight outfits that it must be a fetish we're all participating in - shot off to a modest start the very next year, and churned out profitable sequels in no time flat. The pump was primed and the timing was perfect for another hit video game adaptation...right?
Oh hell, he spotted that lazy foreshadowing! Start the car, START THE CAR!
A Brief(?) Aside About Wrestlers In Movies
Today we know Dwayne Johnson as one of the biggest stars in movies, being able to charge a cool million to show up for three seconds in Fast X. He's had some recent setbacks, and going over the ups and downs of his career...well, this article isn't solely about The Rock, another time perhaps. He has competition though, with John Cena and Dave Bautista having followed in his footsteps to make their own multimedia careers. Of the three, I actually think Cena may be the better actor, willing to get weird and vulnerable in ways that Johnson hasn't attempted in years. (He's easily the funniest.) Bautista is pretty beloved by cinephiles, but he hasn't had a real strong starring role in anything but ensembles like Guardians of the Galaxy, where he's sharing screen time with a host of other actors.He changed the game for big guys with tiny glasses though.
Hogan was the best known, easily, but I'll get this out of the way now: The guy was a *terrible* actor, just a dogshit thespian. Professional wrestling demands just as much dramatic flair as it does biceps the size of a truck, but Hogan spent his golden years as America's Superhero; the good guy, vibing on the audience's cheers til he reached Terminal Hulkamania and dominated, like a pressure cooker with steroid-induced flop sweats. He never really had to prove he had range, and his film career didn't show off any hidden depths lurking beneath the cocaine-dusted surface. After a cameo in Rocky III made Hogan "The big guy from Rocky III", he became sorta familiar to most audiences and nearly a god to Italian-Americans. Naturally, he used that foot in the door to star in in terrible flicks like No Holds Barred, Suburban Commando, and 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. (There was also a more recent movie with him and Bubba The Love Sponge's wife, maybe you've heard of it.)
There was also Mr. Nanny (1993). Here it is looking like a mad lib come to life; "So far we have: Hulk Hogan and The Husband From The Jeffersons are at Their Mom's Retirement Home In Florida while training for a Ballet Recital."
An absolute prince.
Hail to the king, baby.
Back to Doom...I know, I'm not happy about it either.
Shockingly, The Rock passed on being the lead. It's his name first on the marquee, and he's front and center in the marketing, but Dwayne Johnson chose to take the part of the main antagonist - initially a friend before a face heel turn - after joining the cast. The lead role of "John Grimm" went to Karl Urban instead, best known at the time as a side character in The Lord of The Rings. (He was Eomer, as if you didn't already know, nerd.) Johnson said it seemed like the more interesting part, and on paper, I'm sure that's true. In the movie, though? Well, let's get into it."Sarge, the cellophane! It's not holding, they're breaking thr-!"
The Rock plays team leader "Sarge", a bizarre choice of name given that U.S. Marines *hate* that phrase. The most generous thing I can say is that he does what the part calls for; barking orders while showing concern for the team, until it's time to choose between them or the mission. He's not too crude, not too nice, "professional" is the best word for it. The little bit of character he gets is his child-like glee at handling the BFG, which apparently Johnson made sure to take home with him after making the movie. It would be several years before he discovered the secret to making a character like this work in Fast Five (2011): Call everyone "Boy" and sweat *profusely*.
His right-hand man is Karl Urban's John "Reaper" Grimm, and I'm guessing he's damned thankful the boys didn't name him "Fairy Tale" instead. I can't say much about Urban's acting, his characters only defining trait is "Protagonist", he could practically be silent and the movie wouldn't change. Anyways, Reaper is our Doom Guy, more or less; he's been given a backstory tied to the plot, having grown up the child of researchers on Olduvai. They perished in an accident, and John leaves his younger sister Samantha to go enlist. She grows up and follows the family track instead, becoming a UAC scientist herself. Played by Rosamund Pike in the very early days of her career, Sam Grimm is the team's contact on Mars, saddled with explaining technical jargon and telling the audience what's going on with clunky exposition. It's a thankless role, and Pike reads off most of her boring lines like she's going over a receipt to figure out if the cashier flubbed her change.
Urban and Pike, pictured here sharing the same thought: "Please, don't let this be the one they remember me for."
That's something nerds hated when the movie released; the monsters are all people changed by genetic testing. Apparently, Martian folks loved them some gene therapy, and started handing out extra chromosomes to spice up games of Twister or something. Some of them became superhuman, others turned into nightmares. Why the difference?
EVIL—no, really. Sam mentions genetic dispositions for violence and instability, Reaper asks if genes can be evil, and Rosamund Pike *with a straight face* says "10 percent of the human genome hasn't been mapped, they say it might be the soul." I don't understand why they had to use eugenics to replace any religious implications, it was 2005. The games had been around for over a decade, and America especially was gripped with Da Vinci Code fever; being sacrilegious was the hot ticket, yet the guys making the gory action movie were seemingly hoping church groups would buy out a private screening for their congregations.
No hellish incursions or brimstone labyrinths, then; just a by-the-numbers Aliens clone with a BFG. The Rock fingers some monkey blood and monsters out, the proper reward for just *touching shit* in a sci-fi movie. (That's not actually how the genetic tampering spreads, but come on, there's a quarantine in effect, man!) The rest of the team gets wasted by the transformed researchers, including one memorable murder in a bathroom stall. After a few close encounters, Reaper is left bleeding out; Sam injects her brother with Martian how-do-you-do and wouldn't you know it? He's the kind of genetically good person who has a positive reaction. Of course he does, he's *Karl Urban*, baby! After getting his Protagonist Booster Shot, Reaper depopulates Mars in a first-person sequence that's fun but brief. It's the highlight of the movie, but we're talking five minutes right at the end. Then he just has to win a boss fight with The Rock (The Brimstone?), which manages to be a pretty boring fist fight with some clumsy wire-work like a halfhearted wuxia movie. It was the 2000's, the Matrix series was making money, we just did that back then.
If they had just *combined* the wuxia stuntwork with chainsaws, we'd be watching Doom 9: Hurt Me Plenty right now.
You know what I mean, the bits where the teenagers have just arrived at the cabin, when suddenly! A rattle by the door, what fell dread does this portend?! IS THIS—no, sorry, it was a cat, you guys, I'm just a little jumpy. It's a way for the movie to keep you on your toes without breaking the "normalcy" of the setting, the screaming hasn't started yet. Doom stretches that shit out for days, the pacing and reveals come slowly, then all at once in a rush that requires Sarge to have a *dramatic* change in temperament. They can't even blame it on the monster genes, he isn't "turned" until the end. Who wrote this?
A brief aside on writer David Callaham.
Fuck David Callaham.Oh.
Yeah...anyways the director is a more disappointing story, one Andrzej Bartkowiak. The cinematographer for the legendary Sidney Lumet in his later years, Bartkowiak shot classic drama and action, like Terms of Endearment (1983) and Speed (1994). Cinematographers and directors of photography often make a leap to directing, but Andrzej landed weird and broke a leg. I'll admit to liking Romeo Must Die (2000), but the rest of his directorial efforts are a pit of despair. Special note for this website, he also directed Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun LI (2009), a movie so terrible that it would bring out the nastiest side of me to write about. (Genuinely, if you ever see that review go up, assume I'm having the worst day of my life.) His work here is underwhelming, with an aesthetic that's mostly dark corridors covered in brown and gray, and blue lighting strewn about to add a little texture to the shadows. It's a horror movie with too little dread and atmosphere to be scary, and an action movie that's light on excitement and only features one solid set-piece in the third act. It's not especially interesting science-fiction either, since questions like "Are we saying humanity originally came from Mars?" actually go completely unexplored.We're just not touching that, Movie? Not even a *little* curious?
Does any of this junk work?
Some of it! The most impressive part of Doom was the FPS sequence, which took two weeks to shoot and three months to plan out in advance. John Farhat was the visual effects lead and director for the scene, and the DVD release had a great interview with him about the challenges of making it work. A really interesting note was about the aspect ratio of games at the time - 4:3 - and how that allows room to see over your weapon, whereas a widescreen movie - 2.40:1 usually - doesn't have the space for. It *does* mean you have a huge increase in peripheral vision, so they could have more fun with monsters creeping around Reaper, but they had to have him lower his gun as often as possible for the sake of visual clarity. (Is this interesting? It is to me, for some reason; I once called a family member to tell them the Disney+ version of Oklahoma! (1955) was the Todd-AO 70mm widescreen version running at 30 frames per second, and god help me reader, I was *excited*).The DVD extras are pretty fuzzy, but you can see the effect an aspect ratio can have on a shooter here.
Is it Doom?
The whole production is stuffed with easter eggs and references, from the facility being run by a Dr. Carmack to the BFG 3000. There's a lot of cheeky dialogue at the beginning like "Get your game faces on", and ultimately the FPS set piece is probably what fans wanted from a Doom movie in the first place. There's some heavy metal in the soundtrack that's used sparingly, but it's applied at random throughout the movie; one bizarre usage is a few heavy chords played after the squad takes their first casualty. Not for the actual monster attack, just the scene transition from the fallen comrades body. (It's a nitpick, but weird enough it stuck in my head.) Where the Doom games are about a fast-paced experience that leaves you screaming at the powers-that-be—like quaffing cheap energy drinks while running full speed down a flight of stairs with an AMV set to Linkin Park blaring in your headphones—the movie is content to trade adrenaline for a shoddy Aliens imitation. The fan-service and vaguely familiar plot elements are just Doom-scented candles, lit up to lend some stank to the proceedings.Also, they called this the Bio Force Gun...Cowards.
Should I watch it?
Hell no. In the end, the movie is adapting a game that was derivative of several movies, and the results are twice-warmed cinema leftovers. The Thing (1982) and Event Horizon (1997) are both better versions of a sci-fi haunted house story, and if you *need* an underwhelming Alien movie, AVP: Alien Vs. Predator (2004) came out just the year before.There's one redeeming quality to Doom, and you don't need to watch the rest of the movie to understand or enjoy it.
