It’s finally out. It might actually be playing in a theatre somewhere in the world right now! The Doom movie, at last! After being tossed between various studios, directors and actors, Doom has finally been made into a movie.
My expectations of the film were pretty low; I didn’t want to get any hopes up. Let’s face it; videogame-based movies aren’t usually the prime examples of good moviemaking, putting it lightly. But I had to go watch it, naturally. I’ve been waiting for this movie for over ten years! Ever since, a long time ago in a forgotten classroom in a forgotten school, my friend showed me an old pc gaming magazine which stated a Doom movie was in the works, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. As the years went by, this became sort of a running gag between my friend and me. Every now and then we’d remember that article and start wondering when IS the movie coming out, and if the magazine could possibly have been bullshitting. But here we are, several years later and here it is, playing at a cinema near you.
After watching the film, I’m still unsure about it. I can definitely say I like it more than I thought I would, but all in all it’s just a somewhat average or less movie. But I think this is a movie that works well with the ‘what worked - what didn’t work’ way of reviewing, because the film does some things exceptionally well, things that brought a huge smile to my face, and some things were just a regrettable miss. From the beginning, when the huge movie title covers the entire screen, the Doom logo we all know and love, I could tell that this movie knew where it was coming from. It knew its heritage, and it was joyfully flaunting it. I’m going to try and refrain from spoilers, even though there’s not much that can actually spoil the film as it’s pretty predictable. Nevertheless, here’s your spoiler warning. If you absolutely want to know nothing about this film before you watch it, you’d better stop reading or just skim through it and hope you don’t catch something you don’t want to know.
Firstly, the location design for the movie is superb. It looks like it was taken right out of the game (Doom3, that is - the game this movie is based on). The corridors, the labs, even the computers bare a huge resemblance to the game. The little touches are what I really love about it, because it lets me know, as a Doom fan, that these people aren’t just a collection of folks who banded to make a movie out of a title they’d never seen or heard of before. Watching this movie, you can tell someone actually has played the game. And it’s not just the location. It’s the music, which I thought at first was the game’s soundtrack. It’s also the weapons. Each marine has some weapon that features in the game, from the pistol to, yes, the BFG. Apparently the BFG stands for Bio Force Gun, but The Rock calls it for what we know it as; Big Fucking Gun. Another touch which tells you the people who made this film know Doom. Maybe not as well as we do, but they know it, and it’s great watching this. Another thing which I loved was this guy on a futuristic wheelchair thingy, he tells everyone to just call him ‘pinky’. If you’ve played the game you know what this guy turns into.
It’s clear that this movie was made by people who have played Doom and know what it’s about. Why, then, oh why, did they have to change the plot? Don’t get me wrong, the plot in the movie is surprisingly decent for this type of film. It’s not ‘just’ a virus or some shit, and they even managed to insert the good vs. evil thing. But really, no matter how good their plot is, it just can’t beat the ‘portal to hell’ plotline. It just can’t. If these creatures were from hell, if they were demons, if there was a portal to hell they’d have to find, the movie would have been so much better. The whole first section of the movie feels more like Aliens than anything else. Not much action, just random gunfire at shadows that lurk about. Then it feels a bit like a zombie movie. Another problem I found with it is that when people have to turn into these things, it limits how many monsters you can have at a time. If they were all from hell, you could have a legion of these things with no problem whatsoever. Also, avoiding the hell plotline, they pretty much passed on using all the hell related scares we could’ve had. What’s supposed to scare us now is the occasional severed organ or the lurking shadows. But Hell would’ve given us a whole range of things to be scared of. I really don’t know why, seeing as they really did play the game, they didn’t stick with the plot. Maybe they wanted something of their own, or maybe they were afraid religious groups would ban it. Who knows? It’s just a shame.
There’s quite a bit of dialogue and it’s not all bad, but, while I appreciate the attempt at giving this film more depth, it’s just not needed. What I want from Doom is a massacre of hellish proportion. The building of tension is redundant. The hero, John ‘Reaper’ Grimm, has some bad memories from Mars, where his parents died or something. But this is never really fully addressed. We see he’s troubled, and getting flashbacks or whatnot, but it’s just there for no reason and doesn’t affect much of anything. Reaper also has issues with his sister, a scientist in the Mars facility, which are also trivial. The only truly good part of suspense is watching how The Rock’s character, Sarge, slowly degrades from a cool, calm and collected officer to something of a lunatic.
The action, as mentioned before, is sparse throughout most of the film, with the largest and most impressive action reserved for the finale. This brings us to the best part of the movie, the 5 minute or so scene everyone who knows about this movie wants to see; the First Person Shooter sequence. This sequence is original, fresh, exciting, cool and very well executed. I was largely impressed by it when it was over. But that’s not why I loved it so much. Even if it had been a flop, an embarrassment and a mistake, I would’ve loved it. Because, more than anything, it felt like Doom, and again it showed that these people just knew what they were doing. They knew what game this was, its fan base and what it did for computer gaming. They threw caution to the air and put something that was there purely for the Doom fans, because anyone who hasn’t played the game would not get it. And the sequence is good. It occurs near the end of the movie, from Reaper’s point of view. It’s like looking at a gameplay trailer for Doom4 with the graphics turned all the way up. They did everything. They even did the weapon reload which I loved. The music in that sequence is especially good. It was such a beautiful homage to the game, and such a good sequence, that it alone is reason enough to watch the film. I hope no one starts copying this thing, because I doubt it can work anywhere else.
The final action scene, ‘between good and evil’, is a bit of a letdown. It starts good enough but eventually seems a tad forced when they start to fight without weapons, ‘honorably’. It’s a good scene but I expected something a bit more climatic. The ending itself is also a letdown. I hate it when there’s no closure or anything resembling that. He just beats the bad guy, and 5 seconds later ‘THE END’. I like something after that, a moment to catch your breath, look around, see what you’ve done. The end credits are awesome though.
All in all, like I said at first, this movie does some things incredibly well and some things it misses. It is enjoyable, however, especially if you’re a Doom fan. So go watch it at least once. If you don’t like it, no one’s going to make you watch it again.
