“Dumb” would have been a much more apropos title for the movie Doom. So would, although in a slightly less clever manner, “Fucking Terrible.”

I know a lot of people go see a movie and say to their friends afterwards, “What the fuck! I could’ve written this movie so much better. These guys are fucking tools!” I tend to do this also, perhaps even moreso than the regular viewer, as I laughingly consider myself a decent writer. With Doom, I think you could pass a laptop around a crowded short bus and a better, more coherent script would emerge. Of course, the laptop may else also be coated in teeth-marks and drool, but hey — that’s the price we must pay for a non-sucky screenplay.

The characters in the movie are all very briefly described caricatures: “the tortured heroic soldier” (codename Reaper), “the gruff sergeant” (codename Sarge), “the greasy, creepy annoying guy,” “the hip black guy,” and “the silent and steely Asian guy.” Force these characters into a plot that really doesn’t make sense (a special operations team must go to a research facility on Mars, where researchers conduct genetic experiments that go horribly wrong, and get picked off one-by-one), throw in the annoying woman (in this case Reaper’s sister, conveniently a researcher on Mars), rip off every horror-movie cliche in the book while adding nothing innovative whatsoever, and you pretty much have Doom.

Basically the movie rapes the storyline of the most recent “Doom” game. I’ve never played the latest incarnation, though I am intimately familiar with the original two games. This movie completely avoids what was cool about those games. The dark humor, the references to the creatures being from Hell and having the hero travel into Hell — all gone. The “demons” in this movie are just humans that have been injected with an extra chromosome. If as a human one is evil, then you get turned into a creature of darkness. If you’re a good person, you turn into a superhuman. What “scientific” reason is behind the transformation? Something to do with the soul being embedded in the as-of-yet-identified regions of the brain. Sweet! Except not.

My second problem is with the Rock. Now I like most every movie the Rock has been in: Walking Tall, The Rundown, Be Cool (where he plays a gay wannabe-actor turned bodyguard), and even The Scorpion King. But in Doom, he was terrible. His lines all came off flat and his character’s transition from gruff sergeant to main villain was awkward and unbelievable. (Oops. Uh, **belated spoiler warning.**) Since he has been pretty good in everything else I’ve seen him in, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and blame his performance’s misfires on the film’s director and a shitty script.

Another thing I didn’t like was the movie’s much-hyped first-person shoot sequence. Towards the end, when everyone else is dead, Reaper gets injected by his sister with the extra chromosome and, of course, turns into a superhuman. The movie’s POV then turns into Reaper’s as he goes through out the facility killing all of the creatures. What works for a video game does not work in a movie. It’s a jarring transition, what exactly is happening is very unclear, and suddenly all of the previously hard to kill creatures are going down in one or two shots. Reaper even picks up a chainsaw at one point and takes out a pinky demon. This last part was admittedly kind of cool, but I think would’ve been much more effective had it been in third-person. Then we could have actually seen Reaper wield a chainsaw, instead of seeing just the chainsaw and the pinky.

Which leads me to my next and final point: where the fuck was my Spider Mastermind, Revenant, Arch-Vile, and Cyberdemon? We see none of these awesome enemies in Doom! The only creatures that are fought are some zombies, a few imps, and one pinky. At the very least, in the crappy final scene where Sarge (turned into a zombie/imp ’cause he was inherently evil) faces off against Reaper*, Sarge could’ve turned into something sweet, like a Cyberdemon or something. One of his hands would be a rapid-firing rocket launcher and he’d march around the room with a sweet-ass yet spooky stomping sound. That would’ve been awesome! It might even have elevated the movie to a star-and-a-half, or two stars!

Usually I like most movies, whatever the genre (unless it’s an “urban epic” like Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the new 50 Cent movie. *shudder*). I’m what Brandon calls “a movie whore.” But not with this Doom. I want to offer my recommendation: don’t pay to see this movie. Not in the theater, not on DVD, not anywhere. Wait seven or eight months and rent it free from the library. Even then, some people — like Nate — will still hate Doom. And I’ll be there, standing proudly amongst their ranks.

I’m now just hoping that the Halo movie will be better. It’s written by Alex Garland (28 Days Later) and Peter Jackson is involved in a producerly fashion, so my hopes are fairly high. So long as Uwe “I-Anally-Rape-Video-Game-Adaptations” Boll doesn’t direct, then it should at least be a hell of a lot better than Doom.

And last but not least, I want to direct you to Ctrl+Alt+Del, where I believe this comic accurately and succinctly captures the experience of watching Doom.

JAB