Doom Movie Review

I never meant to ever watch this flick nor did I ever think I would actually own this movie but stranger things have happened in my life. On an impromptu trip to Fry’s my wife pointed out the 6 shopping carts full of HDDVDs on clearance and being the cheap consumer who is a whore for cheap movies, we picked up a huge stack of HDDVDs. One of them was Doom, a videogame movie that I had little to no interest in but hey it was only $6.00 so what did I have to lose right?

I won’t consider myself a fan of the Doom franchise. The only version of the Doom I’ve ever actually try to play was the shitty port with the postage stamp size display that came with my Sega 32X. I’ve must have demo’ed every version of Doom EXCEPT the actual PC version. Now the only fun I ever had with the series was playing Doom 3 Co-Op with Tenno over an Xbox Live. Now that was a good time.  So now you have a basic idea on my mind set going into this movie: I can give a crap about the Doom mythos and based on word of mouth, I will not take this movie seriously. So last Sunday, I popped in this disc and watch Doom for the first time with my wife.

The movie really reminded me of a poor retelling of Ridley Scott’s Aliens. A bunch of space Marines stuck on in space station getting hunted by something pretty damn ugly and you know 99% of them won’t be coming back for the sequel. The movie starts off with the space Marines getting ready for some R&R when the nameless space Marine, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, cancels everyone’s leave which of course pisses of the generic lesser space marines and they have to go to Mars on a super secert space mission. Blah blah blah. They end up on Mars, quarantine the station and go hunting for some trouble.

Like the original Doom game, Doom was never really about a coherent the plot. You know from the start that this movie is about how every single one of those poor Marine bastards are going to come to their gruesome fate while creating as much havoc on their way out. My only concern about the flick was how are they going to explain the hell spawn demons? Well, they don’t really. It turns out the unknown creature was an experiment where the scientist injected an additional gene into an asshole to see what happens.  Fuck man, why didn’t those scienist ever watch Robocop?  You NEVER experiment on the criminally insane!

Then it goes off into some jargon about the last 10% of the human genome being pure evil or something and then the test blew up in their faces and a shit storm was now in full effect.  Everyone got their ass handed to them for being stupid.  Of course when anyone get bitten by the mutated prick, they turn into these demon like creatures ala the “T-virus” from Resident Evil.   So no space demons; they were more like space zombies. Ugh, really? Space zombies!? Like there aren’t t enough of that in video games and movies! Oh but there aren’t “really” space zombies because you have one space Marine whose all religious and such so based on one passing comment of him seeing the fuckwad that did him in, the Marines makes mention that the mutated creaters are demon, but only once.  So they are actually Space Zombie Demons… “From a certain point of view.”  What ever, who cares…

This movie was not good by any stretch of the imagination. It was filled with bad action movie and horror clichés all the while the plot was mostly predictable but did I hate this movie? Hell no, I haven’t laughed and enjoyed myself in a long time. Granted the movie didn’t take the source material as seriously as some would have wanted, but I feel the strength of this movie is that it didn’t try too hard to pretend to be a serious in the first place like for example the Resident Evil movies. (Did any of that make sense?)

The action was over the top but there was always that underlining hilarity about it all and the Doom movie addressed it with bad dialogs and gaming gimmick’s like BFG. Hell, even the unnamed main hero became a pun and there was a bad FPS moment. Yeah this movie take the, it’s so bad it’s good” to a whole new level.

All in all I can forgive this movie and enjoy it for what it is: a crappy generic action space movie which was inspired by the Doom license.  With that said, there is only one complaint pet peeve about this movie. All of the military guys sent up to Mars are Marines. When one Marine is referring to another Marine, they don’t refer to each other as Soldier. A Soldier is a term that always refers to someone in the Army. You would think one of the writers could at least get that right. I can forgive the inconsistencies to the Doom mythos but get your Space Marines terminology right, man.

It’s very simple:

Army = Soldier
Marine= Marine
Air Force= Airmen
Navy = Seamen.

It’s not that hard, granted it quite unfortunate if you are in the Navy! Now with that silly rant said, go pick up this movie on the cheap and watch it in a big group with your friends and every time “The Rock” calls someone a soldier or someone gets killed, take a drink. I’ll bet you will really like the movie with booze in your system.

The irrelevant:

This was a first generation HD-DVD and it won’t knock your socks off.  Picture quality is okay and the audio was nice but who gives a shit because the format is dead and I only paid $6.00 for it so whatever.

Posted by Jangofatt