Doom - Final Thoughts
April 23rd 2009 21:06
For a game that means so much to video gamers all over the world, Doom was a massive disappointment. If you weren’t familiar with the video game, you were most likely shocked as to how bad the movie was… and I bet the entire scene involving the first person perspective really confused you didn’t it? Don’t worry we all share your pain and now it’s time to take this bad boy apart and see just what made Doom a doomed movie from the start.
The Breakdown.
The movie starts off ok with scientists being attacked by an unknown creature on a base that’s been built on Mars. That’s cool since Doom 3 was set on Mars as well. We get introduced to the two main characters, Sarge and John, as well as the Marine crew. That too is ok, (besides their incredibly lame army nicknames like Destroyer and Duke), since Doom 3 had a mini group of Marines that went to Mars to investigate a disturbance.
While they head to the Ark, the portal to Mars, we see that John has someone on Mars that he isn’t happy about seeing. At first I thought it was his girlfriend, then his boyfriend by the way he was acting like a bitch, but it turns out later on it’s his sister who he is having a family feud with. The Ark itself is pretty disappointing since it isn’t something awesome like the Stargate – it’s just a bubble. The elevator that leads to the portal looked way cooler than the portal itself.
Everyone has cameras attached to their guns which made me wonder how these soldiers are actually holding their guns. If they held them right-up in the normal aiming position, the cameras would be slightly tilted and pointed up slightly. Whenever they showed footage from the gun cameras, you could see a bird’s eye view of the gun and the guns looked like they were being held against the soldier’s stomach. It looked stupid like though that’s how the guns appeared in Doom 1 and 2. Even still, for a movie the view shouldn’t be like that.
At this point we meet John’s sister Samantha and it’s clear why he’s so annoyed at her – she’s hot! That and she’s a bitch who sounds really weird when she talks. I don’t know why but for some reason she really expresses her vowels strongly. I then figured out she’s a British actress who is bad at putting on an American accent. The marines begin searching through the labs allowing everyone to see how much they all fail at being good actors. It’s pretty sad to see the team look good together, but fall apart separately. We also see the BFG, which stood for Big F***ing Gun in the game but now it’s called Bio Force Gun for the movie. Sarge refers to it as a big f***ing gun later but it still sucks.
We now find out John and Sam are twins and that Sam’s pissed off at her brother for not becoming a scientist. Why is she pissed off? We never find out I guess she’s just a bitch. We learn about some species of humans that used to live on Mars and John asks “If they’re so smart why they so dead?” He couldn’t have made himself look more like a moron, and this should make it clear why he joined the army and not the nerd squad with his sister. I’m not saying army people are morons or stupid don’t worry – please don’t get me confused with John Kerry. Shortly after, the team finds Dr. Carmack who goes crazy and rips off his ear. It’s a pretty dumb scene that would have been slightly better had the lightning been brighter.
Another stupid scene following this is when Goat says “God damn it” and carves a cross into his arm because he is a religious nut. I’m pretty sure everyone would have cuts all over their body whenever they used God’s name in vain. As the scenes continue the movie becomes increasingly dark. I don’t know why they did this but it’s really hard to see anything that’s going on in the movie until someone shines a light on an area. If the director wanted to do this because Doom 3 had lighting issues as well, then he has accomplished his goal.
Everyone searches the sewers for this alien, yet another dark scene, and Goat ends up being attacked. They bring him back to the medical ward and everyone starts playing ER. Seriously we have a group of marines who are trying to work on Goat’s wounds like they were awesome doctors or something. Goat dies and everyone gets pissed off. Sarge wants answers and Portman’s acting like a moron, so Sarge tells him to shut the f** up. I know this isn’t a funny scene but I laughed hard at this. Why? Sarge is played by Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock! When he shouted this it reminded me of his stuff in the old school days of WWE. I couldn’t take the scene seriously, or him for that matter. Whenever he was shouting all I could think of was him berating someone in the ring.
Another thing that annoyed me in this scene is how Sam is in denial that aliens exist. The trouble I had with this is the fact that the portal humans discovered on Earth that takes them to Mars was built by… aliens!? Furthermore they found another species that lived on Mars as well. So how the hell could that stupid bitch say that aliens don’t exist WHILE SHE IS INSIDE A BASE THAT’S ON MARS!? The marines slowly start getting killed one by one and the entire time all Sarge can think about is getting his hands on the BFG. Oddly enough, most people who have played Doom think the same thing.
While Sam and Duke are doing an autopsy on one of the dead aliens, Goat comes back to life as a suicidal zombie. I’ve never seen one of those in a movie before… nor have I seen one who can do the sign of the cross. Regardless it was pretty stupid, and really frustrating to watch. Whenever Goat slammed his head on the glass plate window, Sam would scream like a big dog being kicked in its ribs. Portman calls for reinforcements behind Sarge’s back and they never arrive, which makes the scene pretty useless. More people die and the lighting in the movie still hasn’t gotten any better.
Sarge and the surviving marines return to the medical ward and find out about an experiment scientists were doing on Mars. They were taking the DNA from the skeletons they dug up and injected it into a mass murderer. Not the ideal person to run a test on, especially not knowing what’s going to happen to them. Well it appears they’ve messed around with a virus that’s turning people into aliens or zombies and Sarge is planning to kill everything. Now the Rock is acting all serious and bad ass… and it’s not working for him at all. He should really just stick to how he acted in wrestling since it was more believable, and enjoyable.
Sam talks to John about how the people on Mars have an extra chromosome that is an EVIL GENE!!! That’s the words that she used… an EVIL GENE that existed in this people wiped them out. That’s why they built a portal to Earth to escape. Saying that, doesn’t that mean we’re all aliens? I mean we’re meant to be these people on Mars so I guess Humans are really Martians. Sounds cool to me, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to sound cool to the Catholic Church. Everyone goes to the facility on Earth and Sarge has gone crazy killing everyone. I still can’t take the Rock seriously.
John injures himself by having a bullet hit his leg that bounced off a wall. What are the odds huh? To save her brother, Sam injects the Evil Gene because there is a chance that the person has a good soul and it will defeat the evil part of the gene. Give me a f***ing break. We’ve gone from experimenting with alien DNA to the goodness of our souls fighting off evilness. Well it appears John has a good soul and proceeds to be awesome in the most annoyingly filmed action sequence of all time.
The director decided to finally appeal to game fans by having John walk around owning everything in site all in the first person perspective. It was done very poorly. The camera move around too fast, and when was focused it was too dark to see anything. The constant turning and spinning started to make me feel dizzy as well. Everything looked too fake as well. I mean, I would compare it to video game graphics, but they were worst looking than that.
After that Sarge battles John for the hope of humanity, and John wins. The end.
Final Thoughts.
Let’s look at one of the biggest problems I had with the movie – which it is NOTHING like the video game. In the video game the storyline involved an invasion of Hell and a marine was sent to combat it. That was the general plot for 1 and 2. In Doom 3, it was set on Mars yes, but someone was screwing around with teleporting experiments that opened up a gate to Hell.
In the movie, Doom was about evil DNA infecting people and either turning them into monsters or good people depending on whether their souls were good or not. What a load of shit. It didn’t make any sense at all concerning John was a killer and he has the mind of a killer, but apparently he was only doing his job so it was ok. That being said, the DNA shouldn’t have turned Sarge evil since he was just doing his damn job as well. It was completely stupid and they ruined everything that made Doom awesome to begin with – lots of killing with a simple plot.
The acting was pretty crap as well and the only one out of the group who could act was the wrestler – and that’s an insult to all of the other people who studied acting that appeared in that movie. Don’t worry The Rock wasn’t good either in this piece of crap and he really should have just stuck to wrestling since he can do it awesome. Seeing him act like a tough guy giving orders couldn’t be taken seriously at all, especially when he was yelling. When he tried to be bad it was like he was forcing his anger too much and made him come off looking stupid. Still, it was better than the other actors in that movie.
Something else that would have been great would have been better lighting and camera usage. The movie was extremely dark and I couldn’t tell who was who in the shadows. I couldn’t even see the action due to how dark it was as well. The camera angles were bad, especially during the first person view. It swung around too quick and was very shaky. In fact the entire scene looked way too fake and the bad rock music they added to it didn’t help it out either. When it wasn’t in first person mode for the action scenes, the camera darted around the place too quick. It was really frustrating since you couldn’t keep up with what was going on at all.
I would suggest watching this movie if you want to see how bad this movie ruined the Doom game series. Trust me if you think this is going to be a good movie you’ll be greatly disappointed. Besides the name of the movie, and the terrible lighting issues, there’s nothing related to the game at all. Doom becomes yet another video game victim to the deadly grips of Hollywood. That’s all I’ve go to say about Doom. I will mourn another video game I loved that was killed by a bad movie. Let’s hope they don’t ruin Tetris. Until my next review, have a fun and safe weekend Bucket Heads!
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Comment by Damo
Crap plot
Crap actors
Crap twists in the plot
Crap science presented as real science
The whole film went out of its way to lower the intelligence bar on every level.
Evil Genes verses good souls indeed.
The Rock has an acting range that is less than Vin Diesel but slightly higher than one of the monsters min the film.
However I was not so put off by the first person killiong as I was by showing the face of John too soon.
Talk about losing the suspense too early.
The rest of the film looked way to cheap after that.
Comment by Someone
Evil Pleasures
Random Musings on Life, Love and Everything
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They had to at least try and formulate some sort of plot. I agree that it reeeeally should have revolved around a portal to hell... like Event Horizon but the ship is the whole planet.
I disagree with you about the first person bit. I feel it was intentionally made to look like a video game, just to please us gamer nerds.... and I loved it. The frantic pace, crappy angles, just made it feel like a video game more than a movie, which I think is what they were going for.
I would like to point out some errors though.
1. Goat - I'm guessing you're not ultra-religious, but I imagine if you were then taking the lords name in vain would be a big no-no, and you wouldn't do it often at all. I mean, if you carved your arm up every time you did it, you'd learn pretty quickly to stop doing it.
2. The evil gene that the sister mentioned had nothing to do with the goodness of the soul. It had to do with genetic markers that indicated psychotic behaviour (which is a distinct possibility). While this could be interpreted as 'good' and 'bad' people, she bases her hypothesis on genetics.
3. The Rock just doing his job? No, he proved he was psychotic and the lead was reasonable when the lead wanted not to kill uninfected people and the Rock did it anyway.
4. The sister never says that there are no aliens, she says that the creatures couldn't be aliens, because Mars is a dead planet, and the atmosphere cannot support life.
I agree this film was a huge disappointment, but the first person scene made the whole movie worth watching for me. Then again, I do have a taste for terrible movies, so it could just be that.
Comment by Wayne F
Bucket Snipets
Someone: I don't think a 2 Hour movie of non-stop violence would be boring since I enjoy some of those movies that are designed like that... some of them. I totally think this probably would have been better if they suck to the Doom 3 plotline a lot with the gateway to Hell opening up.
I got the whole Goat/religion thing and I'm glad I don't carve crosses into my body since I'd run out of room
I still stand by the Rock doing his job! He was just... very excited about doing it. Yeah that's it. That's like an office person getting really excited and into the financial report he is doing for his company. Yeah... I think that's a perfect example...
I still can't believe you people liked the damn first person mode! Ugh! Am I the only person who thought it was a total load of crap!? God damn it... oh crap someone pass me a knife...
Comment by Damo
Who said I paid for it?
Comment by Someone
Evil Pleasures
Random Musings on Life, Love and Everything
Let's Get Down To Business
I really, reeeeally wanted to see an on-screen adaptation of the spider monsters you fight in Doom 2... heck, any of the original Doom monsters would have been nice.
I dunno, any chance of a more faithful remake? Maybe in a few years time when Hollywood runs out of ideas again.
Comment by Wayne F
Bucket Snipets
Someone: Omg the spiders! Man, can you imagine if they added one of those giant cyber-demons!? I'd even be happy with those flying flaming skulls! It's very rare Hollywood stays faithful to a video game when it gets turned into a movie and it's pretty sad honestly. The best you'll probably ever watch is Silent Hill. It's pretty good - not for non-fans of the game I think - but I was really impressed as to how close they kept it to the game.