- Title: Doom
- IMDb: link
Hey I got an idea, let’s take a first person shooter video game and make a movie out of it. Hmmm….I don’t know. Yeah, and we’ll get I don’t know like Jean Claude Van Damme, or wait I know The Rock to shoot up a space station of zombies and aliens. I don’t know, sounds pretty dumb. Hey, people shovel in dumb morning, noon and night and beg for more. Explosions is entetainin’, the movie can completely suck and they’ll still love it. Hell go do what ever you want I need to sign Hillary Duff and the Olsen Twins to a new reality tv project.
Maybe that’s not how Doom got made, but sure seems likely to me. This is a terrible awful movie folks. I’ll make the same offer I’ve made before with movies this bad. If you were planning to see this just give me your ten bucks and I’ll beat the crap out of you. Trust me; it’s a much more humane solution. I know this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you what the film is about, so here goes…
The plot, so to speak, is a team of soldiers is sent through a magical portal in the Nevada desert built by Martians and travel through space loogies to an underground facility on Mars. This is the point where many, many questions should arise such as, how did they find/figure out to operate the Martian loogey travel machine, how did they build the facility on Mars around the loogey machine? Aren’t they stealing this from Galaxy Quest? Why does the Mars space station have sewers and air vents that open to the outside? But I digress….
The team is lead by Sarge (The Rock) and includes Reaper (Karl Urban) whose sister (Rosamund Pike) is stationed on the Mars facility, and a squadron of marine types who I’d list, but they’re all nameless monster food so what’s the point?
On arriving the team is attacked by monsters that have grown out of the scientists themselves. And boy does it take them a loooong time to figure this out. Now I know soldiers aren’t known for their intelligence but if the six year old in front of me can figure it out an hour before the characters….well, see that’s a problem. Reaper and his sister decide to try and save people; Sarge decides to kill everything that moves to prevent infection. And the bloodbath ensues.
The film is a bad television movie with too much money thrown at it. Oddly though with all that money the Mars space station looks like it was made for about fifty bucks. Seriously folks I’ve seen old Dr. Who episodes with better sets. It looks like a video game, and at one point actually becomes the first person shooter as the actors completely disappear and the rampant slaughter commences.
The movie steals most of its plot, sets, etc from other sci-fi and horror flicks and television. Among these are Aliens, Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and anything with Arnold and a gun. Nothing original or of any interest here, and for all the blood and carnage and “scary” alien/zombies this is one boring movie.
How bad does it get? I’ll give you an example. The movie points out that the Martians bulit the loogey machine to escape the monsters they created. This idea is thrown away however because they need to kill some more zombie alien things. Forgetting the logistical problem of how they arrived here without building the doorway to the machine on Earth for the moment, what I find interesting is that means they escaped to our planet. So what are you saying that Earth men are descended from Martains? Or Martians have been living among us since the age of the dinosaurs? It’s a constant failing of any sci-fi movie that, by accident or not, raises an important idea that it has no intention of exploring let alone answering. But hey, this is video game movie, don’t expect answers here.
Go see anything else but this, please! Hollywood is going to keep feeding us this crap as long as people pay to see it. On a final note, as bad as I felt after seeing the movie I was more distressed by the scattered applause that came as the credits rolled. The optimist made me want to believe these people were celebrating the end of this near two hour disaster, but the realist in me is saddened that people actual thought this was entertaining. Good sci-fi like Serenity is playing next door to a near empty theater, and braindead regurgitated slop like this is going to make millions. You can complain about Hollywood as much as you want, but you do your voting in the ticket lines folks, and sadly as in other recent elections the dumber choice seems to be the most popular.