Doom Reviews

Based on ID Software's first-person shooter game, this gory, shameless ALIENS (1986) rip-off dispatches a platoon of future Marines to Mars, where the Olduvai research facility is under attack by apparently unstoppable monsters. Like Doom itself, the movie is rich in backstory, but sparse in actual story. The Olduvai colony is reached via the Ark, a mysterious portal discovered in the Nevada desert and apparently built by a long-dead civilization whose ruins lie beneath the planet's dead surface. Marine John "Reaper" Grimm (Karl Urban) was raised on Olduvai by his archaeologist parents, who died in an accident; his estranged fraternal twin, Dr. Sam Grimm (Rosamund Pike), is still there, carrying on the parents' research. She and her team are mapping the genetic code of "Lucy," a set of female humanoid remains found at the dig site (and coyly named for the protohuman skeleton discovered by the Leakey expedition at the real Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania). Lucy's DNA contains an extra, bioengineered chromosome that Sam believes conferred superstrength and agility on her race, and her team has recently isolated it. The current trouble on Olduvai started in the weapons-research facility, housed in a self-contained unit and headed by creepy Dr. Carmack (Robert Russell). Carmack placed the entire facility under maximum-security quarantine, sent a frantic SOS message and hasn't been heard from since. Now for the plot: Under the command of team leader Sarge (Dwayne Johnson, professional wrestling's The Rock), a mountain of a man with "Semper Fi" tattooed across his shoulders, Reaper and six interchangeable others suit up and go a-hunting, creeping around a maze of narrow corridors, sewers and rooms, pouring bullets into the mutant monsters that pop up, down and around various blind corners, overhangs and underlying passageways, and periodically getting themselves killed. Sam dissects icky monsters and explains stuff for the slow learners. Screenwriters Wesley Strick and David Callaham amuse themselves by slipping references to games into the dialogue, and there's a 20-minute sequence designed to duplicate the POV of a gamer actually playing Doom, right down to the smack-down in which Urban and Johnson perfectly duplicate the weirdly weightless moves (thank you, wire work) of video-generated characters. The pointlessness of this exercise merely begs a larger question that plagues all movies based on video games: Since gaming is about interactivity, where's the sense in game-based movies that regress players into passive observers?