Doom - a guilty pleasure

 

Do you know how many times I’ve watched Doom? Over a dozen. I’m not kidding. I remember I even went and saw it at the cinema nine years ago. A year later I bought the DVD, and in less than a decade I’ve watched it maybe twice a year. The reason is simple; I’m a sucker for movies that use the ‘Alien’ structure. You know what I mean, when a group of characters are put in an isolated area and a monster picks them off one by one. Doom is like that. Granted it’s not a particularly good version of it, but it does have its own juvenile sense of energy, and is honestly one of the better game-to-film adaptations.

I just find it so goddamn entertaining. Look, it has a fuckload of problems – the pacing is weird, the action is bizarre, the writing is pathetic and none of the characters have anything going on, but it all sort of clicks for me. I think it’s because the movie knows it’s pretty bad. It doesn’t aim for high art, it never presumes to shoot above its station. There’s no pretention, it’s a dumb, simple action flick.

The premise of the videogame series was always astoundingly simple; you are a marine on Mars, a gate to hell has opened and demons are wandering around, you need to kill them. Oddly enough, the film version somehow managed to screw that up.

A scientific research base on Mars goes into lockdown after a containment breach and something has killed a bunch of scientists.  In response, a military rescue ops team is sent to secure the base, find the missing scientists and eliminate the threat. The team is a weird bunch of archetypes. There’s the sleazy one, the tough black one, the funny black one, the creepy religious guy, and the wimpy rookie (there’s also an Asian guy, but he gets decapitated before any discernable personality comes up). Rounding up the crew is our main character, John Grimm, codenamed Reaper (Get it? Grimm Reaper. Yeah, they did that), played by Karl Urban. Dwayne Johnson (still going by The Rock) is their unit leader, Sarge, a tough, no-nonsense commando dedicated to the mission.

When they get to the base their mission is somewhat complicated with the appearance of Grimm’s sister Samantha (played by Rosamund Pike), a researcher who needs an escort so she can retrieve important data files. She goes along for the ride, against Grimm’s wishes, and very quickly the team find themselves being picked off by horrific monsters lurking the halls.

The writing is bad with groan-worthy dialogue but the cast really freaking give it their all. Karl Urban bloody gives it his all (he always seems to throw himself into every role he gets), while Rosamund Pike is descent as his sister. The Rock does it the absolute best. This was made in the early stages of his film career, before he became the surprisingly lovable action/comedy star he is today, but the spark is evident this early. There’s a knowing humour in how he overplays the super-tough Sarge who goes full psycho by the films end.

One massive piece of weirdness is the action. The early parts of the movie go for tension and atmosphere with the scenes of the marines exploring the shifty research facility are shot dark, with only brief glimpses of the monsters as the crew gets taken out one by one. Later scenes go full crazy, with a man vs monster deathmatch in an electrified cage being a standout. The movie even ends with a ridiculous bout of fisticuffs (where the Rock gets to show off a few wrestling moves).

The big action scene they played up in the movie (one that was a big part of the hype) is the first person segment, where the movie pays homage to the videogame by essentially becoming videogame footage. It’s like a seven minute haunted house ride from Karl Urban’s perspective, where actors dressed as zombies and monsters pop up in front of the camera while Karl Urban’s CGI hands and gun blows them away while rock music plays in the background. It’s exactly as awful and wonderful as it sounds, a bafflingly horrible idea that’s still entertaining for pure silliness. It’s also really weird and out of place, since before then the action had mostly been slower and less intense.

“I guess you’ve gotta face your demons sometime” says Karl Urban in one of the cheesier lines in the movie. It’s also one that brings up a major complaint from unsatisfied fans - the monsters in the Doom games were hellspawn, but here in the movie they’re genetically mutated people. It’s a major, unnecessary change large borne by the fact that American scriptwriters can’t seem to get over ‘genetic supersoldier experiments going wrong’ as the go-to explanation for monsters and zombies. Otherwise the movie actually does a really good job of referencing the game. The monster designs are lifted from Doom 3, and even the mars base has a somewhat similar design in most scenes. Sarge even gets the BFG (though he never actually kills anything with it).

Doom is a movie I can always come back to when I need to kill a lazy two hours. It isn’t a great movie, it doesn’t even stand out in its genre, but it remains entertaining regardless.