Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I really want DOOM to be a fun, kick-ass mostersploitation flick. I think it's really fuckin' funny how the studio took the one well received bit from their Comic-Con presentation (the much touted First-Person-Shooter sequence) and designed their WHOLE marketing campaign around it. Looking at the trailers and posters for DOOM, you'd never know The Rock or Karl Urban starred in the movie. The star is that FPS sequence, apparently. I'm still eagerly awaiting to see this flick. I understand it might blow donkeys for quarters, but it also just might make me smile. But it sure as shit didn't make this below reviewer smile. Enjoy the dissection below!
Hey Harry,
I managed to see a preview screening of Doom yesterday (Wednesday, October 12th) here in Miami, Florida at the AMC Sunset Theatres. Here's the review if you care, it is rather different from the one you ran yesterday, so I hope that makes it more interesting:
I saw a sneak preview screening of “Doom” last night and even though I held out hope that it might be a fun ride, it turned out to be just as miserable as most of the other video game adaptations that have come out over the past few years. Cheap, ugly, and painfully boring are the best words to describe this film, and to make things worse no cheap horror cliché is left unturned in its, overly long, running time. I guess I shouldn’t have expected more, what with Andrzej Bartkowiak at the helm. I mean, this is the same guy that directed the American, Jet Li treasures, “Romeo Must Die” and “Cradle 2 the Grave” (yeah, it’s with a “2”), so he hasn’t really proven himself to be a master of cinema. But still, a man can hope can’t he?
Well, no, I guess he can’t, because “Doom” is just plain awful all around, even though it is definitely “R” rated with a good amount of swear words and gore thrown in for good measure. The problem, though, is that the gore is never particularly inspired and is usually hidden by bad lighting and bad camerawork that plague the whole movie overall. But we’ll get back to that later, for now, if you want to know how bad the movie gets, let’s just say that by the time “The Rock” stands up and yells “Semper Fi Motherf***er”, I think we all knew we were in a lot of trouble.
Set in the near future (is there any other in movies these days?) “Doom’s” plot begins with a monster rampaging through a research facility on Mars. Soon after, Earth receives a distress call from the terrified scientists holed up with the unknown. In response, a team of Marines is sent to Mars to investigate the situation. The team is led by the aforementioned Rock and a mixed bag of screenwriting manual stereotypes that always tend to make up these kinds of teams in movies. Once on Mars, the team begins to get picked off one by one by whatever it is that is lurking in the research facilities’ dark and dank corridors. The rest of the movie is about the survivors trying to figure out where these monsters come from and how to stop them, while, of course, staying alive themselves.
Well, it’s not exactly a bad set-up, right? At least, it’s not a bad set up for a straightforward action/horror hybrid type of film like this. The problem with this movie is just about everything else. The production design, first of all, is hideous. The movie pretty much takes place in a couple of gray corridors that the actors run through over and over again. There’s no atmosphere, mood, or creepiness in these hallways, and no sense of dread is felt as these marines traverse them; the sets are just grey and dark, and that’s about it. It’s an awfully boring place to spend an hour and a half.
Speaking of boring, the first half of the film consists mostly of characters coming up on the monsters and shooting at them as they run away. In between the excitement generated by shooting and missing the bad guys that are running away, the film is punctuated by “shocking” reveals of who the monsters are and what exactly is going down at the research facility. The problem though, is that none of these revelations are in the least bit shocking. Who the monsters are is painfully obvious to everybody but the characters in the movie and what is going on in the facility, though not revealed until the end of the second act, is given away at the very beginning of the films trailer!
The movie also comes off as being seriously cheap. The Monsters that appear in “Doom” are poorly presented extras in rubber suits that, as usual, depend on the fact that they are always shown in the dark, or shot in extreme close-up, so that we can barely see them. When you do see them, you wish you hadn’t, because they are just your typical off the shelf monsters with big teeth and a bunch of eyes. Also, speaking of cheapness, just wait until you see the way in which the characters travel from Earth to Mars in a matter of seconds. It is supposed to be this amazing teleportation device and just about the time you think you’re going to see this massive setup like the Stargate or something, all you get is this cheap CGI blob that spurts out of the ground and sucks up the character.
The scares, as mentioned before, are your standard cheap horror scares that are all the rage these days. A character goes down a hallway, hears a noise, stops, the audio is dropped out, and exactly when you expect it, the silence is broken by something that makes a loud noise, either a monster attacking or just a monkey (!) or a dog that decided to sneak up on the heroes and scare them. There is this hilarious part though, that tries to be scary, but instead shows off just how stupid the movie is. While exploring the sewers one of the Marines hears a noise, when he goes to take a closer look into the darkness from which the noise emanated from, he sees a pair of eyes looking back at him. They’re human looking enough, except for the fact that he can see them in the dark! Which really should clue him in that something is wrong. Instead of shooting, the idiot asks, “Dr. Willis, is that you?” Now, if you saw a pair of eyes glowing in the dark like in a cartoon, you would run away as fast as you could, right? Not these guys, they wait until a few more eyes open up to reveal that, yes, indeed, that is a monster standing in front of them and then they resign themselves to their fate. Not the sharpest tools in the shed, really.
Oh, and that first person sequence that has been so highly touted. While it is the best thing in the movie, it is still rather disappointing. I counted at least two obvious cuts, and the parts where Karl Urban walks up to a mirror or sees his reflection in a wall seem oddly out of step with the camera movements. Such sloppiness, frankly, is unacceptable when you consider how well Kathryn Bigelow did the same thing ten years ago in “Strange Days”.
And that’s all I have to say really. “Doom” is a pretty darn poor movie. I hope I covered all the bases and was able to give a decent impression of what the movie was like so that you all don’t have to spend your hard earned money on poo like this and see it for yourselves. If you use this just call me PK Money.
