Movie Review: Doom (2005)

There's an old joke that says the best parts of a movie are usually shown in the trailer. This isn't true here, because most of the parts you see in the trailer weren't good.

Lets get it out of the way; this movie is bad. This movie is a cash-in; a “didn't-need-to-be-made” movie. The writing, acting, set design and nearly everything else is mediocre and bland. But what were you expecting? It's based on a 1993 video game of the same name, and video game movies are almost always bad! But bad movies need love too, which is why I'm watching it. I also watched the Mummy 3 around the same time, so I might do a review on that later.

As always, if you plan on seeing this movie (for whatever reason) I'm gonna spoil just about everything. The movie is five years old at this point, so it's not exactly fresh news.

Prepare to be amazed

The movie begins with a fairly original take on the Universal Studios logo; instead of Earth it's Mars, which might very well be the most original part of the movie. The plot begins with a hallway full of scientists running in terror from an Unseen Terror. We meet the head scientist named Doctor Carmack (named after the co-founder of id Software, John Carmack) who is apparently eaten by the monster. Cut to a roomful of what Hollywood imagines U.S. Marines to act like. They're all boring character archetypes, from the typical Black stereotypes, to the token religious guy who wears a cross, carries a Bible and quotes that handful of Bible verses that the general public will recognize. Their names are even horribly standard things like Sarge, Reaper and “The Kid.” Look at the top billed actors and their character names. LOOK AT THEM.

"Mars looks surprisingly similar to a featureless cement bunker!"

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," says the religious character, not bothering to finish the rest of the verse.

"Hey, I know that!" says a random audience member, "that's from the Bible! Why's that guy carving a cross into his arm? Christians ARE crazy!"

This merry band of marines are only moments away from what they call “R&R time” which is an excuse for this perverted character to wear a flowery shirt and for another man to play the chunkiest game system since the Sega Nomad. This is strange, because this is supposed to be something like 45 years in the future.

He supplies 90% of the R rating! What a delightful character!

Cool technology -- for 1985

Before long, the marines are sent to something called the Ark, an ancient underground portal from Earth to Mars built by ancient humans (or something, they don't go into much more detail). I'll pause to say this: In the movie there were a few seemingly-interesting science fiction ideas like the aforementioned Ark and later on, a nano-wall. Strangely, I got the feeling that these ideas were probably stolen in large part from other, better science fiction books and movies. Nothing else in the movie is original, and so I suspect plagiarism. 

You need the Green keycard

Basically the Ark is a convenient tool to cut down on the three (or is it five?) month trip it would actually take someone on Earth to get to Mars. Upon arrival at Mars, the marines discover that everything is... fine. Scientists and families are going about their lives, business as usual, with no apparent threat to be found! Hmm. That changes soon enough, though.

This is the "Ark" transport. It's like Galaxy Quest, except you barf once you're there.

Quickly, people start getting killed in surprisingly boring ways, including that nano-wall I mentioned. I guess I can explain it now; it's a wall that can turn transparent to let people pass through. While this initially sounds like a cool idea, I realize that there are several flaws with this design, including one that occurs during the movie:

1: What's so bad about a regular door?

2: What happens if the power dies and your door/wall won't close or open completely? (Seen in the movie)

3: Why add this door if your special effects budget can't produce a very good effect?

4: What's so bad about a regular door?!

The answer to all of these is this: 

So you can make your rubber monster get trapped in the wall.

That's right: This entire technology was developed so it could produce some cheap thrills in this one scene. It's used in a later scene, apparently unable to seal completely and letting monsters get at the main characters. I hope my tax dollars didn't pay for that!

Here's the wall when it's in "door" mode

Anyway, eventually they discover that it's not really demons breaking through, like it was in the games. Rather, it's a virus that the scientists made that will turn you into a monster or a super-human based on how good of a person you are. Nevermind the fact that they completely disregard the lore of the game (Hell breaking through on Mars); nevermind the fact that many people have wildly varying definitions of what it means to be a "good person;" instead, lets focus on why exactly scientists would have a need of such a virus. In the movie, it's explained that there's some kind of archaeological dig site on mars that has turned up "neanderthal skeletons" (even the evolutionists are scratching their head on that one), who happen to have 24 chromosomes instead of the usual 23. 

We have 46 chromosomes, guys. FORTY SIX. The only part of you that has 23 'somes are the cells used for reproduction. Thank YOU, biology! I guess they could have meant 24 PAIRS of chromosomes, which would equal 48 total, but that would just mean a person would have an extra toe or something. Hmm. 

Wait, WHAT?

Biology complaints: Complete.

Anyway, because of this amazing "synthetic chromosome," these ancient Martian people could live long, heal faster than Wolverine and were excellent at slalom and long-jumping. I might've made up that last part. Soon, the hero character (Eomer from Lord of the Rings or Bones from J.J. Abrams Star Trek) is exposed to the serum and turns into what is essentially an X-man, while the Rock starts to turn into one of those creatures. They fight, good wins, the end. Lets dissect some writing!

This expression represents my thoughts on this movie exactly

You can barely see the Rock because this movie is dark most of the time

This movie seems to have been made around one important feature: Lets say Carmack's name as much as possible. Which they do about twenty times during the movie. They even try to make Carmack more important than any crazy scientist has a right to be. He doesn't have "Doc Brown" importance. In fact, he doesn't even have "R2-D2" importance. All he does is send a transmission for help in the first scene, and later turns into a crazy monster and attacks people. It's like the film was written by someone who had never written anything before. IMDB informs me that it took two guys to write this!

Shame shame, I really DO know your name.

The character development for literally every character in the movie is non-existant. Apart from learning their ridiculous names, as a viewer, I didn't care when Duke gets pulled through a grate to his death, or when the Rock (Spoilers again!) shoots The Kid for insubordination. 

"Who are these people again?" I thought, yawning.

The plot itself follows the games well enough, I suppose. I mean, Doom isn't exactly known for its amazing story, but just because something is based on a boring license doesn't mean it has to be terrible. It's still rigidly formulaic. Marines sweep location for monster. Monster kills marines. One or two escape. Cue sequel? It worked well for Predator, Aliens, and countless other movies that followed this exact formula, but this movie didn't succeed in any way, and I'm pretty sure there's never gonna be a sequel. Oh yeah, and there's the first-person-shooter part, which is laughably ridiculous. 

A portion of the movie revolves around Eomer's relationship with his sister (pictured below). As far as I can tell, Karl Urban (the actor who plays Eomer) is a New Zealander while his "sister" in the film is from London. The only thing they have in common is that they're faking American accents in a crappy movie. Otherwise, the writers try feebly (and consequently, fail completely) to make the characters reconcile their differences (which aren't really shown to the audience to begin with) and make them grow as characters. It's strange, because that's the only "love" story you get in the movie. Frankly, the movie didn't NEED a leading man hanging out with his little sister for the whole movie. It's not as important as the killing.

"I'm really British, you foolish Yanks!"

Now, I played Doom 3 when it came out in 2004. It's not the best game in the world: lots of shooting, lots of zombies popping out of magic closets right behind you, et cetera. Weirdly, if they had taken the exact script from that game and filmed it, it would have been a better movie than this. My verdict:

The Good:

The actors did the best they could with what they were given

Cool references to the games (you see a yellow door, a green keycard, the BFG and famous monsters from the game)

The Universal Mars logo was neat

The Bad:

The Writing, cinematography, set design, plot, characterization, coloration, prop quality

Movie is so dark that you can hardly see most of the time

The characters have no common sense

Has surprisingly little to do with source material aside from the name

Mediocre special effects, rubber suits

1/5

It Stands For Death & Dismemberment

Now, I've written a few stories in my time. A few of them even have endings. A few of those actually have decent endings. Something I've never written, however, is a story for a game.

I've always been curious about Dungeons and Dragons, but I've always been turned off by the amount of stat comparisons, difficulty checks, dice rolls and general other nonsense that has to happen in order to have fun. I'm much more interested in the narrative part of the game; it's a video game where almost anything can happen! It's much more of a sandbox than regular games, because you're playing with someone's interpretation of the game rules, not with a computer whose rules are set in stone.

Because of this interest, and because of some new friends who are alright with the idea, I endeavored to create something that I call Dungeons and Dragons Ultra Light, loosely using the naming conventions of fonts, whose weights are measured in degrees from Bold to Ultra Light. That's right, now I'm at least two kinds of geek.

Like the kind of guy who makes a steampunk 20-sided die.

Essentially my game (playfully referred to as D&D Ultra) is the poor man's version of the regular game: There are no game boards, stat sheets, miniatures, and there's only one type of die. The ol' 20-sided, or d20 as it's known to players.

I sketched out some basic rules that made the game play more like an old Lucas Arts adventure game than D&D. It made me realize that the only thing that sets my D&D Ultra apart from, say, Monkey Island or Full Throttle (apart from their games having significantly better writing) is the random dice rolls. In Full Throttle, if you want to open a locked door, you'd click “open” and he'd say, “I need a key for that.” In my game, if you want to open a locked door, I might have you roll the die to pick the lock or use a spell to open it. This is actually what I wanted, because my interest with D&D has always been more with the social interaction than the combat. The dice rolls help keep things interesting.

Rolling dice in this game would only slow down the awesome.

Here's where we get to the portion of the blog that actually talks about writing. When I set out to make a game for my group to play, the first thing I did was search around for a usable pre-made campaign that I could use. Unfortunately the ones I found used a format I wasn't familiar with, and the adventures were far too in depth for some of the people in my group. Although I knew nothing about D&D, let alone writing a campaign, I decided to dive in headfirst and write my own anyway. During one sleepless night, I wrote out the first four areas of the campaign in my head. The next day I sat down and committed my ideas to paper (well, to a word processor) and added enough extra stuff to finish the story. It's very simple, really. As an actual story it wouldn't hold up at all. Frankly I just wanted to make a few interesting areas for my friends to run around in.

Once we actually played it, I learned what I did right and wrong. I previously knew I couldn't anticipate every action the group wanted to take. I naively assumed the group would loosely follow the path I gave them. I had a few interactions and descriptions on paper that I could read off, but 90% of the time I was making things up on the fly, which was immensely fun, but it would have been nice to have something to reference.

For instance, in the first area you have a few people you can talk to: The bartender, the barmaid, an old soldier and a really drunk guy. (It already sounds a little like Monkey Island, huh?) You can talk to all of them, but I had only written responses to one question for each character, and naturally those were the questions nobody asked. I also discovered that my group almost consistently either wanted to flirt with everyone or simply murder them. I was almost prepared; I had written in difficulty rolls for Flirting, Threatening and Bluffing. However, I didn't anticipate the murderous nature of my friends, which in itself is a little frightening.

It turns out that it takes many, many pages of text to be fully prepared for the group's choices. I found a free D&D campaign off the company's website and now I better understand what it says. If you flip to the back there are tons of little paragraphs detailing what happens when a player touches X thing or threatens X person. It's a little bit like programming a video game, except it requires no programming, just a lots writing.

It's a great writing challenge, and yet I find myself wanting to write many, many more adventures.