DOOM

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak. United States, Czech Republic. 2001.

I won’t bore you with the history of id Software’s Doom franchise. If that’s what you’re looking for, there are plenty of documentaries and books for that. Instead, I will bore you with my personal history with Doom Buckle up, kiddos. We're gettin' nerdy.

I. Panasonic 3DOH MY GOD MY EYES!!!

My first experience with the masterpiece that is Doom came in 1996 when my sister’s friend, Chris, dropped a large box in the middle of my living room, muttered “I don’t want this anymore”, and walked away. To my shock, that box contained my first new video game console since I foolishly chose the Sega Genesis over the Super Nintendo for Christmas in 1990: the Panasonic 3DO. Don’t get too jealous, folks. The 3DO was no longer a cutting-edge gaming console (if it ever was one). You didn’t need to spend $700 to get one either. No, it was an abandoned machine, now selling for as little as $200 in some discount department stores. It was probably easier for Chris to give it to me than to sell it off.

But who the fuck cares? I now had access to the best version of Road Rash ever. Hell, half the games he gave me were pretty good. I had a blast with Killing Time, Return Fire, Escape from Monster Manor, and Battlesport. Of course, I also inherited more than a few clunkers, but let’s not dwell on that sadness. A few weeks later, I made an impromptu excursion to the illustrious York Galleria Mall in York, Pennsylvania, with some friends. I stopped into good ol’ Electronics Boutique to see if they had any old 3DO games lying around, and what do you know? As luck would have it, they had three, all heavily discounted. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (which I loved), Way of the Warrior (which was digitized vomit), and the one and only Doom.

Those of you with lives and significant others might not know that this 3DO port of Doom is considered to be one of the worst versions of the game. Developed in only ten weeks by a single developer, it’s a miracle the thing ran at all. The 3DO lacked the necessary processing power to handle a game with this much unbridled awesomeness. As a result, certain levels needed reworking, and many graphical and audio effects needed to be redesigned from scratch. The developer, industry vet Rebecca Heineman, wasn’t even provided with the source code for Doom, leaving her high and dry for days. She was left to do the best she could in the very short time she was given. It was either finish the game in ten weeks, or the publisher would lose the license.

This proved to be no easy feat. Compromises needed to be made. For example, to offset the abysmal frame rate caused by running 3DO Doom at its maximum resolution, Heineman added multiple viewport sizes for the player to choose from. The smaller the viewport, the better the frame rate. Doom on the PC ran at an internal resolution of 320 x 200 pixels at a maximum frame rate of 35 frames per second (if your graphics card could handle it). But I wasn’t playing on PC. I was playing on a 3DO. I didn’t want to play a slideshow, so I chose the smallest possible viewport. That’s right, kids. My first experience of playing Doom was in a 128 x 80 pixel box in the middle of a 19-inch CRT television at around 10 frames per second.

And I fucking loved it.

Oh, no doubt about it, it was shit. The frame rate stuttered when I entered a new room, the input lag was persistent, the enemies were jumbled messes of pixels, and the eye strain was constant. But I’ll be fucked if I didn’t come home from school, eat dinner, and then play Doom until bedtime, often three or four days a week for the better part of a year. I was absolutely hooked. 3DO Doom, the worst port of Doom I’ve ever played, not only made me fall in love with first-person shooters, but it completely rekindled my interest in video games. A few years later, I was working at KB Toys, buying up every console I could. I gobbled up every first-person shooter released, including every id Software title. I played Quake and Quake 2 for the first time. I first experienced Duke Nukem 3D. I tolerated Hexen. I braved the fog of Turok. I was - oh god, it hurts to say it - a gamer.

I bought a capable PC in 2003 and haven’t bought a console since. The first piece of software I purchased? Doom. And Doom 2. And Final Doom. Yeah, I was a little hooked. Since then, I’ve played with Doom more than I’ve played with myself. At the first opportunity, I’ll fire up GZDoom, open up The Plutonia Experiment, crank it to ultra violence, and play until sunrise. I might have a combined five thousand hours in the various Doom games. Maybe even closer to ten thousand.

So this movie is absolutely made for me, a Doom super fan. The kind of guy who knows the lore and can draw a map of E4M2 from Thy Flesh Consumed from memory. This one is for the fans by the fans. Right?

II. Enter the survival horror. Kinda.

DOOM takes its cue more from Doom 3 than the classic run-and-gun, pseudo-3D originals. The original games were fast-paced action spectacles full of monsters waiting in large open rooms and cramped corridors, begging to be mowed down with plasma fire or bullets. Not Doom 3. No, that game was less about unmitigated carnage, and more about immersing you in a dark, spooky atmosphere. It was a major change in direction, both in aesthetics and gameplay. John Carmack, lead programmer at id Software, always wanted Doom to look like a horror game. Now he could make that happen. The tech in 2004 finally allowed for it.

Early in Doom's development, id Software was offered the license to make a video game adaptation of ALIENS. The DNA of that film became embedded in the source code for id’s blockbuster. It’s all there. Marines trapped on an alien planet surrounded by hordes of bloodthirsty monsters? Check. Bad-ass weaponry? Check. Violence and mayhem? You bet your ass. Odds of survival? Well, that depends on the difficulty level. ALIENS had Ellen Ripley. id Software had Doom Guy. id Software passed up the ALIENS license to maintain their artistic freedom, but the basic inspirations stayed. The sci-fi action remained, but the hordes of aliens became the armies of Hell, running rampant in research stations and military bases, all thanks to our inextricable need to tinker with things we don’t understand.

While Doom and Doom 2 were colorful run-and-gunners set to driving synth metal, Doom 3 amped up the horror. It was a technological masterpiece for the time, with an industry-altering lighting engine, impressive textures, and world-class level design. id Software used environmental storytelling to flesh out the world. This allowed players to dive deep into the lore by reading emails, PDAs, and notes. While this wasn’t a novel idea (the System Shock series had done the same thing years before Doom 3), the attempt at giving a simple action game like Doom a proper narrative was laudable.

Doom 3 isn’t a fast-paced action game. It isn’t overwhelming. It’s slow and methodical. You’re not gunning down rooms full of enemies. Instead, you’re creeping slowly through a research facility overrun by demons, flashlight in hand, scavenging for door codes and completing micro tasks as you work your way to the showdown in Hell. It’s a horror game with occasional moments of pulse-pounding action.

It’s also the only franchise installment suitable for a cinematic adaptation. The other installments don’t have real stories to tell (keep in mind Doom 3 was the most recent game at the time). A 90-minute action film following a mute grunt through corridors does not make for a solid film. I’m always perplexed by people who want human stories left out of giant monster movies as if 90 straight minutes of watching monsters whack each other over the head wouldn’t get boring. It would, and so would 90 minutes of a live-action, one-to-one Doom adaptation. This film proves that, but more on that later. We need to talk about the plot of the movie now. Oh boy.

III. Rip and tear my heart out.

Back in 2046, a portal to Mars was found in Nevada. In the present day, a breach at a Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) research facility necessitates the deployment of the Rapid Response Tactical Squad, a bunch of bad-ass marines led by Sarge. Along for the mission is John “Reaper” Grimm (get it?). Reaper’s estranged sister, Samantha, is one of the lead researchers stationed at the facility. When they arrive, Samantha is one of the few scientists left alive. The rest are in pieces all over the corridors or missing. We learn that Reaper and Sam had a falling out after the accidental deaths of their parents. They were killed while out digging for Martian artifacts.

Through Sam, we learn what the UAC has been up to on the Red Planet. They found evidence of an ancient civilization, including bizarre humanoid skeletons. Tests reveal that they had been genetically altered. Those skeletons contain an unnatural extra pair of chromosomes. The UAC scientists have been testing patients with a synthesized chromosomal enhancement based on that discovery. Whoops, big mistake. Turns out, it’s basically the super serum from the Captain America comics. When injected, good people become even more good. They become superheroes. Bad people, on the other hand… They become even worse, mutating into monsters. That’s right, folks. No demons here. Might as well have named the Martian colony Raccoon City.

If you’ve seen ALIENS, you know the drill. One by one, marines die until there’s only one left, this time a dude. Instead of a little girl, you get his little sister. Sarge becomes the big bad when he gets orders to kill all survivors and doesn’t hesitate. Reaper refuses. Both men get their genetic material enhanced. Sarge becomes a monster. Reaper becomes the Doom Guy.

See how I summed the whole movie up in three paragraphs? That’s because this movie has practically no story. It does have lots of Doom things, though. We get Imps and a pinkie demon (actually a mutated paraplegic scientist in a wheelchair; guess what his clever nickname is). There are scientists named Carmack and Willits, named after id Software owners. We even get a Hell Knight, even though it makes no sense to call it a Hell Knight, as there is no Hell in this fucking movie. We see a chainsaw, plasma gun, a chain gun, even a BFG locked away in a storage locker. The code to open it? IDKFA, the special code that gave you all weapons in the video game. How adorable.

The centerpiece of the film is an extended first-person shooter sequence that puts us in the shoes of Reaper as he viciously murders everything in his path. It’s a fun scene, but little more than a total gimmick. The sequence rolls out in an unbroken shot for a full five minutes. It’s fairly impressive, even if it feels like something you’d see at a video game trade show. It resembles a highly planned cinematic that was rendered in-engine. Me personally? I would have preferred no first-person shooter sequence. I would have replaced it with a little bit of what made Doom so fucking special in the first place.

IV. Hell. I wanted Hell.

Removing the demonic aspect of the narrative makes this an adaptation in name only. You cannot remove the demons from Doom. It would be like removing the vampires from Dracula. The Count isn’t a vampire, folks. He’s just a lecherous septuagenarian with halitosis and a couple of groupies. Would that still be Dracula? Of course not, and removing all the demons from Doom, one half of the fucking chemical composition of the franchise, makes this not Doom at all. This is just a lazy 2000s action movie that has bootstrapped itself to a popular video game franchise. GHOSTS OF MARS is more of a Doom movie than this Doom movie. At least that one had supernatural baddies and violence you could see.

DOOM is a poorly lit, glacially paced action movie with generic tough guys, a lame science-gone-wrong plot, and lots of grown men screaming while emptying blank after blank at something off camera. It takes 44 minutes for an imp to show up, and when it does, it looks ridiculous. The marines begin to die off, and you think ‘ooo we’re gonna get some shotgunners and zombie soldiers like the game!’ Nope. When Sarge brings a dead imp back to mission control, one of the marines says, “Maybe it came from another planet.” Sam sarcastically asks, “What? Like an alien?” Bitch, you’ve been digging up skeletons of weird creatures all over Mars. The fuck you mean “yeah right sure pfft aliens”? These elite marines bring a rookie with them to a red alert on Mars. When Sarge calls for the portal entrances to be locked down, he tells his right-hand man to give an 80-pound scientist in a wheelchair a gun and some grenades. He’s like, “Good luck guarding the entrance, science guy!” and fucks off.

It’s dumb. Everything is dumb.

Look, if you just want a dumb shooter full of every 2000s action movie trope known to man, put on DOOM or RESIDENT EVIL and have a blast. They’re the same movie. Dumb action slop with just enough franchise tie-ins to not get sued for false advertising. But DOOM is damn near two hours long, and that’s 30 minutes too much for a movie with this little story. This movie drags more ass than Pinky when he falls out of his wheelchair. It is excruciating, even more so as a Doom super fan. I’d rather spend those two hours playing the game. In fact, your life would be much better if you did that. Let’s all do that. Let’s all play some Doom. Doom is life. Doom is love.

Well, maybe not love. But Doom is happiness. This is not. This is ass.