First-Person Mediocrity

Some video games lend themselves to adaptation better than others. A good adaptation needs to have enough material from the source work to be able to take story, characters, and other elements and cohesively apply them into the new thing, be it a novel, a comic, or a film. Fans will want to see familiar territories and ideas give life in this new media, and if the work isn’t able to properly adapt those elements it’s going to fail. Plenty of movies from the 1990s tried, and failed, to adapt video games to the big screen and failed in the process because they didn’t know how to work with what was provided to make something interesting on the big screen. (Need we even discuss the 1993 Super Mario Bros?).

At first blush 1993’s Doom would not instantly seem like the kind of game that would make for a good video game adaptation. Even if we’re charitable and go with the 2004 Doom 3 (which clearly this film was released to piggyback off of), there’s still not a ton of plot available to work with. A base dedicated to portal technology, biological experimentation, and weapons development, is built on Mars. The base experiences an unexplained accident and demons from Hell come forth to kill everyone. One dude (often named “Doomguy”) has to battle his way through these hordes and stop the forces of Hell. That’s it, that’s the story. If Hollywood is going to make a Doom game, that’s what they have to work with.

Or, in the case of Universal’s 2005 film, they can throw almost all of that away and make their own thing that barely resembles Doom. Now, sure, you can make an argument that because there’s so little plot in the three games that came out before the film (even if we’re kind and give all the background story building credit in the third title) Universal was free to do as they liked. Still, there are common elements you have to work with. An unnamed lead protagonist. A base on Mars. A portal to Hell. Demons. These are the core elements of Doom, they’re what’s required. If you change these moments then you’ve made a film as accurate to the lore as Super Mario Bros. was to Nintendo’s franchise back in 1993.

So, of course, that’s exactly what Universal did. Under the direction of Andrzej Bartkowiak, working off a screenplay by David Callaham and Wesley Strick, the only thing that the Doom film provides is a base on Mars. Other than that, this is just another generic action film with horror elements. Even that might have been fine if the film could have nailed either the action or the horror, but 2005’s Doom is tedious and boring on all counts. By any measure, Doom is a failure of a film, only made worse by the fact that it’s also a terrible Doom adaptation.

Karl Urban plays John Grimm (aka “Reaper”), one of a half dozen elite soldiers sent to Mars as part of a UAC mission. Under the command of Sarge (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), these soldiers need to investigate a disturbance at the facility. A group of scientists have gone missing and there’s been some kind of attack. No one is exactly sure what was the cause, although it’s safe to bet it has something to do with the experiments going on at the site… or maybe something has come up from the archaeological dig on Mars’s surface.

Their point of contact at the base is Reaper’s sister, Dr. Sam Grimm (Rosamund Pike), who has been studying the excavated bodies of the ancient Martians. They were humanoid creatures, not unlike our own species, but where humans have 23 chromosomes, the Martians have a mysterious, synthetic 24th. Somehow this 24th chromosome made them super-human (or, really, super-martian), giving them long lives and incredible strength. But they still died off, eons ago, and the question is how? Did something kill them? Does it have anything to do with the thing (or things) that killed the scientists here? And what comes next? The soldiers are working on borrowed time and if they don’t figure out something soon, the beasts lurking on Mars could kill all of them off, too.

There’s a lot wrong with Doom, the film, but let’s be clear: it’s biggest issue is that it doesn’t involve demons invading Mars from Hell. Yes, there are creatures, and they do go around the base killing people. Hell, a few of them even look vaguely like creatures from the games. But they aren’t demons, they’re biological experiments gone wrong. There’s no portal to Hell, these aren’t beasts from another plane. The creators of this film (maybe under direction from the suits above) neutered the key background element of these creatures, and it sucks a lot of the soul out of the film.

This isn’t a story about evil from another plane of existence; it’s a tale of humans doing something stupid and paying for it. I’m not going to say it dumbs the material down because, let’s be honest, Doom isn’t exactly smart anyway. There is, however, a visceral thrill from the demons coming forth to invade Earth. It’s such a core element of the franchise that even the 2019 film, Doom: Annihilation (which gets so much else wrong), at least had the creatures as demons. If you’re not fighting beasts from Hell then it’s not really Doom.

We could also bitch about the fact that the film not only names the main character but also gives him a squad of buddies and a sister as well. Sure, Doom games have had multiplayer, but the main story modes have been one dude, on a mission, on his own. It’s claustrophobic and harrowing, with a guy having to learn to survive on his own against overwhelming odds. None of that is conveyed in this buddy-squad action film where the dude, Grimm, has people he knows and cares about and spends a lot of his time around other people.

The needs of the media dictates that Reaper has to talk to people to convey information, especially during breaks in the action. Very few films can have just one character, by themselves, without anyone to talk to, for long stretches of the film. Even Doom 3 breaks things up by having the Doomguy meet scientists and talk to them from time to time. But there’s a difference between that and giving the hero a whole group of people. That’s a different dynamic, one that very much doesn’t feel like Doom at all.

It doesn’t help that all of the characters around John Grimm are incredibly generic and one-note. Some of them only have one personality trait (like Dean, who is a scuzzy womanizer); others don’t even get that much development. None of them are real characters, not with development or true motivations. They all just exist to show up, shoot at things, and then die. I’ve seen better character development in C-grade 1980s Slasher films, and those are well known for having the barest of threadbare characters.

The movie also lacks anything even remotely interesting to look at. It’s ostensibly an action movie with a squad of soldiers, but the action is so poorly filmed that most of the time you don’t really know what’s going on. Things are shot on dark stages, with little light, so it’s hard to see who is where or what’s going on. Even when you can see, the editing is incredibly choppy, to the point where any sense of space or movement is lost. You don’t care about the action because you can’t follow it, which makes it feel weak and not worth watching.

It’s also not scary, despite there being a ton of weird monsters in the film. This is again down to poor direction for the film. Because things are so dark in the film, including the monsters themselves, it’s hard to see anything coming. Tension is never built, horror is never developed, and things (that are hard to make out) come barrelling out of the dark out of nowhere. I’d say they were trying for jump scares but to effectively scare someone that way you first have to build some tension. You can’t just have things randomly happen and call it “scary”. That’s not how it works.

But then basically nothing works in this film. Even the actors that could be relied upon, like Urban, Johnson, and Pike, are left going through the motions and barely giving performances at all. This was a round of paychecks for them, and you can tell they all knew it. They aren’t invested in their dialogue, they don’t care about the scenes they’re in, and they just don’t give a fuck during most of the movie. Johnson does come to life a bit at the end when the film spontaneously (and for no reason) decides to make him the bad guy so that Reaper has someone to fight for a finale, but even then it feels weak and half-assed. No one comes out looking good from this film.

Really, about the only time the film shows any creativity is when it, out of nowhere, goes into a first-person action mode in the leadup to the climax. I’m not saying this sequence is good, as it’s as poorly directed and edited as everything else in the film, but it is different. Maybe a better movie could have done something with this, but Doom doesn’t know how. Instead of being fun and interesting it’s mostly just nauseating, that is when it’s not tedious and boring to watch.

Doom is a bad movie, through and through. It doesn’t adapt the games well, but then it also doesn’t tell a good story or even provide anything in the way of thrills. If you wanted a good Doom movie, this aint it. But then, if you just wanted something watchable at all, this isn’t it either. It’s just bad.