Posted by Frosty

Doom

Starring: Karl Urban (Reaper), The Rock (Sarge), Rosamund Pike (Samantha Grimm), Dexter Fletcher (Pinky)

Written by: Dave Callaham and Wesley Strick

Directed by: Andrzej Bartkowiak

Running Time: 100 minutes

Rating: R (for strong violence/gore and language)

Grade: 1.5 stars out of 4

Review by Peter Debruge

Ten years ago, one of the most disappointing movies of my teen years opened with one of the coolest stunts I'd ever seen – and then promptly sank beyond all redemption. I'm talking about Waterworld, and the effect was a twist on the usual Universal logo where shortly after earth came into view, the ice caps melted, the continents disappeared, and the camera swung down into the endless ocean to find Kevin Costner drifting at sea (and drinking his own urine, if memory serves).

Doom opens with a shot like that (the globe trick, not the urine), only this time we see the Universal logo wrapping around the Red Planet before zooming in to the Martian surface, where dead-meat doctors in soon-to-be-bloodstained lab coats demonstrate how genetically altering convicted killers to accept a 24th chromosome that makes them "super-strong, super-fit, and super-intelligent" more or less proves Darwin's point.

First impressions are a powerful thing, and no matter how many movies I see, I always find myself mistaking the production company shingles for the first shot of the movie – which is why I love it when one of those logos actually turns out to be the first shot of the movie. Doom's idea of swapping Mars in for Earth was a stroke of genius. It plugs the audience right in to the movie and assures us that maybe Doom won't be as dumb as we'd feared. Of course, having seen Waterworld, no sooner had the logo impressed me than I thought, "Oh, shit. Things can only go downhill from here."

Sure enough, the rest of the movie is hard-pressed to measure up to that opening shot as he-men carrying guns the size of vacuum cleaners chase zombie demon creatures through underlit hallways. However, I'm pleased to report that there is a sequence late, late in the game that pays off all that has come before. Once the action moves back to earth, one of the few surviving characters goes on a zombie-shooting spree that takes place entirely in first-person shooter mode.

I've often wondered why more movies don't use first-person POVs for anything more than the occasional eyeline shot. Hitchcock tried it from time to time (the subjective strangling scene in Frenzy being a prime example), then John Carpenter upped the ante by giving us a killer's-eye-view as Michael Myers stalked his prey in Halloween. Both Strange Days and Brainstorm (a rather obscure old Christopher Walken movie) toyed with the idea of technology that could record human experience, and Being John Malkovich let characters and audiences alike spend a few moments seeing life through John Malkovich's eyes.

Doom isn't even remotely interested in the psychological implications of its first-person footage (what it means for the audience to identify so strongly during this violent rampage, for instance). Instead, Doom situates us behind the stock of a gun (and later a chainsaw) for the pure, visceral thrill of it – and, of course, as an homage to the game. Normally, I'd be annoyed to find myself watching a video game stripped of its interactive component, and for most of its runtime, Doom runs on autopilot. But this breathless first-person finale is another story. It's fitting that the sequence is almost completely computer-generated and a testament to how far technology has evolved that its practically photorealistic.

There's clearly a very evolved level of artistry that goes into making video games these days, and the time is right for some ambitious young critic to change the way the world looks at video games, just as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and company did for Cahiers du Cinéma back in the '50s. Personally, I have a hard time finding time to play video games and limited appreciation for the result. Some would say the countless hours I spend watching movies in the dark is time I'll never get back (I certainly feel that way about watching Doom), but the truth is, I look at movies not as diversionary entertainment, but as windows into other lives, cultures, and experiences.

Beyond the vicarious thrill of shooting things, Doom offers none of that. While George A. Romero and Danny Boyle use zombie movies as political allegory, this one is mind-numbingly "what you see is what you get" about its monsters. The screenplay's basically a bloody wet dream (I apologize for arranging those words in that order) for existing Doom fans. Like Resident Evil, it serves as a prequel to the game, and as such, it's as unnecessary as it is unpleasant.

Still, it could have been a lot worse. On a purely technical level, this is a solid action movie. Cinematographer-turned-director Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave) has a keen understanding of the look, feel, and pacing of action movies, and he hews close to Ridley Scott's Alien model here, preferring dank underground corridors to the infinitely more scenic surface of Mars. The creature design is well below what we've come to expect from movies like this, but there's an above-average effort to give each of the human characters a proper personality and backstory (my favorite is Goat, who penitently carves crosses into his forearm whenever he takes the Lord's name in vain, but has no qualms about killing things).

I mentioned the first-person finale earlier, but the movie's true climax is a WWF-worthy smackdown between Sarge (The Rock) and the team member lucky enough to have made it this far. Now, I like The Rock. I like the way his performances all seem to acknowledge the audience, as if he's winking at us to say, "Watch this. You're really gonna get a kick out what I've got planned for you next." He's a natural-born entertainer, and without him, this movie would have absolutely no appeal to anybody.

It's a shame that Doom is set to open on so many screens at the same time that a wonderful little movie called Duma, which has struggled for six months to find its audience, was originally set to go wide. While Doom is obsessed with destruction, Duma is just the opposite. It's an uplifting family film about an African-born only child who learns to appreciate life after adopting a wild cheetah cub. I know it sounds off-topic, but while all hell's busting loose in Doom, I kinda wished it would freeze over, and the most deserving movie would get a fair shot.