If there is one thing first-person shooter fans, disturbed teenage outcasts, and sporadically-employed twenty-somethings can agree on, it’s that the video game Doom is, quite possibly, the best way to kill time between binging on McDonald’s cheeseburgers, looking up weird internet porn, and pretending to look for a job. It worked for me. There was a period in my maturation process that consisted of hours-long marathons of Doom, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Simpsons reruns, with periodic breaks for urinating, defecating, smoking, and fast food consumption, and look how I turned out. I’m happily married, my wife and I have a beautiful 5-month old daughter, I own my own home, I am gainfully employed, and now I watch my reruns on a 52” flat screen TV with surround sound. So, you know, don’t let the media tell ya video games, horror movies, chain smoking, and Taco Bell aren’t good for you. Next time you see a local newscaster moaning about violent, sexist video games (They do that, right? I don’t watch local or any news ever at all.) and the dangers of Chinese take-out, you turn the channel. Or better yet, shoot your TV in the face. Oops. Maybe there is such a thing as too much Doom. You probably shouldn’t shoot your TV. Maybe a strongly worded e-mail is enough.In the spirit of full disclosure, I spent the bulk of my youthful “video gaming” playing a copy of Doom 2 I borrowed, and subsequently stole, from my friend, Todd. Sorry, Todd. If you are reading this and want Doom 2 back, I’d be happy to give it to you. Please don’t want it back though. PLEEEEEEASE!!!
Anyway, Doom 2. I would get home from whatever unsatisfying temp job I was doing that week, share a cigarette with my roommate, and proceed to play Doom 2—in God Mode, of course—for a couple of hours before prime time television and bed. Doom 2 was my way of relaxing, dealing with stress. The anger I felt, mostly at myself, for being kind of a failure at life, would dissipate when I was hacking space demons to pieces with a chainsaw. And, seriously, why would you use anything other than the chainsaw when playing in God Mode? If you were more of a Super Shotgun guy (or girl!), more power to you, but when you’re invincible and have the power to literally walk through walls, why wouldn’t you want to get up close and personal, Leatherface-style on these hideous hellbeasts? I’m just saying.
For those of you unfamiliar with Doom—I’m talking to you, Grandma—Doom is a series of video games in the first-person shooter style in which a dude walks through a bunch of doors, shooting and killing various space weirdies that may or may not also be from the pits of Hell. I don’t know. Want a history of the Doom franchise, check Wikipedia. We’re here to discuss the Doom movie—the uncut, unrated Doom movie.Watching Doom the movie is like watching a friend play Doom the video game, by which I mean, it’s boring. The film, like the game on which it based, is basically people, mostly bulked up, sweaty dudes, walking through doors into rooms, down hallways to other rooms, and through different doors and hallways into various different rooms. There are a lot of doors opening and closing and while that might sound intensely exciting to you, it rarely ever is.
And that’s what is ultimately disappointing about Doom. I didn’t have any great expectations going into this thing, but I thought it at least might be a little bit scary. The graphics may have been primitive, but Doom 2 could be downright frightening, especially when played in the dark. And it didn’t help that the apartment in which I played was located in a less-than-great part of town. The creatures were horrifying. The impaled twitching bodies in the torture chamber were disconcerting. The sound effects were chilling, especially those big ugly demons that seemed to be growling the ominous phrase “I’m your mom” over and over again, no matter how many rounds you pumped into their bloated stomachs. Doom 2 was, quite simply, scary as shit! Doom the movie, as I said earlier, is boringer than hell.
Generally, I believe video game-to-movie adaptations don’t work for one of two reasons. Either the video game in question 1) doesn’t have enough plot to sustain a feature-length film and little-to-no effort is made to rectify this (Mortal Kombat) or 2) has a whole bunch of plot or such a wacky, off-the-wall idea or concept, that a coherent, interesting film is nearly impossible to pull off (Super Mario Brothers). Doom, on the surface, doesn’t seem to have a lot to work with, however, the filmmakers give it one helluva try. There’s an underground warp zone in New Mexico that can instantly transfer a human being from Earth to the surface of Mars. There’s a creepy laboratory where earthlings are being injected with Martian chromosomes (Chromosome 24) that will either transform test subjects into a hulking alien monster or a gravity-defying superhero depending on whether or not said test subject possesses the, for lack of a better term, “evil gene.” There’s an attractive blonde women with perky nipples. There are cool guns. None of this changes the fact that we are, in essence, watching The Rock and his alien clean-up crew walk through an endless succession of doors and down an endless succession of hallways.The film follows Sarge, played by The Rock before he was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and the other colorfully nicknamed members of the Rapid Response Tactical Squad (The new guy’s nickname is “The Kid!”) as they travel to Mars via The Ark, a weird ball of teleportative goo, to find out what happened to Dr. Carmack and his scientist buddies after a particularly troubling transmission from the UAC research facility. Once there, Sarge and his team walk up and down hallways, open doors, enter rooms, and close the aforementioned doors behind them. Eventually there is shooting, but it takes an awfully long time to get there.
There isn’t much else to Doom, to be honest. It’s about what you’d expect, assuming you’d expect anything at all. The only truly interesting scene comes at the end of the film just before the fairly predictable Big Fist Fight Finale. For five or so uninterrupted minutes, the audience experiences the “walking through doors and down halls” thing first person shooter style. It’s like playing Doom only you’re not sitting in front of a computer with your pants off. It’s an exciting sequence that made me wonder if the movie might have been more successful if it did something unconventional and made the whole thing first person style, like, from the prospective of The Kid on his first mission or Sarge coming face to face with something he’d never encounter in his Marine Corps career.
I can’t imagine needing an uncut, unrated Doom, but here it is. I wonder what they cut out for the theatrical cut? I don’t wonder enough to seek a theatrical version out, mind you. I think I’d rather just find Todd’s copy of Doom 2 and play that for a couple hours.
