Doom – Film Review

A team of space marines known as the Rapid Response Tactical Squad, led by Sarge (Dwayne Johnson), is sent to a science facility on Mars after somebody reports a security breach. There, they learn that the alert came after a test subject, a mass murderer purposefully injected with alien DNA, broke free and began killing people. Dr. Grimm (Rosamund Pike), who is related to team member Reaper (Karl Urban), informs them all that the chromosome can mutate humans into monsters — and is highly infectious.

The first memory I have of playing any of the Doom games was back when I was probably about seven or eight years old. I know, I was probably way too young to be playing such a grisly and intense game but I found myself genuinely loving it. My neighbor’s son and I were about the same age and he came over one day with a copy of the original game and we started playing it and next thing you know, hours had gone by in what felt like minutes.

There is just something so incredibly fun about walking through a seemingly endless array of areas and rooms filled with mutated demons and creatures, pulling out extraordinary weapons and blasting them to death. If the Doom games never came out, I wholeheartedly believe that the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchise would never have been released. Doom is one of the most influential pieces of gaming entertainment ever.

Although there are a lot of fun Doom games, I must admit that the most recent entry – Doom Eternal – is my all-time favorite. The world that developer id Software crafted, the weapons, demons, and exploration elements are all top of the line and make for one of the best gaming experiences you’ll ever have.

So you would think that a movie adaptation of Doom would be absolutely amazing right? Well, sadly, you’d be dead wrong. By all accounts, this movie should have been incredibly fun and one of the best blockbusters of the 2000s, but director Andrzej Bartkowiak‘s film adaptation of the popular video game series is one of the biggest video-game movie adaptation misfires in history.

About twenty or thirty minutes into watching this movie for the very first time this morning, it became apparent to me that this film was going to make no effort whatsoever to stay true to the source material. Practically nothing that the fans loved so much about the games was translated over into this adaptation.

There is no mention or appearance of the iconic Doom Guy, no double-barrelled shotgun and none of the locations from the games make an appearance here. The BFG is a weapon that is used from this movie which is nice that they at least showed that iconic weapon here, but the only other way that they tried to stay true to the games is genuinely hilarious.

For those who are unaware, Doom is a first-person shooter – as you would probably expect, this film is not filmed in the first person… except for one scene. One hilariously, horribly filmed and edited scene that is absolutely riddled with awful computer-generated imagery.

But aside from the movie being almost entirely unfaithful to the game series that came before it, it’s also just plain and simply boring and oftentimes cringe-worthy. You wouldn’t expect a movie that follows a group of soldiers shooting up a bunch of demons to be boring in the slightest, but Doom is.

It takes nearly an hour for any real excitement to happen, and even then, it’s not that much fun to watch. David Callaham and Wesley Strick‘s script has essentially no character development for anybody on screen. The movie is almost entirely made up of scenes where the soldiers slowly traverse through hallways and when they’re not doing that, they’re having ridiculously weird conversations with one another.

And surprisingly, neither Dwayne Johnson nor Karl Urban deliver a fun and entertaining performance like they usually do. Johnson is an extremely amusing actor to watch and almost every movie role he gets is sure to be a blast, but his work as Asher Mahonin is shockingly boring. It’s not Johnson’s fault though – it’s the script’s fault. It just doesn’t give him anything to do and when it finally does towards the end, it’s too little too late.

Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Doom is without a doubt one of the biggest missed opportunities of the early 2000s. Instead of getting an extremely action-packed thrill-ride with Dwayne Johnson and Karl Urban taking on hordes of demons, we instead get a dreadfully boring film with a script that feels like it wasn’t even a first draft.