I’m about to try really hard to convince you that there is actual value to the universally panned Doom movie you probably only remember for those five minutes of first person carnage in the final act that are still objectively awesome to this day. There’s substance here that’s gone overlooked for too long, so I’m going to do exactly what Dwayne Johnson told me to do when he visited me last night in a dream I had after watching too much “Ballers”.
I’m going to open your eyes to just how entertaining this movie really is.
When I’m through, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t showered with awards. Forget them, we can remedy that right now. As Bloody Disgusting’s games editor — or the guy you non-gaming types might refer to as the guy who should really stick to writing about games because his taste in movies sucks — I’m awarding Doom our first ever BFG Award for Being Fucking Great.
All right, let’s do this.
For those keeping count, this is the third video game adaptation I’ve defended in our In Defense of… series. Each time I’ve assumed there’s nothing but hate for these films I like, but a majority of you seemed to enjoy Resident Evil and Silent Hill, so it’ll be interesting to see what reactions I get with this one.
Not enough people appreciate this quirky amalgam of 90’s space marine goodness and delicious B-movie cheese, or the filmmakers’ comical attempts to get us to take what’s going on on-screen seriously enough for it to be frightening. Much like watching a Michael Bay production, the secret to enjoying this movie is that you can never think about what’s going on.
Doom makes no effort to explain really anything. Its shameless abuse of scientific and military jargon gets delivered by dead-eyed actors who very clearly already received their paycheck. It wants you to leave your brain outside the Hellgate so it won’t get embarrassed when you spend more time thinking about what’s happening than the screenwriter did when they wrote it, possibly after being inspired by a SyFy movie marathon.
If any of that sounds like criticism, you haven’t been paying attention.
This is a movie that’s based on a game made in 1993, before developers discovered they could put stories in their games. Doom has had a monumental impact on video games, and specifically the genre of first person shooters. This series did for the FPS genre what Resident Evil did for survival horror or what Call of Duty did for the universally hated concept of annual releases, and it accomplished that while relying exclusively on its gameplay mechanics.
Doom, as a franchise, has never been known for its thoughtful characters or for particularly rich storytelling. It might’ve been capable of that, had id Software not prioritized making an addictive and rewarding gameplay experience over everything else. That’s partly why the original game has retained much of its charm to this day, because it’s still fun to play two decades (and change) after its release.
This is why I don’t understand some of the complaints about the movie. This movie is Doom, plain and simple. It’s unapologetic in its stubborn adherence to video game staples. It even goes so far as to end with a boss fight.
Doom is the video game equivalent of a run-on sentence where the words have been replaced with a labyrinthine network of rooms filled with demons and everything you could ever want to use against them. It’s a seemingly endless barrage of action with very little filler, because there’s no time for crap like character development when the legions of Hell are pouring into our world so they can cut down our brightest minds only to reanimate them as mindless ghouls.
Demons are assholes, and Doom treats them as such by turning their surprisingly tender monster bodies into a receptacle for lead, or whatever ammunition is made out of in 2046.
That essence is front and center here. It’s obvious the filmmakers wanted to make something that more closely resembled the games, but that would’ve required the sacrificing of roughly 90% of the dialogue to make room for soldier stuff, and Dwayne Johnson might not have been able to memorize all those complicated hand gestures military types use to issue orders.
Getting rid of the script would’ve been a tough sell anyway, and non-gamers wouldn’t know enough to appreciate how much closer that would’ve brought the film to the games. See, the games are like the stream of consciousness of a 12 year-old who’s just powered through The Avengers and all the candy that’s ever been or ever will be. They’re loud and obnoxious, but undeniably entertaining.
This movie tried to appeal to non-gamers and in doing so, it had to find a way to form a recognizable movie structure around a premise that might literally be impossible to take seriously. It tries to get us to care about the fates of its cast of unlikable characters, the majority of whom are introduced just so they can be torn apart later on by whatever the fuck this thing is supposed to be.
A team of professionally trained artists were told to design a frightening demon face, and that is what they came up with. That creature looks like something you might expect to find growing inside a haunted Easy-Bake Oven.
There’s no excuse for dull monster designs, so I won’t even bother.
That’s the one thing that really can’t be forgiven here. The characters are awful so as to maximize the feeling of satisfaction you’ll get when it’s their turn to die horribly. The dialogue is paced so it ties the scenes together and carries us quickly between them, unburdened by filler. This movie is an accurate depiction of the games, even if we’d rather not admit it.
And then there’s the glorious scene I mentioned earlier.
That scene is silly, gory, bombastic and very, very fun. It’s our reward for enduring the crap they had to cram in there in order to call it a movie. This is one of the most accurate live-action adaptations of a game ever, and aside from Silent Hill, it’s the closest Hollywood has ever come to bringing the magic of the games to the big screen, and I love it.
What do you think of the Doom movie?
