Review: Doom

Note: This review was contributed by James Rocchi

Games are going to take over from movies as the mainstream form of entertainment, but why is that happening? Well, books tell you something. Movies show you something. But games let you do something.

-- Dan Houser, VP Creative Rockstar Games, as quoted in “Gangs of New York”, The New York Times, Oct. 16, 2005.

First released in 1993, ID Software’s Doom revolutionized computer gaming – an action game where you were looking at the world of your targets through the eyes of the character you controlled, with demons and creatures and long-fanged beasts popping into your field of view on a regular basis to be dispatched by whichever weapon of mass destruction you happened to have on-hand. Subsequent iterations of Doom have upped the polygons-per-second and the bloodshed, driving sales of computer video cards and teaching America’s kids that two in the head stops pretty much anything.

Now, Doom comes to the big screen in a movie adaptation directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak – who went from working as a cinematographer on high-gloss trash like Speed and Dante’s Peak, to directing even glossier, trashier films like Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave. With its run-and-gun plot, Doom makes Romeo Must Die look like, well, Shakespeare in comparison. The opening voiceover tells us how a portal connecting our planet to Mars was found in Nevada, and a team of archeologists, scientists and others are investigating the long-dead ruins found on the Red Planet. The film then shows us the staff of the Mars base being chased down and turned into fajita meat by half-seen creatures – and a distress call is made back to Earth.


In Doom’s future, the phrase “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli” has apparently been extended a bit, as the Marine’s Rapid Response Tactical Squad, led by Sarge (The Rock) is assigned the task of teleporting to Mars and getting to the bottom of the crisis. Sarge’s squad is straight from central casting – the weaselly Portman (Richard Brake), Jesus-loving Goat (Ben Daniels), chain-gun wielding Destroyer (DeObia Oparei), smooth-talkin’ Duke (Raz Adoti), silent Mac (Yao Chin) and the new guy, The Kid (Al Weaver). Sarge explains to his right-hand man Reaper (Karl Urban) that he doesn’t have to go to Mars – suggesting that the Red Planet has bad memories for Reaper – but Reaper cowboys up and joins the team regardless.

Once on Mars, the team is joined by Dr. Samantha Grimm (Rosamunde Pike), a high-level scientist and, yes, Reaper’s sister. Their mission: Go into the sealed-off portions of the base, figure out what’s going on and retrieve vital data from the servers of the company that runs the base. Portman’s unimpressed: “Five bucks says this is a disgruntled ex-employee with a gun.” Portman will lose his five bucks, among other things.

Doom seems to be taking cues from Predator, right down to choice-of-weapons; the script, by Wesley Strick and Dave Callaham, isn’t afraid to reference – by which I mean rip off – Predator, Romero zombie flicks, James Cameron’s Aliens and a thousand other B-movies. We soon learn that the corporation on Mars was researching the mysterious 24th chromosome found in the remains of Mars’s inhabitants … and making monsters who can turn other people into even more monsters. This leads to dialogue like the Sarge’s imperative to two of his men: “Duke, Kid … get back to the dig and make sure those dead scientists are really dead.”

As the team gets picked off, Doom tries to do something interesting, with the Sarge going all Colonel Kurtz on us: Once the base’s staff head back to the locked-down base on Earth, the Sarge suggests an easy way to handle the job of separating the infected staffers from the uninfected: “Kill ‘em all … and let God sort them out.” Once Sarge gets tagged by the big bad beasties, Dr. Grimm injects her brother with the 24th chromosome – which we’ve been told in tech-talk gobbledygook only makes you an evil monster if you’ve got the genetic markers for psychosis and makes nice people better, stronger, faster – so the stage is set for a little superhumano-a-superhumano action.

Post-injection is also where Doom tries to get back to its roots: we fly into Grimm’s pupil and then snap to his point-of-view, leading to a sequence where Grimm runs a gauntlet of monsters and dispatches them with his rifle in scenes that could be taken right from the game. I can’t help but think that this is going to be confusing to game fans -- I can imagine their right hands subconsciously curling out to take control of the mousepad that isn’t there – and what the curiously flat sequence winds up doing is plunging you into the inaction of just watching zombie heads (from the FX artists of Stan Winston Studios) get turned into pulp by flying lead. Games like Doom borrowed from moviemaking, with 3-D graphics and their computer-generated equivalent of camera motion; recently, movies like Doom have borrowed back from videogames, with an emphasis on firepower over character and slaughter over scenario. It’s a full-circle transformation that winds up devouring itself without satisfying anyone’s hunger for entertainment.

Doom isn’t operatically bad; it’s just derivative, inert and dull – it feels like the third sequel to a film that never existed. Even The Rock – a screen presence (I’m not going to hurt myself by stretching to call him an actor) who’s proven he has the goods in films like the far superior action-burger The Rundown – can’t bring things to life, even with the relish he brings to saying nonsense like “Semper Fi, Motherfucker!” Books may tell us something; movies may show us something, and games may let us do something – even if “something” is nothing more than twitching fingers on the keys to plug monsters in their hideous heads and pausing to reload. But Doom is the worst of both worlds – all it offers us is shooting and shouting, while strapping the audience firmly in the passenger’s side with nothing to do but watch and yawn. Pop-culture observers have been explaining for years that videogames now make more money than movies; with movies as dull and dead as Doom, that piece of analysis starts to seem more and more like a self-fulfilling curse.