Doom the movie has a rating of 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, which puts it on the same tier as Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and the Assassin’s Creed movie. Which is unfair. Assassin’s Creed was terrible because it thought it was clever, drily dumping conspiracy theory-history with a straight face, while Doom was gleefully dumb, the kind of action-horror movie where people say “motherfucker” then do something cool—one of those ideal four-beer shout-at-the-screen experiences.
The way the doomed marines are introduced is a classic of the form. You’re used to this kind of scene from Aliens (Bishop playing stabscotch) and Predator (Blaine insisting that chewing tobacco will make you “a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus”), though I have a soft spot for the one in Top Secret! where the French Resistance are introduced holding increasingly ridiculous weapons, including a straight-up cannon.
Doom’s not as over-the-top as that, but it’s close. Sarge (Dwayne Johnson when he was still being credited as The Rock) is introduced shirtless, because why waste time getting to what we want to see? The group sleazebag Portman is so greasy his hair looks like it repels water, the religious Goat reads a Bible and catches fruit without looking—someone has to catch something without looking up in these scenes so you know they’re cool—and Duke plays a Futuretronics Galaxian 2 to remind you videogames exist.
This scene tells you exactly the kind of movie you’re about to watch—one that’s so indebted to Aliens it’s still paying off the loan, but willing to have more fun with the form than any of the Alien movies since.
This crew gets sent to Mars to investigate an archaeological dig base where bad stuff has happened. Doom the movie explains the monstrous demons with some hasty ancient-alien-experiment pseudoscience rather than having them be just plain demons, which helps differentiate it from Event Horizon, but did anger the kind of fans who care about the Doom lore that apparently exists. I guess if you grew up in America during the Satanic Panic the rebel yell of Doom’s pentagrams must be meaningful in the same way anything that made your parents mad is. I didn’t and so the fact Doom the movie, like Doom the books, uses Christian ideas as a metaphor but is actually about aliens is fine by me. Your mileage may vary.
On Mars the marines meet “Pinky” Pinzerowski, a technician whose lower body is mechanical because of a teleporter accident (Dexter Fletcher with a better American accent than the one he had in Press Gang) and they also meet Doctor Samantha Grimm, in the role of the beautiful scientist this era of movies loved (Rosamund Pike from Gone Girl and Pride & Prejudice, being more convincing than Denise Richards was as Dr Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough).
For a second we’re supposed to think Doctor Grimm is Reaper’s ex-wife—his real name is John Grimm, that’s why they call him Reaper, lol—but actually she’s his estranged twin sister. Their parents were among the first scientists on Mars, and when they died she wanted to follow in their footsteps while he wanted to get as far away as possible. That’s the kind of traumatic backstory that marks him out as Real Protagonist Material.
What follows is a pacey, blessedly sun-two-hours spent running around in corridors that is interspersed with an oddly romantic autopsy, a Big Fucking Gun, a monster being attacked with a computer monitor that looks real VGA-ass for what’s supposed to be year 2046, a sewer level, scientists named after id’s founders being murdered—it manages some genuinely shocking deaths, there’s a real “no one is safe” feel toward the end—and finally, an extended first-person sequence that’s astonishing just for existing.
For a little over four minutes you the viewer are Doomguy as he rips and tears through a bunch of baddies like a haunted house train-ride complete with zombies who pop up just to cackle. Only you’ve got a machine gun, ho ho ho. The movie honestly could have ended here, but instead it throws in a bareknuckle boss fight and a real “movie’s over, fuck off” finale so you know it’s never going to get a sequel.
The 2019 reboot, Doom: Annihilation, ends on a cliffhanger because for some reason they thought they’d get a sequel, and again I’m thankful the 2005 version was more self-aware than the average videogame movie. Doom: Annihilation also tried to have it both ways with demons who were simultaneously ancient aliens and also from a Hell dimension, but the imps look so lame throwing fireballs it’s obvious why the previous version ditched that idea.
Sure, 2005’s Doom was as dumb as rocks who flunked out of rock school, but that’s what I want from a Doom movie. That and some kickass music, which Clint Mansell’s score totally delivered.