Editorials
In Defense of ‘DOOM’ (2005)
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?
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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