If all films were music, then DOOM is percussion by petulant eight-year-olds.
Here is a film that is almost all cliché, held together like patchworks of mismatched jigsaw puzzles. It isn't so much "kiss, kiss, bang, bang," but more "bang, bang, chomp, chomp." The film is loosely based on the (in)famous game franchise and does something I didn't think was doable in movies -- it made decapitations boring.
Most of the time, I stayed awake for what imdb.com generously calls the film's "plot," but I found myself starting to doze off at a critical moment when the characters, under the stress of being assaulted by mutated monsters and poor production values, started losing their heads in more ways than one. The only reason I know this happened was because I remember waking up and seeing a character without his head and was like, "Damn, where'd his head go?"
The film is about a time when man discovers an "ark" that allows him to travel to ruins in Mars. Scientists there discover the remains of homo sapien-like creatures with 24 pairs of chromosomes rather than the good old 23. Something about mutations being not cool comes into play, and marines are called in to take names and kick ass. However, there are monsters on Mars, and they kick ass too. So lots of ass is kicked both ways, and collateral starts to pile up like unwashed, mold-infested, decapitated laundry.
The marines are led by "Sarge," played by the Rock, whose charisma and personality is submerged beneath the darkness of the film's poorly lit sets and the film's incurable stupidity. The rest of the marines have one word names like, "Kid," "Mac," "Portman," "Destroyer" and so on. The only marine with a real name is John Grimm, "Reaper," which means he's important and will probably survive the movie until the last five minutes.
I remember their names but can't seem to remember too well what they actually contributed to the movie as a whole. Most of the marines exist to be killed by the mutated creatures, who are much easier to remember because they have faces that look like my Italian cooking. I gave them names like "Meatball," "Spinach Lasagna" and "Tomato Sauce-Gone-Wrong."
As impressively grotesque as the monsters are, they're not scary, just disgusting. A good horror film can inspire a genuine sense of fear and despair in the audience. That DOOM inspired me to seriously consider buying French cookbooks says something altogether different.
Still DOOM is enjoyable if the people watching it are totally secure in letting themselves feel dumb. Enough beverage consumption can do that, and it makes the part of the movie that switches in to first person point of view -- complete with a gun pointing forward -- a lot of fun.
However, DOOM lost all grounds for redemption when it tried to be meaningful. I can stomach poorly researched science and talk about the genes encoding the human soul -- if it is done in the name of good fun -- but DOOM is pretentious enough to tack on a philosophical conflict for its climax. When the film makes a Nietzschean metaphor of the risk in fighting monsters because it may turn one into a monster, my last ounce of respect slithered down a dirty drain.
In the end, if you decide to take the time to see DOOM, just remember that you can always fall asleep during the parts where people are dying.
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