Awesome Movie Review: Doom

Ahh, Doom. It seems like just yesterday I was in high school, getting a fistful of floppies from a friend, and going home to fire up the modem for some hardcore 28.8 baud action. Doom was the shit, at least until Duke Nukem 3D came out. Even sawing up demons with a chainsaw can’t beat using a toilet and giving a stripper $1. Those are the type of things that make a first-person shooter memorable. It’s been so long since the days of Doom that I can’t even remember the exact plot of the game. I’m pretty sure it involved killing demons on Mars and trying to stop them from getting to Earth. I also remember shooting chickens out of a rocket launcher and unlocking secret videos of naked Pam Anderson. Sadly, there are no chicken launchers in Doom. But thankfully, there’s also no naked Pam Anderson. The last thing I want in a movie is to see a middle-aged collagen beast naked, oozing Hepatitis from every pore.

The plot of Doom starts out fairly close to what I remember the plot of the game being. There’s some magic gate that teleports people from Earth to Mars and The Rock and Eomer are sent through it to investigate a distress call from some scientists. So fat that’s pretty close to the original. However, it never quite becomes clear what exactly The Rock and Eomer are fighting. That, in a nutshell, is the major problem with Doom.

In the video game doom, the character is killing demons. Demons from Hell, if memory serves. In the movie Doom, it first seems as if The Rock and Eomer are fighting humanoid aliens, as there is an extended scene where Eomer’s sister, a scientist on Mars, explains how they found the fossilized remains of some humanoid creature in an archaeological dig. But not just any fossilized humanoid creature. Oh no, it’s a genetically superior humanoid creature, one with 24 chromosomes. 24! That’s one more than humans have. One more = better. This is where things begin to go awry.

As the film goes on, we see that The Rock and Eomer are fighting something far more sinister than alien humanoid creatures with an extra chromosome. There fighting alien humanoid creatures with an extra chromosome that are trying to infect humans. Then, as the film goes on even further, it’s made clear that many of these presumed alien humanoids with an extra chromosome that are trying to infect humans are actually humans who have already been infected by the alien humanoid creature with an extra chromosome. Apparently, when humans are infected with the extra chromosome from the alien humanoid creature with an extra chromosome, it makes the human turn into a humanoid creature with an extra chromosome. Unless, of course, the human being infected is pure of heart, in which case the extra chromosome turns the human into a superhuman warrior of justice and light. Or something like that. As Eomer’s sister helpfully points out, 10% of the human genome is unmapped, so somewhere in the that 10% is the gene that determines if, when attacked and infected by an alien humanoid creature with an extra chromosome, a person turns into a monster or a paladin. Well, not really a paladin (the extra chromosome doesn’t give one the power to turn undead) but I can’t really think of a better one-word equivalent for warrior of justice and light.

Eventually, both The Rock and Eomer are infected by either an alien humanoid creature with an extra chromosome or a human turned into an alien humanoid creature with an extra chromosome. One turns into a superhuman warrior of justice and light. The other turns into a alien humanoid creature with an extra chromosome. I don’t want to spoil the conclusion of this Shakespearean in magnitude showdown, so I’ll let you guess who becomes the paladin and who becomes the sort-of demon. Oh yeah, did I mention that all this extra chromosome shit was caused by genetic experimentation on human prisoners. It’s not really that important, but it lends an extra layer of nonsensical scientific horseshit to the plot. The writers of Doom should be given credit for not stopping at alien humanoid creatures with extra chromosomes that infect humans, turning them into either alien humanoid creatures with an extra chromosome or superhuman warriors of justice and light, depended on the infectee’s genetic makeup. Many screenwriters would have figured that to be more than enough. But the writers of Doom put in that extra effort and made it all the result of man’s hubris.

While I admire the Doom writers’ desire to have their characters fight not just demons or aliens, but some bizarre inexplicable hybrid of aliens, zombies, demons and genetic mutations gone awry, I wish they hadn’t spent so much time explaining the “science” of Doom. The movie could have done without the first ten or fifteen minutes. I don’t really need to know about the teleporting Ark or the history of the scientific facility on Mars or the vacation plans of the space Marines. Just start the movie with The Rock and Eomer arriving at Mars station and get straight to the action. I also could have done without the scene where Eomer’s sister explains how only certain people are turned into the monstrous alien humanoid creatures with extra chromosomes. I’m still not quite sure what happened in that scene. It involved pouring brain fluid on a tongue or something retarded like that. I’m willing to suspend disbelief as much as the next guy, but I don’t believe a scientist at a facility being overrun by alien humanoid creatures with extra chromosomes would waste time extracting brain juice from dead space Marines.

Despite some of the ridiculous plot elements, Doom isn’t a terribly awful movie. Director Andrzej Bartkowiak does a fairly restrained job, with the exception of one gimmicky segment shot in the first person. Because, you see, Doom is based upon a first-person shooter, so it’s like an homage to the genre, or something. Anyone who’s seen Lady in the Lake knows that extended first person perspective gets tiresome after a very short while. But, to his credit, the FPS homage could have been much, much worse. At least it was smooth, without all the fast cuts and quick and jerky camera movements that so many action directors are fond of these days. Doom also lacks the trite usage of people in slow-motion firing a gun in slow motion, usually after the slo-motion death of a comrade. Trust me when I say Doom could have been much, much worse.

Even the music in Doom isn’t nearly as terrible as in most crappy action-movies. The dude who did the music in Pi and the Vin Diesel classic Knockaround Guys provides the score for Doom. I don’t there was any point in the movie where I felt the soundtrack was taking too much attention away from the action at hand. A douchebag like Tony Scott could learn a lot from watching Doom, not because Doom is a particularly great movie, but because it’s a movie that’s not hindered by douchebaggy directing and a douchebaggy soundtrack, like Domino.

Doom could have been much better. Letting The Rock and Eomer fight just plain old aliens or demons would have been far better than the hotchpotch of sci-fi and survival horror villains. Doom also could have been much, much worse. The plot is fucking ridiculous. The space Marines other than The Rock and Eomer are largely expendable clichés. And the movie stars The Rock, who usually costars with monkeys. Monkeys that hump him. Despite all these things, Doom is far from unbearable. The filmmakers deserve some kudos for making an adaptation of a video game that I could actually sit through. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, other than Orson Welles’ rarely scene masterpiece Bubble Bobble. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Doom two tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein. Sure, it’s pretty mediocre, but it’s still much better than most other mediocre action/sci-fi movies out there.