(SPOILER WARNING)

Three things became abundantly clear to me while watching DOOM.

1) ALIENS was such a well made movie.
2) The Rock really needs to give his agent a Rock Bottom.
3) I’d much rather be playing DOOM than watching it.

Up until the last 15 minutes, DOOM was nothing but a bunch of uninteresting characters, many of which aren’t even given any distinguishing character traits, running around darkened corridors with guns, periodically shooting at or being stalked by either a big, ugly hellbeast or a zombie-like person in the early stages of transforming into a big, ugly hellbeast. Exploring darkened corridors and shooting ugly hellbeasts is perfectly entertaining in the video game DOOM because you control the action. In essence, you are the one running around the station; you are the one being attacked by hellacious monsters. Watching this play out in movie form, well, we’ve seen this movie many times before, the best being when it was called ALIENS; and the skulking about darkened corridors, unsure of what’s lurking in the shadows really only composed about fifteen or so minutes during that film’s first act. DOOM stretches the skulking about corridors element out for nearly 100 freakin’ minutes and didn’t even get it right. What makes the game fun is that the monsters are constantly coming at you and you never know when you’re going to go around a corner, open a door, or enter a room and have one of these creatures come right at you. The movie follows the ALIEN formula of having the monster(s) hiding in the shadows, patiently stalking people sneaking up on victims. They even managed to work in a fake scare involving an animal popping out. Ah, hell, they even managed to do it more than once. A DOOM movie should feature relentless, non-stop action. Instead, we got this. I swear to God I sat there thinking that if the production values had been only slightly more dingy then DOOM could easily have been an ALIENS knock-off produced by Golan-Globus or New World Pictures about fifteen years ago.

Then again, the monsters in DOOM really aren’t the hellbeasts of the video game. The makers of the DOOM movie made a fundamental change to the games’ already filament thin storyline by eliminating the basic premise behind the game itself: a portal to Hell being opened up on a remote Martian space station allowing unholy creatures to come through. The hell portal has been eliminated and replaced with a really dopey concept based around Martian chromosomes. Archaeologists on Mars have uncovered the remnants of a deceased Martian civilization. The Martians have an extra 24th chromosome. You and I only have 23. Scientists began conducting human experiments on condemned criminals that then transformed into these hulking hellbeasts that slaughtered everyone on the station.

If I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, “Nothing good can come from experimenting on condemned prisoners.” When will mankind learn?

So anyways, during the film’s final 15 minutes, when the movie actually bothers trying to introduce a plot outside of armed soldiers running around darkened corridors containing monsters, we get a speech about the human genome and how this 24th chromosome may tap into the human soul. Basically, it’s like this.  If you’re naughty, you get transformed into a hulking hellbeast. If you’re nice, you get Wolverine’s fighting prowess and super fast healing. I don’t know about you but I like the much simpler “Oops, we opened a portal to Hell” concept instead.

Contrary to what you may have been lead to believe, The Rock isn’t really the star or the hero of the film. The real star of the film is Karl Urban of LORD OF THE RINGS and CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK fame and here he makes for one of the sorriest excuses for an action hero I’ve ever seen. His parents were the archaeologists that originally located the Martian ruins, they were killed in an accident, and to this day he’s still tormented by the never adequately explained events that claimed their lives and left him emotionally scarred. Whereas he went into the military, his sister followed the parents’ line of work and, what a coincidence, she’s the scientific envoy assigned to accompany the soldiers into the quarantine zone. How lame is his character? This brings up boring pathos and tepid melodrama. He’s so lame I honestly can’t even remember his character’s name. All I know for certain is that Urban spends the overwhelming majority of the movie looking and acting like a guy suffering from a really bad hangover and a wicked case of motion sickness. I kept waiting for him to just keel over and pass out at any moment.

And there’s The Rock… I’m really starting to feel bad for this guy. He clearly has the potential to be the next big action hero he’s been hyped as for the past few years but he’s yet to have a breakthrough role, and if he keeps picking projects like this and WALKING TALL, he never will. His entire role consists of barking out run-of-the-mill military commander junk. The Rock is supposed to be a big movie star and big movie stars should not be taking roles like this that could be played by just about anyone. Admittedly, in the minutes leading up to the film’s climax, he does get a few moments that require actual acting other than just barking orders. It’s not much but at least it’s something. I still don’t understand how his agent talked him into this thankless role. Rock, can you smell what your agent is cooking? It’s the smell of your potential superstardom slipping away.

The other members of the squad are indistinguishable save for a few: a big black guy named Destroyer, a young rookie called “The Kid,” a religious ex-con that carves a cross in his arm whenever he takes the Lord’s name in vein, an LL Cool J wannabe, and a leering, drug-peddling, potential sexual predator played by a guy that seemed to be trying to channel Brad Dourif to the third power. The rest are just fodder. Heck, even the ones that do standout for whatever reason are nothing more than fodder. At this point it seems almost pointless to rip on the shoddy script but it really is quite hackneyed. “The Kid” has a drug problem. What comes of this fact that’s brought up a few times? Nothing! After an encounter with one of the creatures, the creepy potential sexual predator wants to get the hell out of there, not even wanting to go back out in the corridors to do his job. Minutes later, all by himself, he casually takes a bathroom break, even putting his gun down in the process; so much for being scared paranoid. Wanna guess what happens to him?

I found DOOM to be a chore to sit through until the final 15 minutes. It wasn’t that the movie actually got good, but after the mediocrity of characters going through the motions of every ALIEN/ALIENS knock-off made since those films came out, the climactic scenes setting up The Rock’s heel turn, Karl Urban becoming superhuman, and the now infamous first person shooter P.O.V. sequence broke up the monotony that preceded them.

Speaking of the first person shooter P.O.V. sequence, it’s kind of neat but not nearly as cool as I’m sure they intended it to be. It really only serves to pound home just how much more fun it would be to merely play the game instead. Actually, watching this sequence I started having flashbacks to the old Action Max game system, a very short lived light gun based video game system from the late 80s that used VHS video footage in place of cartridges. If Action Max was around today and they released a version of DOOM then this sequence is exactly how I imagine it would look.

And somebody got their video games confused because the movie version of DOOM concludes with a fight worthy of STREETFIGHTER or some other hand-to-hand combat game as Karl Urban playing Neo-lite and The Rock in the early stages of transforming into Wishmaster duke it out in a fight to the death. Weak.

Oh, and the movie can’t even be bothered to play by its own rules. One supporting character, a half-human/half-machine technician (He lost his lower torso in an accident involving the Earth-to-Mars transport system), is turned into one of the hellbeasts, as seen during the first person shooter sequence. Why? We were never given any indication that he was evil nor had evil tendencies. Someone just decided it would be cool to see a half-demon/half-machine hellbeast.

That transport system I mentioned; it’s called “The Ark” and at no point is it ever explained which is probably a good thing since it looks like someone took the liquid energy inside the Stargate and reduced it to a convenient basketball sized glob. I doubt that one could be explained in any way, shape, or form.

I’ve read some online comments from people expressing joy because DOOM is R-rated with plenty of gore and violence. I hate to break it to them but it’s because of crummy movies like DOOM that Hollywood tends to shy away from making hard R-rated action films these days. Yeah, it opened #1 but it wasn’t a very impressive showing all things considered and it’ll fall off the face of the planet come next weekend. DOOM is ultimately yet another video game to movie adaptation that points out the fundamental flaw with the very concept. The basic premise behind DOOM works fine in the context of the video game because it’s just that - a game. But in the context of a motion picture narrative it’s just a run-of-the-mill sci-fi action flick that we’ve seen before done better and worse.

Again, first person shooter video game about soldiers running around an abandoned space station killing hellbeasts = fun. Third person perspective motion picture about soldiers running around an abandoned space station killing hellbeasts = generic.

Skip the movie. Play the game. You’ll have more fun.