Doom: The Movie

Written by Kyle Williams  on October 21, 2005

Movie Review: The usher didn't rip my ticket, he chainsawed my ticket.

Tweet

Comments

I gave the movie version of Doom absolutely no thought until about a month ago. Sure, it was going to star The Rock and was being based on one of the most beloved videogame franchises this side of the mushroom kingdom but I had been burned before. Street Fighter. Mortal Kombat and its sequels. Alone in the Dark. However, it was just about a month ago that I saw the trailer. You know, the one with the first-person camera perspective. It was then that I knew that I must see this film even though I still expected a crap-fest.

Completely contrary to everything that I know to be good and true in this world, Doom is a pretty okay movie. Perhaps I went in expecting it to suck so bad that there is no way for it to have been as abysmal as I anticipated it would be. Regardless of how, exactly, it happened, it did happen. And I had a good time.

What Doom does very well is create atmosphere. It is almost like watching Aliens for the first time as Sarge, Reaper, and their RRTS cohorts make their way through a research facility on Mars. Director Andrzej Bartkowiak does a great job of letting shadows fuel our imagination as the team responds to a corporate distress call at this outpost. The first hour, maybe hour & fifteen, minutes of the film make a good suspense film. We start to see into the personalities of the characters by watching how they respond to the unknown. Then, surprise, the characters start to be killed off. In all honesty, Doom's biggest shortcoming lies in its predictability. Even when the suspense is as thick as molasses you basically know what is going to happen.

Once Doom starts to pick up the pace and move towards resolution it feels like a completely different movie. This shift does a great job of keeping the audience's interest. Just as soon as you start to get a little bit tired of the pacing-through-the-darkness routine it ends, replaced by the blast-everything routine. Once again, when the blast-everything routine starts to get old they end the film. I think that this speaks volumes about the editing of the film and explains why several of the character hooks are left undeveloped, even though you expect them to become fully fleshed out.

Now for the game player in me. Ahem. [cough]

It is great to watch Doom pay homage to the man that got the whole fps genre going in the first place. It is literally only seconds into the film that we meet one Dr. Carmack. Unfortunately, that is just about where the similarities between the two mediums end. Where Doom the videogame is an action-packed ode to trigger happy demon killing, Doom the movie focuses on the terror that comes from being trapped in an unfamiliar place with God-knows-what. The general theme is the same, Marines fighting monsters in a base on Mars, but even the source of the terror is taken away from the denizens of hell being released. I won't spoil the "twist" for you but it was at right about the point where they reveal the source of the madness that the movie shifts gears into the clichщ filled world of mixed media. The pace picks up to what I originally expected and we are treated to God-Mode, the first-person escapade of Reaper. As for the gimmicky camera mode? It worked surprisingly well for the two to three minutes they used it and they ended the sequence at just the right time. Now that I've seen it, I never need to see it used again. You hear that Hollywood!? NEVER.

Bottom Line
At its best, Doom channels science-fiction classics like Aliens and Predator. At its worst, it is still better than Alone in the Dark. Surprisingly less action-oriented than its videogame counterpart, Doom does a good job spending the first hour-plus of the movie creating a tense atmosphere while thrusting in a number of shock-value moments for good measure. It is the last 45 (or so) minutes that are exactly what you expect: campy, predictable, over-the-top action.

At the end of the day, Doom chainsaws itself to a C+.