DOOM ~ Worst game tie-in movie EVER!

I love video games. This is no big news to anyone who knows me or who has been reading my blog for any length of time. Like most guys I know, I was playing DOOM almost everyday. Single player, multiplayer, LAN parties where we played nothing but DOOM.

I do not love video games turned into movies and DOOM the movie is no exception. Steve-o, Big Mike and I went to see the latest video game turned movie at a late showing on Friday night. Thank God I had a good beer buzz going. To say that this movie is “the suck” would be reviewing it too kindly. Oh, don’t take me the wrong way because Steve-o, Big Mike and I had a great time on our guys night out and laughing at DOOM when we weren’t wishing it was over.

Here’s the paraphrased story of the game, which appeared in the player manual.

A nameless space marine (you, the player), are one of Earth's toughest. You have been hardened in combat and trained for action. Unfortunately you have been deported to Mars for assaulting a senior officer after you were ordered to kill unarmed civilians. You are forced to work for the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), a military-industrial conglomerate that is performing secret experiments with teleportation between the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Suddenly, something goes wrong and creatures from Hell – yes, HELL – come out of the teleportation gates. A defensive response from base security fails to halt the invasion, and the Mars bases – all your base are belong to us – are quickly overrun by demons. All base personnel are killed or turned into zombies. At the same time, Deimos vanishes entirely. A UAC team from Mars is sent to Phobos to investigate the incident, but soon after all radio contact ceases and only one human is left alive — that would be you. You task, and you have no choice but to accept it, is to stop the hellish invasion and make it out alive.

Okay, that was a enough of a cool premise for a video game and had the writers stuck to that they may have had a decent scifi action horror flick. The hacks didn’t stick to the original story. They gave it their own pathetic personal touch. Mother frackers! One of the many sad things about DOOM the movie, which is doomed to a short run in theatres, is that there are absolutely no good quotable lines. The other sad thing is that there are only three things that DOOM the movie has in common with DOOM, the most awesome of first person shooter video games, is the title, the Mars setting, and the UAC, but instead of them conducting teleportation experiments they are conducting human genome experiments on criminals sentenced to death. The hellish demons are spawned from the criminally insane and the people that they kill turn into zombies. When you get right down to it, DOOM is a weak ass zombie movie on Mars. The hacks that wrote this Cleavland Steamer of a film left out the creatures spawned from hell that were so cool and frightening in the video game! Where were the floating pinkish orbs with one eye and a gaping maw that spewed forth death? HUH? WHERE DAMN IT? Also absent were many of the cool weapons from the game, such as the rocket launcher and the plasma rifle, two of my personal favorites. They did include the BFG – AKA, Big Fucking Gun – but the only aspect of if they kept for the movie was the name. The effect they gave the BFG was, in the words of Eric Cartman, lame, totally lame. Speaking of lame, let us talk about the wrestler turned actor, The Rock. The Rock is appropriately named as an actor. He acts like a rock. He has as much screen appeal as a rock and if a rock could talk I imagine it would sound like The Rock. Now, let’s move on to the acting by the rest of the cast. There was none. Sad to say that Karl Urban, you may remember him as Eomer from the last two chapters of the Lord of the Rings movies (God I hate mentioning those awesome movies in a review DOOM) is likely to doom his acting career with his staring role. What was he thinking by taking this role? Was he that hard up for cash or a screen appearance? GOOD GOD MAN! EXERCISE SOME DISCRESSION WITH YOUR CAREER!
At one part in the movie, Steve-o said, “dude, GO BACK TO MIDDLE EARTH!”
The action was pretty pedestrian and ninety percent of it takes place in near darkness. There’s lots of ballistic small arms fire and sparks in darkened hallways and tunnels. There’s a chain gun and all it succeeds in doing is killing a monkey that escaped the lab. Opps, sorry, I guess that could be considered a spoiler. Sorry, it won’t happen again. That brings me to the two funniest scenes in the film.

1. How frightened all of the black folks were of a monkey in an airshaft. The girls were freaking out and I heard one guy say, "yo man, I hate those little monkies!"
2. The loud fart three or four rows back and to my right. One girl screamed when she heard it and the rest of audience laughed their asses off. I was far enough away that no odor floated in my direction. I did here someone yell, "LIGHT A MATCH!"

Any way, all of the darkness saves money on cool monsters and effects, none of which were special in the least. I could write another paragraph about this… actually, no I can’t. There’s really nothing more to write except to say don’t bother with DOOM. Not in the theatres and not on DVD either. Play the games instead. They are infinitely better.

I should also mention that the three of us had no expectations concerning this film other than it would suck and in that we were not disappointed.