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DOOM (2005)
Chainsaws on Mars? Three things made me disregard all the promises of this being R-rated until the day it was released. First was casting The Rock - if it stars a wrestler, it'll be PG-13. I think the last movie that did, and wasn't, was in 1988. Second, the BFG - the big fuckin' gun - became the "bio-force gun". Third, and most saddening to me, was the removal of all the Satanic elements of the game in favor of pseudo-scientific "plausible" genetic-manipulation stuff (complete with hogwash tech babble even junior high kids aren't gonna buy - ten percent of the human genome hasn't been mapped? What?). Now, I'm not one to run around hailing Satan or anything (well, yes I am, but anyone who knows me at all knows how seriously to take that) but part of the appeal of the game was that it so unapologetically pitted the player against demons from Hell. Not "mutant creatures" or "genetically altered lifeforms" - fucking demons from fucking Hell!!! Pentagrams everywhere, BURN and SUFFER and DIE written in dried blood on the walls - you walked into fucking Hell in those games. Hell! HELL!!! Why this change? Especially when the minions of Satan are without doubt the baddies, the loathsome hordes to be exterminated? The mind boggles; you'd think the fundies that the makers of Doom were surely terrified of getting into a twist would get a kick out of that. If they're gonna make a movie for adults (like, say, an R-rated movie), can't they at least give us enough credit to receive a movie about people killing demons from hell as a fantasy in which demons from hell are the nasties? If that strikes you as dangerous, you're not an adult. Oh, and two more things suggested to me that it was going to suck, no matter what it was rated: video game adaptations have had a lousy track record, and just because I liked the game Doom 3 (on which this movie is loosely based) doesn't mean I had high expectations for the movie. And there were rumors of a twenty-five minute first-person-shooter sequence where all of what you see is in full gun-at-the-bottom-of-the-screen FPS mode, probably the worst idea I've ever heard. The movie itself didn't turn out to be that bad. Not quite. Though the BFG is referred to as the "bio-force gun" on a monitor, it does actually get called the big fuckin' gun. The FPS sequence is only about five minutes long, and despite how the monsters aren't actually demons from hell, they're always referred to as demons, and the marines are frequently heard to mention that they are in hell. You might wonder then why the makers of this movie bothered with these changes, but never mind - at its core, Doom is as lame an Aliens knockoff as there's ever been, and it's fitting enough that it's a movie based on a video game that was originally inspired by Aliens. You'd think such a roundabout route to knockoffville would pick up some freshness along the way, but that FPS sequence and a nifty "nano-wall" are about all this movie's got. So, on to the plot. After a nice Martian twist on the Universal title screen, we see how monsters have run amok in a Martian research base decades in the future and a bunch of marines on Earth have to cancel their leave to investigate. They use an ancient "arch" artefact to travel over there (apparently interplanetary ship travel is impractical) and find most of the base well-populated and in fine working order, except for the research division which...blah blah blah. The plot owes so much to Aliens it even waits until it's half over before it gets going. And if you've played the game, you'll chortle to yourself when you meet the guy named "Pinky", 'cuz you'll be like "Oh-ho, I know what happens to Pinky." The marines are led by The Rock, and their mildly two-dimensional member is played by Karl Urban. Later on The Rock becomes a laughably unconvincing villain (the camera loves this guy, but his charisma is not of the sort that can come across as villainy no matter how hard he tries), and we get that FPS sequence, which dizzyingly hard to watch as it is (even if you're not prone to motion sickness, you'll still get the impression that you're essentially just watching somebody else play the game), at least it compresses a lot of violence and bloodshed into a short amount of time, and with that, becomes the nominal highlight of the movie. And oh yeah, the monsters. There may be more than two kinds of monsters in this movie, but a lot of it is so dark you'd never know. There's the big humanoid slimy-thing-in-the-dark, which appears to be a guy in a costume and not much better looking than a creature in an Xtro sequel, and the bull, which is CGI and might not pass muster if it didn't turn up in the already visually askew FPS sequence, though as it is, it is the highlight of that sequence (and thus of the movie). And some zombies. No flaming heads, no skeletons with rocket launchers on their shoulders, no huge blubbery cyber-cthulhus. I know the game sort-of explained what chainsaws were doing on Mars, but anyone who didn't play it is going to wonder, and then they're going to wonder why the chainsaw couldn't be used against something it'd be effective against, like the zombies. All of Mars that you get to see is an establishing shot of the lab from outside and a peek out the window from inside (so it doesn't really matter that it's set on Mars), and no, The Rock doesn't become a thirty-foot-tall cyborg minotaur at the end (instead, he has a wire-fu fight with Urban). No rockets, no fireballs. The main title looks fantastic - too bad it's as close to recreating the experience of the game (which was incredibly atmospheric and quite beautiful, in its way) as this gets. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |