“If you’re about to say what I think you’re gonna say, I’m gonna shoot you in the face.”
Doom was always all-in on theme, imagery and a casual mythos but it was never a series that took its narrative seriously. Intensity and action were always given precedence over things like character development, story, or emotional complexity. It was for the adrenaline junkie who just wanted to run around really fast slaying demons. Schlocky action-horror is a frenetic zone in which plenty of endearing B-movies exist, and where Doom: Annihilation tries to plant its flag—but it fails even more miserably than the first Doom movie a decade and a half ago. It sort of tries to translate the first game’s bare bones story—mad scientists messing with the wrong arcane artifacts, a special Marine task force fighting demons that come through portals from Hell. It should feel very familiar if you’ve spent some time with the genre or seen James Cameron’s Aliens. But it doesn’t capture any of the game’s sense of mayhem and is so terribly inept as a film that it’s barely even worth writing a few paragraphs about and only attracted attention because of the famous name on the poster. It almost makes me look back on the first film with fondness. At least that one had some decent practical effects.
On Phobos, the innermost moon of Mars, some mad researchers open a portal to Hell. A squadron of cryogenically reawakened Marines must step in to whoop some CGI zombie-demon butt. Well, actually, all but one of the Marines are slaughtered by the ghouls. The lone survivor of the ordeal is Joan Dark (Amy Mason), a disgraced lieutenant disliked by the other marines because she let a terrorist walk free (or something—I forget but it doesn’t actually have any bearing on the story). She’s the only character with any depth—as shallow as that depth may be—as she is given a little flashback scene with her dying mother that vaguely connects with the climax. Accompanying the team is a nerdy scientist named Bennett (Luke Allen-Gale) who also happens to be one of Joan’s college boyfriends who remembers every detail of their month-long relationship from all those years ago. The duplicitous mastermind behind the portal experiment is Dr. Betruger (Dominic Mafham). The rest of the characters are as bland as canned vegetables and I can barely remember their names—except for the generic movie tough guy name of Captain Savage (James Weber Brown). They’re just demon-fodder after all, given a few lines and told to scream loud when they get their throats ripped out. After the regular formula of firefights, scientific hypotheses and “deep” conversations (including a silly one with a chaplain) Joan finds herself transported to Hell where she is surrounded by demons. Thankfully she has the BFG—which appears to have the heft of a nerf gun—and some plasma grenades and she’s able to fend off hordes of baddies just like Doomguy.
The film is filled with video game references—colored keycards to access new areas, mini-maps projected onto helmet visors, health stations, exploding barrels. Even the overpowered main character and her bottomless arsenal feel like part of a game. It should go without saying that this is not what fans of a video game are looking for in a film adaptation. It’s empty signaling. These elements are not inherently bad, but they simply can’t pull much weight on their own. To see them presented so earnestly is sad. The action that should be the film’s calling card is lackluster—blandly choreographed and interspersed with too many shots of Marines walking around the base with their hackles raised. As the latter portion of the film devolved into a mish-mash of CGI demons and the fireball-chucking Imps from the game, I realized that in my memory the 2005 Doom had better effects than those in Annihilation. You’d think the decade and a half of improvements in technology between the two films would have led to something a little more polished. Guess not. And the finale in Hell, which at least deserves credit for its audacity, pales in comparison to the first-person sequence in that film.
It’s a thorough disappointment, a cash-in on the goodwill earned by the series’ return to form with the 2016 Doom reboot. It throws out too many easter eggs in hopes that their presence will satisfy hardcore fans. It’s shamelessly derivative of its genre without much to offer on its own. I’m not surprised that Bethesda (current publisher of the Doom games) distanced themselves from this.