It’s been over a week now since the legendary id Software released the sequel to the reboot of DOOM with DOOM: Eternal. DOOM: Eternal has been a smash hit, with it having the most successful launch of any of the franchise’s other titles to date on the PC market place, most notably on Steam. DOOM: Eternal prolongs the extended legacy DOOM as a franchise has held in the video game space, but we often forget that there was not one, but two separate attempts to bring this series into the film medium. As everyone’s ripping and tearing through DOOM: Eternal, I thought it would be fun to rip and tear through two of the worst video-game-to-movie adaptations Hollywood has ever had the misfortune of producing.
DOOM (2005)
When I originally watched DOOM back in August of last year, I had denounced it as an irredeemable pile of trash with no real redeeming qualities to it. Upon a second viewing, my opinion has changed somewhat, but it’s still nowhere near good.
Directed by Polish director Andrzej Bartkowiak, and starring the likes of Karl Urban and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson during his first retirement from WWE, DOOM saw light during a promising time for video game movies. While critical reception was never any good, films such as Resident Evil and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its sequel were blowing up in box office takings, making some production studios eager to take on whatever gaming properties they could to try and capitalize off of the growing entertainment medium. One year before DOOM released, the newest entry to the video game franchise was released in DOOM 3, which was a major success both critically and financially, but had many detractors against its dramatic change in pacing and style to the DOOM games that preceded it. For brief context, when DOOM was introduced in the 90s, it was a fast-paced first-person-shooter first, and more of a horror game second. But DOOM 3 flipped that on its head to make a much slower, methodical experience that was rife with tension and atmospheric horror. It was DOOM 3 that made the primary influence for the DOOM film, where everything from monster designs to setting of the film, itself felt ripped right from that game, and not so much the more action-packed entries in the 90s.
While DOOM has plenty of issues that I’ll be getting to soon, I have to say that there’s a lot to admire in the visual presentation of the film. Taking influence from the more controversial entry of the franchise was a rather bold move to make, although I feel it’s ultimately towards the detriment to the end product. Taking greater influence from the dark, decrepit corridors DOOM 3 helmed with monster designs ripped straight from that game made it feel rather timely for the film, and now makes it a rather intriguing time capsule for how this movie pulled so much influence from the game. Although there’s a fair share of eye-rolling nods given to the game series through references like naming a scientist in the narrative “Carmack” (a reference to the last name of two co-founders of id Software: John and Adrian), the more horror-based atmosphere makes it stand out. I rather liked seeing the surprisingly impressive production design to the scientific bases in which the story takes place in, and although the visual effects are mostly rather dated, there’s some real love and care put into the design and animation of many segments of the film, which is rather unexpected for a video game movie. This care for the craft can also be found in Tony Pierce-Roberts’ cinematography, which is surprisingly well-done for a film of this type. Watching the camera move around as it does, placed in strange but visually interesting ways, and even hosting a few long takes here and there is pretty refreshing to see when the entire video game movie junket is chock-full of half-baked garbage like the infamous Uwe Boll has spewed his whole career.
Even if there’s a lot of great things that came from DOOM taking influence from DOOM 3, there’s plenty that really has it fall flat right on its face, and the biggest of which is the complete absence of the iconic monsters that has made DOOM the force of nature that it’s become today. Throughout DOOM, there’s only appearances of three types of demons that have become synonymous with the franchise: the imps, the more generic “former humans”/zombies, and a cameo from the pinky demon. I understand that DOOM wasn’t made with the largest budget in the world, so the inclusion of certain types of beasts were to be left on the cutting room floor, but having your entire horror-based experience that is built on the foundation of freaky hellish creatures only becoming a glorified zombie romp is severely disappointing. DOOM makes several adjustments to how the demons operate as well by having all of them being “former humans” one way or another, not really committing to the graphic and terrifying hell-spawn we all love.
DOOM’s other major flaw is the weirdly out of place first-person segment (emulating the game), which just goes on for far too long and revamps the entire tone of the film until the very end. Up until the major action blowout for the final act, DOOM was relatively grounded in tone by being strictly horror-action, but when the camera goes into the eyes of “Reaper,” Karl Urban’s character, it’s pure cheese until the end credits. Although stupid in concept, I’m not entirely against the idea of having a first-person segment in the movie, but the problem of this scene compounds from the previous monster related issue, where the entire corridor crawl is nothing but a boring drag through some hallways, watching our generic while guy protagonist shoot the same bland zombies over and over again; it just doesn’t make for any riveting entertainment.
Unfortunately, the previous aesthetic issues of DOOM don’t hold a candle to its sexism issue. DOOM is, surprisingly, a tad racially diverse for the kind of movie that it is, having two of the actors portraying the military patrol of the film being African-English, and having now world-renowned Samoan super-star Dwayne Johnson as one of the three most prominent roles. We also have a female lead built up to not be a blatant sex object in Rosamund Pike’s Samantha Grimm, but these few diversity points don’t really add up in the whole portrayal and treatment of women in the film. Although in more passing remarks, the male side characters of DOOM are extremely sexist horn-dogs, chasing after women like they’re objects, and frequently objectifying them by describing them as “a fine piece of ass,” and the film also hosts a case of harassment where one character in particular approaches a group of women in a lobby area, sleazily requesting a “strip search” from each of them. The blatant sexism dies down as the perpetrators die as well, but the early moments of the film can be rather hard to get through in just how gross and sexist it can be.
Overall, DOOM is a rather bad movie, but it’s far from the worst video game film to ever be produced. DOOM ended up being a financial flop for Universal, giving the realization that just because there was a recent surge of successful video game adaptations, it doesn’t mean yours is any good. It took a whole fourteen-years for Universal to take another stab at the DOOM franchise, after the popularity of video game movies long died out. Even though DOOM wasn’t the worst thing ever, all that time passing couldn’t mean we’d get a film worse than the original… right?
DOOM: Annihilation (2019)
Set to capitalize on the original October 2019 release date for DOOM: Eternal, the film DOOM: Annihilation marked the second attempt to take one of video games’ most un-adaptable intellectual properties and try to make a bit of cash off of it. Unlike the 2005 film, Annihilation was a direct-to-video title produced by a Universal sub-studio, leading it to have a supposed smaller budget.
The considerably large time-gap between the release of both movies, nor the noticeable budget differences isn’t what really makes DOOM: Annihilation stand out from its 2005 counterpart, it’s that the film goes for a considerably different tone than its predecessor.
DOOM: Annihilation strips away the horror fundamentals that the first film had, going for a heavy action focus, instead, feeling much more like an Aliens rip-off than the original DOOM did; DOOM: Annihilation brings a rag-tag group of military personnel to assemble together and take on some sort of alien/demonic force while they throw cornball quips around and hold conversations so vulgar that a sailor would blush. This group of wise-cracking thirty-somethings that all act like they’re in a fraternity march about a recently overrun science facility on Mars, as they attempt to bring power back to the station and secure the staff within the perimeter; not winning any points in originality, I see. As one expects from the outset, everything goes wrong, people begin to die left and right, and we get a sci-fi action thriller that’s so boiled down to its bare-bones tropes that the only thing making this a DOOM movie besides the cringe-inducing references to the series is the actual title of the film, itself.
Elaborating further on how the writing of DOOM: Annihilation goes, its cavalcade of tropes is only the tip of the iceberg when analyzing its issues. Annihilation goes the route of presenting a script that attempts to ape the more machismo clichés of 80’s action sci-fi, yet constantly falls flat to feel extremely juvenile. The consistent swearing from characters for seemingly no reason gets old very fast, and phrases such as: “I’m your ultra-nightmare, motherf***er” makes both DOOM fans and casual viewers wince in painful cringe, and there’s plenty more after that. The characters presented here are just so bland and forgettable, that the sheer fact that they’re so obnoxious is the only thing I can remember about them upon even a second viewing of the film. After two viewings of a film, I should at least know one character’s name, but besides the one that’s a blatant reference to DOOM 3, I, nor anyone else who’s seen this mess can honestly give you a name without looking them up.
This bogged-down action romp is such a stale mess; it’s hard to watch. Even though DOOM: Annihilation is a more tonally consistent film and takes a few more elements from the series, overall than just a bizarre loose adaptation of a single game, it’s considerably more boring than the previous film, and with that, introduces more eye-rolling moments than before. If the references made to DOOM 3 within the original DOOM film were too much to handle, Annihilation takes it a step further by going on a consistent spree of referencing the series as a whole through forced implementations of weapons such as the chainsaw and the iconic BFG, as well as making not one, nor two, but three different references to id Software properties through character names. The original DOOM could easily be held guilty for trying too hard to be a fan-service extravaganza. However, DOOM: Annihilation laughs in the face of the original and goes all out by trying as hard as it can to be a DOOM movie through the laziest ways possible.
While not a complete waste of effort (although teetering on the edge of being one), Annihilation makes a couple improvements from the first movie, the first of which is that we actually get a sense of the demonic element the DOOM franchise is famous for. I’ve mentioned before that the first DOOM film had a few strides in taking some elements from the games and placing them within the movie, yet the monsters of the film were a complete bust, being more of a zombie-fodder killing spree than a film about actual invading demons from Hell, itself. Annihilation still revels mostly within zombie killing but doesn’t entirely ditch the whole Hell-angle of the narrative, even if it’s extremely brief, and there’s no actual mention of Hell as a place within the story. The monsters of Annihilation get a slight upgrade on making them an actual force to be reckoned with, rather than limping cannon fodder, which stays a little closer to the ethos of the DOOM series of games, but not by a lot. We’re once again stuck with only the most basic of demon types in Annihilation (more than likely due to budgetary constraints), but the imp monsters actually shoot their iconic fireballs like they did in the games, so that’s something I suppose. Those plastic Toys “R” Us looking guns certainly aren’t an improvement over the first movie’s prop design, though.
As an additional major improvement from the first film, Annihilation implements a more diverse cast than before. We get a more racially diverse cast of characters by having people from many different ethnic backgrounds, we see a speaking role given to a disabled character using a prosthetic leg, and we additionally get a fair few women in the spotlight, one of which is the main character to the entire narrative. The casting diversity is much appreciated, yet sadly, it never seems to go much of anywhere when (spoilers, but who honestly cares) a large majority of the diverse cast are killed off within the first half of the movie. We keep our leading actress through to the ending credits, but the ethnic diversity to the cast is only around for a short while.
In conclusion:
DOOM has been a rather consistently great FPS video game series, helming many iconic entries and honestly being a rather fun experience, all things considered. The games have had their lull periods here and there, but for the most part, it’s been a phenomenal series filled with the cartoonish ultra-violence we all engage with. Sadly, DOOM’s cinematic efforts cannot say the same, with both of them being honest disasters in their own right, never reaching the heights of even the worst of the video games. With DOOM: Eternal being a grand success, and these movies wallowing in pitiful agony, one could hope that we can just keep video games, video games, and movies, movies.
