Abandon Hope, Part Deux: "Doom" Review

Film: Doom (no, you don’t have to typeset the movie in capitals. Nor does it deserve it)
Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Genre: Sci-Fi / Horror
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Running Time: 100 minutes
Release Date: October 20th, 2005
Budget: $70 million



Y’know, I realize that it’s only been about a week since I tore into DOOM 3’s bloated carcass like a pack of starved hyenas…but after sitting through the Doom movie again, I almost feel like I owe it an apology. Yes, it’s trapped in the gameplay equivalent of a mid-life crisis, and aptly suffers for it, but even when it strays the farthest from the path, DOOM 3 at least can remember what DOOM should be about. It’s about Hell quite literally breaking loose. It’s about one man standing alone but unperturbed against a seemingly endless army of assailants. Strip away its vestigial features, and even DOOM 3 is about such things. What it is NOT is everything that Doom the movie IS; a molasses-slow soft-sci-fi tale with less respect for the integrity of the franchise than Jack Thompson. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason DOOM 4 hasn’t been released yet is because whatever little dignity that the series retained after this movie has locked itself up in the bathroom and refuses to come out until John Romero says he’s sorry.


Not an easy task. He’d rather make you his bitch.

Then again, it’s not like anyone should be surprised by the film’s poor quality. It is a video game movie, after all, a subgenre of cinema universally notorious for sucking more balls than Lindsay Lohan on a drinking binge. There are a number of theories as to why seemingly no one can create compelling movies out of beloved video games, but there’s two that really stick out in my mind as the root of the problem, both of which Doom demonstrates quite well. And the first of these is simple to understand: the makers of these films are lacking in appreciation. In a film adaption of any sort – but particularly the rabid, attentive, and critically-inclined fanbases of subcultures like video games – respect for the integrity of the source material is vital, and the lack of it is a death sentence. This should have been apparent a couple decades ago when some idiot decided that the best way to bring the universally-adored Mario Bros. to the silver-screen was to give them rocket boots and ray guns in order to battle subterranean dinosaurs. Hell, arguably the closest a video game movie has come to capturing the essence of the games themselves was the Silent Hill movie, and even that film missed the point so badly that merely mentioning it around Silent Hill purists (such as myself) induces more blinding fear and personalized pain than a trip to the Otherworld. Or maybe that was the point.


Pictured: the murder of Dennis Hopper’s career.

But Doom doesn’t even come close, and it knows it damn well. You don’t even need to see the movie to understand how loosely it grasps the basic tenants of the classic it’s based on, because even reading the bare-bones plot synopsis leaves the impression that a most vital component is missing. There is no Hell in the Doom movie. There is no Satan, no demons, not even zombies (well, not in the traditional sense, anyway). Every single reference to the occult and the damned – y’know, the basis for the ENTIRE CONFLICT OF THE GAMES – is siphoned out for theatres. It’s just about the least necessary and most confusing plot perversion I can think of. Why did they do this, to piss us off on purpose?! The film didn’t even intend to make the grab for a profitable PG-13 rating, so that certainly couldn’t have been the motivation. The only reason I see for why they would have done this was to avoid any potential controversy, at which point I have to ask: you guys do realize what made the first game so famous, right?


HINT: It wasn’t the fluffy bunnies.

So what’s the origin story for our flesh-eating monstrosities if Beezelbub is out of the picture? Well, fasten your seat belts and strap on your helmets, my beloved readers, because here comes a brand new crash course in stupidity.

In the film, as it turns out, Mars happened to be home to an ancient, advanced humanoid alien race; granted, this is a silly plot point that even DOOM 3 brought up every now and again with the Soul Cube malarkey, so we can let that bit slide. Unlike in the game, however, this species was essentially genetically identical to humanity, with one small twist: a synthesized 24th chromosome that granted them superhuman capabilities, including immunity from disease and the ability to heal from grievous wounds almost instantly. However, the chromosome is apparently attracted to unmapped centers of the genome which correspond to genetic indicators of both good and evil; people exhibiting a genetic predisposition for good retain their human traits, while the more psychotic and immoral individuals become transformed by the gene into mindless monsters who can, in turn, infect their victims with the chromosome. Inevitability, the Union Aerospace Corporation begins tampering with this 24th chromosome, and predictability, these genetically-enhanced mutants start a panic on the Martian facility.

You got all that? Good. Now, please take a moment to take out your repressed frustrations of idiocy-induced rage upon something other than your computer screen. Once finished, you may choose to continue reading, OR, because you should recognize by this point just how hopeless this movie really is, you can stop now and exit your browser before the remainder of your faith in the artistic spirit has evaporated. Just hit the little red X in the corner.


That one.

For those of you still with us…hoo-boy, where do we even begin to discuss how monumentally brainless this concept is? First of all, the idea of a gene being affected by ambiguous and conceptual establishments such as “good” or “evil” is astoundingly foolish, without question. Sorry. Secondly, I don’t know just how many of the writers working on this film passed any sort of biology class in high school, but they should all at least have a general understanding about how the human genome works. Chromosomes aren’t a fucking virus; they can’t be injected through a hypodermic needle, they can’t be passed on through fluid transfer (seriously, when was the last time you were bitten by a dog and had your DNA structure remapped?), and they sure as hell don’t cause mutations over the course of a few minutes. Thirdly, and perhaps most glaringly…uh, 24th chromosomes already exist, guys. Except those individuals with an added pair usually don’t inherit superhuman traits or transform into monsters. No, they usually end up with less cinematic and more legitimately horrifying conditions, like Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Down Syndrome, Triple X Syndrome, and Klinefelter's Syndrome, among others. Congratulations, makers of Doom, you’re all a bunch of insensitive dicks.



Of course, this pitiful revelation doesn’t fully unravel itself until much later in the movie, so the uninformed might hold out through the beginning in the false hope of seeing some kick-ass, demon-flavored action. Even so, you’ll probably have your hopes dashed in the first few seconds when you see a flock of bad actors…er, I mean scientists running around plasticine sets stolen from Ridley Scott’s backyard, trying to escape from some unimposing camera angles. Of course, this disaster calls for some backup, so the UAC calls in a troop of marines to quarantine the base, search for survivors, and retrieve their valuable property. You may notice that I said marines – as in more than one – and you may find that odd considering how you can count just how many notable human characters exist across all three major games of the series on one hand. Well, that just brings us to the second major reason why video game movies don’t work: because the two mediums are incompatible with one another.

A video game tells its story in a much different fashion from a movie. Because of the power of audience interactivity, you don’t need a large cast of characters nor long exchanges of dialogue to explain the plot; properly done, it is possible to tell winding and epic tales through a game even when no one is speaking, and at the player’s own pace, no less (the Silent Hill series, Portal, and Shadow of the Colossus are all great examples of this). Games like DOOM serve as an even more alarming revelation that games can remain entertaining even with little-to-no plot at all. Films, by contrast, cannot function this way. Transmuting a story (or lack thereof) intended to be told through a considerably less linear and structured medium towards a complete different format, as you might imagine, causes issues; it results in restructuring the essence of the narrative to the point of unrecognizability just so that it can fit onscreen. And there are few better examples of how devastating this transformation can be than the Doom movie.

So yes, there is now a cast of characters in the DOOM universe (if you can really still call it that). All you really need to know, however, is that one of the marines is played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and another is portrayed by the guy who played Eomer in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Pretty much everyone else is a bit player destined to serve as an expositional dump truck or to be brutally murdered for our, ahem, amusement. The other soldiers are particularly unmemorable because they encompass almost every one-trait stereotype to be found in the ranks of cinematic military forces. The young, inexperienced rookie with the heart of gold? Check. The hollering adrenaline-filled warrior who treats lethal combat like a game? Check. The silent religious nutjob? Check. The asshole? Oh-ho-ho, you better believe that’s a check. Seriously, around the time this motley crew of clichés was boarding a dropship and exchanging insults with one another, I was starting to question whether or not I was actually watching Predator by mistake.


“C’mon guys, this pose will be great for the trailer!”

And perhaps I wouldn’t have been bothered so much by this if they had used the expanded cast to tell a compelling tale. But as we’ve established, DOOM never really had much of a story to begin with, and the aforementioned, blisteringly-idiotic changes they brought to it aren’t exactly enough to pad out the size of a feature length epic. So what exactly does our badass clique of heroes do when they arrive at the monster-ridden lab?

NOTHING! You get NOTHING! About 75% of the Doom experience is about watching these battle-hardened soldiers stumble about in the dark searching in vain for plotpoints and the occasional ineffective scare (oh yes, Doom thinks it's a horror film, isn't that cute?). Every now and again the agonizing boredom is punctuated by a line or two of mildly significant dialogue explaining the soft-science nightmare that is the plot, and the marines certainly are trigger-happy, riddling shadows with bullets at the drop of hat. But honest-to-God action sequences are few and far between, and everything in between serves as mind-numbingly dull filler. Do you want to know how long it takes before a marine is attacked by anything resembling a monster (slightly crazed zombie-like survivors not-withstanding)? 40 fucking minutes! Seriously! And even then you’ll be reeling from the abysmal special effects of the baddies far too hard to enjoy it. It’s like the filmmakers modeled their movie directly off of the complaints about DOOM 3, rather than the game itself.


In one of the more accurate scenes from the movie, The Rock wonders where the hell all of the duct tape is.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the urgency of the story is slowed to a slug-like crawl right from the word go, it gets worse. The scenery, like I mentioned, seems pulled straight from Aliens or Blade Runner, only about 50 times less interesting. Compounding the problem, the laughably small number of sets and the poor, choppy editing leech all sense of scope from the UAC base; hell, we rarely even get a reminder that most of the action takes place on Mars, so the film practically feels like it’s taking place in a two-story house that forgot to pay the electric bill. Meanwhile, the script is pathetic, yet another symptom of converting a largely plotless game into theatric form. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I said that one of the marines tells another, “I gotta take a dump” without any sort of provocation, but yep, it happens. It’s even worse when, a few minutes later, that same marine drops his rifle’s magazine and spends about thirty seconds of the completely tensionless scene retrieving it…only to be killed for completely unrelated reasons a few seconds later. For goodness sake, the DOOM comic was better written than this!


OK, maybe that was a lie.

There are, of course, the few shameless occasions where the director throws a bone to the game’s fanbase in a futile attempt to keep their interest. As far divorced as the movie is from the game, it does sneak a reference or two in there. One of the scientists, for example, happens to be named Dr. Carmack, an obvious nod of the head towards id Software’s co-founder John Carmack. The Rock also happens to stumble upon the infamous BFG…although the movie attempts to retcon the weapon’s official name to “Bio-Force Gun”, it shoots a blue glob of caustic goo instead of a green irradiated explosive, and the only target he manages to hit with the damn thing is a group of unarmed civilians off-screen (seriously movie, fuck you). And course the monsters are pulled from the game’s roster, though thanks to the religiously-cleansed new background only about three different kinds show up, and they rarely do more than swipe at the marines for a bit before running away, lest there be any intense fight scenes in this movie.

And then there’s the famous POV section, Doom’s purported coup-de-grace. For about five minutes towards the end of the movie, we inhabit the first-person perspective of our protagonist as he trudges through corridors, blasting everything in sight. In all fairness, it’s probably the closest the movie ever comes to feeling like DOOM, but it’s all too little, too late. The cheesy special effects and shoddy camera work simply inhibit the effectiveness of the sequence, not to mention that it appears out of nowhere, has nothing to add to the story, and slows the build-up to the climax of the movie (which, if you can believe it, is essentially a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style fistfight. In a DOOM movie!). And apparently our good friends Mac and Bob were stationed at the UAC’s Ark complex as well, because during the sequence our hero stumbles upon not one, but TWO chainsaws lying about haphazardly in the research facility, one of which he uses to brutalize the Pinky demon (pretty much the only interesting monster design plucked from the games).


Well…at least it kind of LOOKS LIKE the game…the decade-old game…

Overall, it comes across as a rather desperate last-ditch effort to make the Doom label seem appropriate, even if it is the most interesting and action-packed scene of the whole thing. Here’s an idea, filmmakers: maybe the next time you want to attract movie-goers with a neat gimmick, maybe you should try to utilize it for most – or maybe even all – of your movie instead of just the last few minutes. It would be difficult, sure, but I guarantee you it would sell better than the bland, soulless turd you ended up making, and I can think of at least one other movie that pulled it off.


I never thought I’d see the day where I would reference one of my all-time favorite films in comparison to the Doom movie, but…there ya go. Maybe just watch this instead?

So that’s Doom, the movie: yet another forgettable relic to inscribe upon the pantheon of terrible video game adaptations. At least Uwe Boll movies are watchable with a big bag of popcorn, a group of friends with good taste, and a running MST3K-style commentary; by contrast, the only ways you can make fun of this movie just remind you how generic, inaccurate, and unnecessary it truly is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to wash my hands of this whole debacle by playing the first good ol’ DOOM. Those hell barons aren’t going to gib themselves!

Awesomely-Bad: An Introduction to Movies That Are So Bad That They're Actually Good

The monster that the movie has been waiting to unveil finally jumps onto the frame in an attempt to startle – and rend the flesh of off – the helpless teenage protagonists. The only problem is that you, the viewer, saw it coming from a mile away…along with the Party City price tag on the monster’s neck.

Actors deliver their cheesy dialogue with all the grace and subtlety of a caffeinated gerbil. The plot is a hodge-podge of pseudo-mythological nonsense, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, and/or Star Wars plagiarism, derived from a screenplay most likely penned by the producer’s eight-year-old son…and the budget seems to have been procured from that very same boy’s piggy bank savings. Yep, there’s no mistaking it at this point: you are watching an incontrovertibly bad movie.

So why the hell are you having so much fun?

It’s certainly not a point of shame; besides, even if it were, I would be the last to admit it. This may surprise many, but I absolutely adore certain bad movies. That’s right: for all the time I spend ragging on certain instances of art that fail to actually be art, I’m much further charmed by the pleasantries of 1980s B-movie fodder than I am by the majority of today’s modern theatrical releases. Hell, if you were to break into my room when you knew I was about to watch a movie, it’s probably just as likely that I’d be popping in the DVD for either The Godfather or Street Fighter The Movie.


Well...of course.

You might be questioning why this is so, and if that happens to be true, then welcome aboard the S.S. Who the Hell Knows, because we’re on the same boat.


I apologize profusely for the above sentence. It was late and I was tired.

I’ve pondered long and hard about why people can enjoy themselves watching a film that they know, deep down, is an unquestionable piece of shit. How is it that one bad film causes deep displeasure and the other does not? Are they not both equally damaging to the infrastructure of film? And if the “bad” movie makes for good entertainment, does it then cease to register among the damned and rise to the sacred level of…good?

Ultimately, though, I came to a realization, one born of distinction. You see, there are truly two breeds of bad movie in existence: bad-bad movies and awesomely-bad movies.

Alas, we will spend the majority of time in the theaters experiencing the former category, and they truly are a detestable breed. The common bad-bad movie fails to entertain for many reasons, and I could spend the rest of this article listing them in full: bad acting, stupid story, half-baked morals, poor special effects, appearances by Paulie Shore, involvement from Michael Bay, etc. These movies emotionally drain us and leave the empty husks in the theater to rot, usually for the sake of a quick buck.


...not like I'm pointing fingers or anything...

The line separating these monstrosities from the awesomely-bad movie is a thin and blurry one. An awesomely-bad movie can possess any of the above traits (with the exception of Michael Bay, for obvious reasons) and still manage to entertain. There is no exact science to the distinction; rather, one simply feels the unique aura of good-heartedness about the film that renders it fun to watch in spite of its flaws. This aura can arise from excess silliness, in both premise or event; the charms of a low-budget production; or perhaps even a single moment that makes you sit up and laugh out loud. The unfortunate truth, however, is that these films grow rarer every day, consumed by Hollywood’s endless march into genericism and blandness over true enjoyment.

…which is why I’ve compiled a little primer of movies that I personally to be “so bad that they’re good”, so that their kind does not fade into obscurity outside the reaches of the Internet. So the next time you have a free moment and want to watch a movie, but don't feel up to being depressed by a good movie like Fargo again, then you can always turn to…

The Official Supernova Asylum Introductory Guide to Awesomely-Bad Cinema

Troll 2
Often considered the holy grail of hilariously awful films, Troll 2 is a film so universally incompetent that it even manages to get its own name wrong (not only is the film completely unrelated to the original Troll, but it doesn’t even use the word “troll” once). Between the burlap-sack-masked villains, the bizarre morals (vegetarianism is evil?), and the worst line-reading in the history of cinema, Troll 2 has been elevated from its humble, low-budget origins to cult status. There’s even a documentary detailing the fervor surrounding this movie, entitled Best Worst Movie. Consider this required viewing for anyone entering the realm of “so-bad-it’s-good” cinema.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
Battlefield Earth heralds the arrival of subpar filmmaking into the 21st century…and it is glorious. Striving to be a colossal sci-fi epic, its ambition collapses in on itself in every conceivable way over the course of the film. From the bafflingly off-kilter camera angles to John Travolta’s worst over-acting ever, every last frame of Battlefield Earth is a prime example of unintentional comedy. It’s been universally panned across the board, but don’t let that inhibit you from seeing it; I guarantee it makes for a much more entertaining science-fiction flick than…oh, say, Avatar.

Manos: The Hands of Fate
When a film is created based on a bet and the screenplay is drafted upon a napkin in a Texan coffee shop, the results are almost immediately bound for the dust bin. But thanks to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the archaeologists of obscure movies, you, too, can now enjoy this once-lost piece of theatrical blasphemy. There are so many things wrong with this movie that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps the shoddy editing that occasionally keeps shots of the clapboard in the film? The completely irrelevant sideplot that mostly consists of a random couple making out inside of a car, several miles away from where the “action” is taking place? The fact that the title literally translates out from Spanish into Hands: The Hands of Fate? Overall, it’s best if you simply accept and embrace these facts as you laugh out loud to the sight of a misplaced bet shriveling and dying onscreen.

Dragonball: The Magic Begins
Before there was the big-budget 20th Century Fox adaption of the famous anime series, there was the bootleg Taiwanese knock-off. Try in vain to cling on to your treasured sanity as a monkey child, an obese shape-shifter, a wise-cracking cockatoo and a pedophilic turtle-man set out to save the world from a Power Rangers villain castaway and make veiled references to rape. And you know what the crazier part is? I’ve told that this is actually the MORE accurate adaption of the series!

Hobgoblins
Yet another fossilized turd returned to the public conscious by the MST3K team, Hobgoblins is most famous for being a dark, twisted mirror into which all your deepest fears manifest themselves as agents of chaos that converge into the blackened void of a new age. By which I mean the film makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I could attempt to detail the plot of this movie to you in full, but such an attempt may prove dangerous without a strait jacket and a cache of drugs on hand to soothe the senses.

Night of the Lepus
The horror movie genre was created with the noble goal of making humans fear that anything and everything in the world has the potential to murder you. And so it is that we have Night of the Lepus, which, for those of you not familiar with animal taxonomy, concerns giant killer rabbits. Yes, rabbits, almost as if that one scene from Monty Python and Holy Grail became self-aware and mutated into its own film. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s difficult to conjure up the slightest bit of terror when the face of death looking down upon me possesses floppy ears and adorable beady eyes. But it’s hardly the most insane and ludicrous of premises, not when there exists a film like…

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
I swear to you I am not making any of this up. There really is a movie out there about a sentient bed that digests its victims, proving that, in Hollywood, the sky really is the limit. By all accounts, this is pretty weird as it is. Weirder still is the fact that the film took about 26 years to release after its completion. Even weirder is that the movie actually takes the form of, not a cheesy horror film, but a grungy art house epic, complete with inner monologues, stone-cold acting and trippy dream sequences. But to really, truly get a grip on how batshit-bizarre Death Bed really is, allow me to describe the most intricate, overcomplicated way to defeat a monster in a movie ever: to destroy the demon bed, one of the protagonists has to draw a circle of blood around the bed, create matching circles in the outside yard, gather the bones of the bed’s victims and carry them into the outside circles nude, which teleports the bed outside and destroys it…somehow. Why not just throw a match in the room and set the damn thing on fire?!

Yor: Hunter From the Future
Paper-mache dinosaurs. Purple cavemen. Laser-shooting cyborgs. Fire mummies. The single manliest thing to ever happen on film. Yor: Hunter From the Future is an amazing movie for all of these reasons and more, and if you disagree, I may have to hunt you down and destroy you, for it is clear that you have no soul.

Pretty Much Anything By Bruno Mattei
The surprisingly robust filmography of Italian director Bruno Mattei is like an endless library of laughably awful creations. The movies range across many different exploitation genres, from zombie films to Nazi porn (no, seriously), but I refer mainly to his blatant plagiarism of many classic American films, including Predator (Robowar), Jaws (Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws), and Rambo (Strike Commando). Of course, my favorite is the movie which plays out like a shot-for-shot recreation of Aliens, and goes by the name…Terminator 2. Again, I’m dead serious. He even beat James Cameron to the punch by two years!

Pretty Much Anything By Uwe Boll
If you know anything about Uwe Boll, you know why I’m bringing him up here. Needless to say, he’s become legendary for his ability to take popular (or sometimes, not) video game franchises and castrate everything that was ever holy and sacred about them for their film adaptations…and yet we all still come crawling back to see them, possibly because we know we’re getting a good (read: bad) product. It’s a sad indicator when your career highlight is having a cameo in your own film wherein you get shot to death by police officers…along with all the innocent children the room. I swear I’m not lying!

Pretty Much Any SyFy Original Movie
Though the 1980s golden age of B-movies may be long gone, its tradition lives on through the glorious vessel that is the SyFy channel. Flip it on late at night and you’ll likely be greeted with the sight of horribly CGI-rendered beasties being shot at by clueless actors in their late 40s with grenade launchers. I guarantee that almost any one of them is bound to be a laugh-out-loud masterpiece…it’s just a shame you have to wallow through hours of Wrestlemania to see them.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
OK, I’m not going to lie: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is the single greatest movie ever made. Yes, yes it is. How could it not be? Think about it: Jesus Christ teams up with a Mexican wrestler and a spandex-wearing secret agent nun to defend the lesbians of Ottawa, Canada from surgeons, atheists, and skin-harvesting vampires. What, exactly, in that sentence does NOT sound like the greatest thing ever?! Watch this movie. Like seriously, right now. It’s the best.

Now go forth, my friends. Go forth, and embrace the awfulness!