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I've learned to ignore videogame movies. As a young, impressionable child of ten, I thought Super Mario Brothers: The Movie and Street Fighter: the Movie were great ideas. I never actually saw Super Mario Brothers until much later, and it took some begging to get my parents to take me to see Street Fighter. But nonetheless, I saw Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat too. At my age, they were wonderful. At my age, you could have shown me a blank reel, told me it was the inside of a hadouken, and I would have been overjoyed with the film. It only took two years for me to start looking back with disgust at Street Fighter and its gun-running Ryu and Ken. From there on in, if it was a movie, and it was about a videogame, I simply let it go by. Final Fantasy doesn't count. They sold that shit to me as a REAL movie, and I fell for it.
The policy has served me well. Since my youth, the most I've seen of a videogame movie was a couple minutes of the Uwe Boll classic House of the Dead. It was.... quite enough. When I started to see the ads for Doom I figured it would be more of the same old crap. I didn't even know it had come out when I first saw it at a theater. Coming out of A History of Violence, I saw a long line (in retrospect this is still strange; Doom didn't really make much money) outside the theater. I couldn't think of anything big that had come out, so I looked up at the marquee.
DOOM.
"Well, shit." I thought. People were coming out to see Doom. Suckers.
I had hoped that to be the last I ever thought of the film, but it was not to be. A statement was made on the internet that goes as follows:
Sub (author's note: this is my fake internet name), if you get me a review of decent length (5000+ words, three or more mentions of beverage), I'll put it up immediately.
I'm a real man, dammit, and real men take challenges regardless of their silliness. I got back to the author and told him he had a deal. Now I actually had to go see Doom. Sucker.
I don't have a long history with Doom; though I love the odd deathmatch, FPS was never really my genre. I remember the first time I heard of the game: the kid next to me in fourth grade was telling me about this AWESOME game his dad got for his computer. He described it to me in ascending-weapon order over the process of two lunch periods, concluding with the Big FUCKING Gun, whose name he whispered to me in awe. I was astonished that the game even existed. At first, I thought it was one of those things the kids in class made up, like that 10-player version of the Ninja Turtles arcade game where you could play as Casey Jones and Splinter, or the secret Japanese version of Street Fighter II where you could piss on the other guy when you knocked him down. I found out soon enough that Doom was real, but I didn't get to actually play it for a long time. The kids who ran the computer labs lorded it over us in between MUD sessions, the sons of bitches. I snuck in a networked deathmatch (the idea of which I could barely comprehend, it was so incredible) once. I stuck it to THAT The Man. I didn't have a computer till the days of Quake I, and it was only then that I went back to Doom. Though I had a fine time, my memories of the game are, frankly, hazy. Doom 3, which this movie's probably supposed to be based on, I've only seen in screenshots. I'd be a bad choice to review this movie if the movie had much to do with the videogame. Aren't we in luck, then?
Anyway, the timing of all this was pretty good. My birthday was coming up. I'd be 21 on Halloween. When it's your birthday, you get favors from people. My brother and I had already made plans to go drinking somewhere, as tradition would dictate. That wasn't the favor. The favor I asked him was to sit through Doom with me. I didn't want to suffer alone.
He dropped me off at Generic Megaplex to buy tickets while he parked the car. I tried to buy the tickets from the ticket machine; it wouldn't work. Standing on the back of the line, I looked up at the showtimes. The showtime for Doom was unusual; it read
OC DOOM 7:20
I couldn't ask about this at the register; it was about 7:18 and the line I was on was about 30 deep. I called up my brother, told him there might be a problem.
"There's something weird about the showing. I can't buy tickets for it on the machine. And it says OC in front of Doom."
"The fuck's that mean?"
"I dunno. Maybe it's sold out?"
"Doom can't be sold out."
"You're right."
I waited, and he just came in and bought the tickets from the ticket machine like I couldn't do before.
Inside the huge, stadium-seated auditorium, it sure wasn't any kind of a sellout show. 20 people, tops. We reclined and sat through the trailers, none of which I even slightly remember. The studio logo came up.
(NARRATOR) blah blah blah, setup setup setup
While this exposition is going on, they're doing the cliche where the camera pans over the movie's CG logo which is made out of, like, spikes and chunks of twisted metal and pistons and stuff like that.
(whooshing sounds)
"Oh, fuck," I whispered.
"It must have stood for Onscreen Captions." [editor's note (tim): actually, it stands for "open captions." "CC" is "closed captions," "closed" referring to the fact that you can open them if you need them, and their default setting is "off." televisions have closed captions, usually. though there must be an electronics manufacturer somewhere in the world (sony, maybe) opportunistic enough to make an open-caption television for deaf people too dumb to who know how to work the television remote. or else, for deaf people who hog the remote and won't listen to their significant other's suggestions for OBVIOUS REASONS. HOHO!!! oh shit, i can't even write an editorial note without telling my whole fucking life's story, fuck. or at least without insulting people. i'm such a failure. i should mention the time i had sex with a deaf girl. god, that's a great story. that'd make me feel good.]
"Oh....."
The first laugh of the movie.
(whooshing continues)
The second laugh of the movie. The captions were good for more laughs than the movie itself was. For every line, they seemed to appear, at the least, a good two seconds before the character who was supposed to speak it opened his mouth. Dialogue which wasn't snappy before suddenly became quite clever, when attached to a picture of a man who wasn't actually saying anything. Make no mistake; the movie was good for a couple of laughs itself. This is a goddamned silly movie, and I was relieved, at least, that it wasn't taking itself too seriously. It would have been less tolerable otherwise.
The movie proper starts: we see Sarge, "SEMPER FI" tattooed on his back, sitting at his computer. The Rock, playing Sarge, is the only actor in the movie I recognized (not that I'm so terribly pop-culture-literate), and the only person in the cast with any presence. If anybody sasses him, he'll say something like "(VERB) THAT FUCKING (NOUN), SOLDIER," and give them the People's Eyebrow. Fearing for his life, the Marine falls right back into line. Sarge goes from being protagonist for the first three quarters of the movie, to the antagonist for the last 15 minutes.
Sarge is taking his orders. Trouble at the research base. Dudes with guns are required. Sarge goes out and tells his men, who are jackassing around in the rec room, the news.
Doom the movie has solved Doom the game's primary issue with reality: how does that one stern-faced fellow carry all that shit around? Instead of making the film a series of 40-minute epic struggles in which the hero triumphantly lugs his chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, chaingun, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, and BFG 9000 down a hallway, we have a gallery of cliches who share weapon-lugging duty. Unfortunately, they don't lug any of those awesome weapons; they get boring Marine standard-issue machine guns. Screw standard-issue; this is a ridiculous movie and the weapons ought to be ridiculous.
Nearly every Marine has the codename of one of those kids you see playing FPSes on the interwebs. It would have perhaps been more authentic if their names had been in alternating caps, or ended in the number 69, or been surrounded by the letter X. The first thing we see is a guy named Duke (or by my naming convention xDuKe69x) playing some kind of handheld videogame. I guess it's a nod. Then there's the religious guy (Goat) reading the Bible and doing God-stuff. Elsewhere in the movie, he cuts himself when he takes the Lord's name in vain. He totally looks like he's enjoying it during that part. There's Annoying Guy And Pervert (Portman, one of three names one might see on an actual human being), who, in this scene, declares his intentions to get him some she-boys, much to Goat's chagrin. Destroyer is the big guy. He gets the only really decent fight in the movie, in which he beats on a Hell Knight with computer parts. The Kid is the same character as The Kid in the Matrix movies. You're really digging for cliches when you're ripping somebody else's rip of an established character type, one they even gave a placeholder name, and then use the SAME placeholder name. I tells ya, this flick is ballsy. The token Asian (Duke and Destroyer are TWO black guys, therefore they cannot be tokens; also they do not die first) is Mac, a Chinese dude playing a Japanese dude whose real name is Something With An S Samanosuke Takahashi. Something ridiculous like that. [editor's note (tim): hi, it's me again. i found this hilarious: "Discuss this person with other users on IMDb message board for Yao Chin
." isn't that fucking hilarious? "Discuss this person." Ha! Person!! Okay, continue reading now.] All Mac does in this movie is state his name and get decapitated.
So Sarge comes in and ruins everybody's party, and if they don't like it they can answer to his raised, authoritative eyebrows. Nobody tries anything.
The last guy to appear is our hero, Reaper. He's the third named character, but like Mac, his real name is a gimmick. Johnathan Grimm. Reaper. Oh ho ho. "They're Marines, not poets," he explains later. Even the writers didn't think the names were cool. His parents died at the base, which seems to me more a JRPG plot contrivance than a FPS plot contrivance. Oh, well! He comes along, despite Sarge's wishes. He's got to confront his demons, you know! Get it?
It's a shallow lineup; one shouldn't expect much in this department to begin with. This is, at heart, a routine slasher flick, and our Marines aren't much more than warm bodies that need to be turned cold by the end of the film.
The thing is, it's a slasher flick trying to be Aliens. There's a whole scene in which the camera marvels over the Marines' guns. The Marines grab their guns, and the guns say the names of the Marines, and the Marines caress them, saying things like "come to Daddy!".
You know, looking back, that scene was kinda creepy.
There's another wonderful scene in which the film (assisted by The Rock) marvels over the tragically underused BFG 9000. This is the only part of this film (outside of the first-person segment) that you should watch when you see this movie on TV or something. The camera swivels around the gun while The Rock says "AWWWW SHIT" and "BIG.... FUCKING..... GUN!" He picks up the gun.
(Driving rock theme plays)
The scene ends. This takes about thirty seconds.
The implication for both scenes is that they're going to, at the very least, kick some ass (or possibly take their guns someplace quiet and make gentle, sweet love to them in a bed of flowers while a soft violin piece plays). They're certainly equipped for an all-out marines-versus-monsters fighting-and-explosions setpiece, but the movie can't even be satisfying on that level. After the action-movie setup, it sputters out into a bunch of scenes depicting the exact same event over and over again:
-a pair of marines walk cautiously through a hallway, flashlight-equipped machineguns at the ready
-they hear/see something, scream "CONTACT!" into their radios, and shoot, ineffectively, in its general direction
-the monster kills one of them.
So, okay, the movie's not about marines shooting monsters, it's about monsters killing marines. This would still make for some quality b-movie entertainment if the monsters were scary, or at least cool-looking. They aren't, sadly. The hallway-walking scenes are so by the numbers that it's hard to even be a little worried by them, much less unsettled. Scared? We're many, many miles from scared here. We're in another goddamned state is where we are. The tagline is "Hell Breaks Loose", but the monsters aren't even from hell, like they're supposed to be. They're from the supersecret 24th pair of chromosomes (later referred to as the 24th chromosome, for extra laughs). They infect people. In practice they're closer to being zombies. That's not demonic! That's not intimidating! So scary is down. Do they look cool? I dunno, I couldn't see them. It was dark in those hallways (this is also, presumably, Doom 3 influence). It's rare that you actually get a look at one of these guys; when you do, it's most often a corpse. Corpses aren't threatening either!
Whether the movie is about monsters killing marines or marines shooting monsters isn't the issue here. The problem is that both the marines and the monsters suck and it's a chore to watch either group do their thing.
There's this major plot twist in the last fifteen minutes that turns the movie from slasher back to shit-killing action spectacle. Because the movie is terrible, regardless of this change, I don't mind spoiling it.
I mentioned earlier that Sarge becomes the antagonist; this is because the monsters make it out of the FPS map they've spent the movie in, and into another FPS map full of innocent civilians. There's sad music and the wailing of babies, when The Kid walks into a room full of them. He decides against killing them all; Sarge objects and shoots him in the throat. The hero objects, and they have a standoff that ends when the wheelchair-bound guy makes an announcement to the group and is killed immediately by a monster. His only purpose in this movie is to get turned into the monster from the game with wheels for legs. By the way, only bad guys get turned into monsters by the infection; good guys get turned into superhumans. It's okay that I was so abrupt in mentioning this because it's about as abrupt as the revelation is in the movie. The remaining Marines all die (which The Rock objects to). This leaves our protagonist and his sister, the Science Chick. I didn't mention her previously because the only purpose in the movie she serves is to talk about 24 chromosomes and act as a pair of boobs to look at in an otherwise man-packed feature.
Reaper has been FUCKED UP by monsters and stuff and there's only one solution:
SHOOT UP THE 24TH CHROMOSOME AND BECOME A SUPERHERO.
The following dialogue has been approximated because it wasn't good enough to remember. I don't even remember the one-liners anymore. The Doom comic was far more eloquent.
So he's all, "nah sis i'm a bad guy you don't know what I'VE DONE I'VE KILLED PEOPLE'N SHIT and i'll totally turn into a giant monster" but sis says to him "you won't because you're the protagonist of this film. So he tells her "YOU SHOOT ME WITH THIS GUN IF I TURN INTO A BIG BAD GUY", and she says "okay okay" and shoots him up with Chromosome 24 Energy Drink: For When You Wish For The Camera To Sit Directly In Front Of Your Eyes For The Next Three Minutes. To The Max Extreme.
The first-person view segment is, well, like watching somebody else play Doom. The format doesn't have very much potential to be exciting, and they didn't use any of it either. Our hero stands, looks at himself in a mirror to establish to the viewer what is going on, encounters some monsters, and kills them with his super powers. I think they make him shoot the bullets, like, HARDER or something. In an amusing bit of fanservice, he chainsaws the aforementioned wheelchairing demon, as seen in the game at some point. Really, the only amusing bits of this movie ARE the fanservice. The two sequences that only got a little chuckle out of me, the BFG bit and the first-person segment, are the only parts of the film I feel are worth watching at all, and even then I certainly wouldn't advise you to actually subject yourself to this movie just to see them.
After this sequence is over, the assumed-dead Sarge comes out, says "SEMPER FI MOTHERFUCKER", and our hero and villain have a little wrestling match. Melee was never Doom's strong point, and that is still quite the case here. I was hoping for the winner of the fight to say "MELEE KILL" at the end, but it was not to be. Reaper tosses Sarge into a teleporter with a grenade. It explodes but you don't see him die. This is a slasher movie aiming for a franchise, and The Rock's not supposed to die (he said so himself!), so it's completely fair to assume that The Rock is not in fact dead. The Reaper and the Science Chick get on an elevator and the first-person credits roll. The floating gun shoots the credits, see. We'd had more than enough of that shit already, so we didn't stay for all that.
At the dive we ended up at, while I was Guinnessing away my memories of the film (in retrospect, I'm lucky it didn't work), my brother, a Marine himself, told me that he appreciated the Semper Fi stuff but if the Rock ever called him "soldier" he'd punch him in the face. You call a Marine "Marine", dammit. We then remembered the dumber lines in the movie, laughed again about the caption (whooshing continues) and stopped talking about it. So it lasted about five minutes of conversation about how dumb it was, if you're interested in, you know, lasting impact.
In conclusion, having suffered for your sake, I'd like to recommend that nobody ever see this movie. It's not something like the Street Fighter movie, where you can see it to find out how hilariously bad it is, and be entertained by same; it's just an awful movie. You know how it's funny when a man gets kicked in the crotch, but it's not so much so when a serial killer castrates him? Yeah. It's certainly not Boll-caliber but it's getting there. It not only lacks redeeming qualities, it lacks distinguishing qualities. Even the (very brief) parts you think you want to see simply aren't worth suffering through another shitty slasher movie over. Doesn't one come out every three weeks anyway? And definitely don't see another shitty slasher movie on a special occassion, like your birthday. God. What have I done?
david cabrera was waiting for somebody to say "we're knee deep in the dead" or something
[now: discuss this on the forums]
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