A combination archeological dig and research facility on Mars is quarantined for unknown reasons. A Rapid Response Tactical Squad, lead by Sarge (The Rock) and including John Grimm (Karl Urban), is sent in to save the corporation’s data, retrieve personnel if possible, and take out anything dangerous. Once there, they join with Grimm’s scientist sister (Rosamund Pike), who is charged with downloading the computer data, while they fight off horrible monsters and zombies.
Claiming to be based on the highly successful series of video games, Doom is really another “Bugs in a Can” film in the mold of Aliens. There are multiple powerful monsters, a troop of marines (sorry, that’s RRTS members), and plenty of dark corridors for them to walk through. Like Aliens, there are a few non-combatants and a lab where the companies dark deeds can be seen. Naturally, most of the soldiers will get picked off and a lot of monsters will get shot by very loud guns. We’ve seen this many times before. The only real change from Aliens comes from ripping off Resident Evil (which is 50% a “Genetically Engineered Zombie Bugs in a Can” movie) and switching the ultimate battle to something easier to film.
And that dooms (get the play on words) this flick to mediocrity. With Aliens already out there as a nearly perfect rendition of this story, why make another? Since the comparison is so obvious, your film needs to beat James Cameron’s masterpiece in at least one area, and that rarely happens. It doesn’t here. So, most “Bugs in a Can” films are direct-to-video schlock affairs, with unknown actors and has-beens trapped on dim sets that hide the cheap monster effects.
So, compared to those home video projects, Doom is pretty good. The monsters are cooler, the corridors are longer, and the sci-fi toys are zazzier. Of course Doom cost twenty times more, so this isn’t a case of “you get what you pay for.”
Unfortunately, like all those low-budget cousins, Doom is pretty slow for its first half. Unlike its video game namesake, there’s almost no gunplay and the monsters stick to shadows. This is supposed to be the tension part of the program, but that would require real characters we can care about, and those aren’t here. What we get are a group of one-quirk soldiers (we need that quirk so we can identify them when they die). So, there’s the melancholy guy, the sleazy guy, the religious guy, the black guy, the sleazy black guy, the Asian guy, the young guy, and The Rock (his quirk is being exactly like he is in all his other movies). That’s all you get to know about any of them, and in several cases that’s too much (after two lines, I was praying for a monster to eat the sleazy guy, whose dialog consists of telling girls that he’d need to strip search them for security reasons). The melancholy guy (that’s Grimm) is even a lead in the picture and yet we’re only given a partial explanation for his pouting.
Eventually, the writers caught on that soldiers separating from each other (because the plot requires it), moving around slowly in the dark, and suddenly dying, isn’t interesting. So the “story” changes. The survivors pick up their guns and we get mindless mayhem (which is a great improvement). The high point is a five minute, first-person perspective shooting spree. It’s exactly like watching someone else play a graphically improved level of the video game. Hey, watching someone else play a game isn’t much fun. Well, it’s as good as it gets here, and for about four minutes, it’s not bad. Then it starts to drag.
Still, with an over-used story, by-the-numbers characters, and no theme, there’s fun to be had in the meaningless violence. The gore is front-and-center, as limbs are torn off and heads are smashed into walls. Gatling guns are common, and The Rock manages to find the game’s legendary “Big Fucking Gun” and blow enormous holes in the ceiling. Forget that none of it makes sense: that an infection can change a person in a matter of seconds (even adding mass) or take hours depending on when a new monster is needed for the script; that Mars has the same gravity as Earth; that character behavior is disconnected from personality; that skeletons from tens of thousands of years ago are found in perfect condition and sitting up; that three insane people are left on active military duty (one cuts crosses into his arm if he sins); that they haven’t mapped the human genome forty years in the future (ummmm, isn’t it already done now?) and that the unknown final tenth is where are souls are defined; that Martians came to Earth long ago and became us, and somehow lost their twenty-fourth chromosome. Instead, think only of guys with big guns blasting demonic-looking critters who are busy ripping off heads. Think of gallons of blood. Think of wire being shoved through a hand and an arm being cut off in a door. If that sounds fun, then you’ll find Doom mildly amusing entertainment for a Saturday afternoon.