Where have you gone, Dwayne Johnson? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Doom Annihilation (2019): 3 out of 10: I liked 2005’s Doom. I did not love it, and I certainly would not recommend it alongside Aliens, Starship Troopers, or even Predator 2, but it was a respectable attempt at turning the video game into a theatrical science-fiction action movie. It had Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, some decent special effects, a reasonably energetic pace, and an interesting variation on a very familiar plot. Rosamund Pike also spent much of the movie not wearing a bra, which may not have improved the screenplay but certainly did not hurt the viewing experience.
It was a lukewarm recommendation for a video game adaptation that critics absolutely lambasted.
Doom: Annihilation, released fourteen years later, is neither a theatrical sequel nor much of a theatrical anything. It is a direct-to-video production that uses the Doom license while otherwise resembling one of those inexpensive science-fiction movies assembled from rented corridors, plastic rifles, and whichever actors were available that particular Tuesday.
A group of Space Marines arrives at a research facility on one of the moons of Mars, where scientists experimenting with teleportation technology have accidentally opened a portal to a cheap CGI hellscape. The facility has gone silent, the scientists have put on zombie makeup, and the Marines must fight their way through darkened hallways while attempting to close the gateway before CGI monsters come pouring through it.
I can only assume the movie exists because somebody needed to keep the Doom license active. It has the faint aroma of that unreleased 1992 Fantastic Four movie that was reportedly produced largely so the rights would not expire. Outside of some contractual necessity, I cannot imagine why anyone felt compelled to make this.
The Good
Many of the sets are nice. There are some surprisingly convincing metallic corridors, control rooms, laboratories, and industrial passageways. For a direct-to-video production, the physical environment occasionally looks better than expected.
The movie understands that a Doom adaptation should feature armed characters walking through shadowy futuristic hallways, and it has certainly located an adequate supply of them.
Dominic Mafham, playing the senior scientist responsible for much of the unpleasantness, also appears to understand exactly what kind of movie he is in. He chews the scenery with appropriate enthusiasm during his limited screen time. He may not be giving a subtle performance, but subtlety would be a ridiculous thing to bring to a movie about accidentally opening the gates of Hell. That is about it for the good.
The Bad
It would be easy to spend the entire review listing the ways the older Doom movie is better than this one, but the most immediate problem is the creature design.
For most of the running time, the monsters are essentially fast zombies dressed as scientists. Eventually, more recognizable demons begin appearing, and somehow things get worse. They toss fireballs while thrusting their hands forward in a motion resembling children shouting hadouken playing Street Fighter II on the school playground. The effects are not merely inexpensive. They are awkwardly staged, strangely weightless, and completely unconvincing.
The monsters look embarrassed to be shooting the fireballs, and the actors look embarrassed to be reacting to them.
The plot involves a scientific experiment accidentally opening a gateway to Hell, which should provide a filmmaker with nearly unlimited permission to go insane. Unfortunately, Hell is barely represented. There is little memorable gore, no nudity, very little atmosphere, and almost none of the grotesque creativity associated with the games.
The movie has demons, teleportation, possession, Space Marines, and an interdimensional gateway, yet approaches all of them with the enthusiasm of someone completing mandatory workplace paperwork.
Amy Manson plays a commanding officer and spends much of the film looking completely lost. In one scene, she appears to be attempting to portray a hardened soldier, but the result feels more like a police officer on a body-camera video patiently trying to persuade a drunk man not to get himself trespassed from a convenience store.
Forget Sigourney Weaver. She is not even Michelle Goh in Alien Lockdown.
Alien Lockdown, incidentally, is another direct-to-video movie about armed personnel wandering through industrial corridors while being killed by monsters. The corridors in Doom: Annihilation may be better, but Alien Lockdown somehow had more convincing actors and was just crazy enough to be slightly more entertaining.
The cast here consists largely of cardboard cutouts and military clichés. Characters split up when they should remain together, forget access cards when the plot needs to delay them, and repeatedly wander into obvious danger.
None of them has enough personality to make their deaths particularly meaningful, and the performances rarely rise above the level of a corporate training video.
In fact, the entire movie feels like an HR presentation about sexual harassment. Jeffrey has made an inappropriate joke near the photocopier, and everyone must stop to discuss the correct procedure for reporting the incident. Except here, the employees are Space Marines being attacked by demons. So basically a corporate training film but without the sexual tension.
The Ugly
There is a surprisingly large genre of movies in which military personnel travel through one corridor after another while their numbers are gradually reduced until only the lead character and perhaps a potential love interest remain. I have reviewed at least five or six of them in the last few years.
Doom: Annihilation has a recognizable license, a slightly larger budget than many of its competitors, good-looking corridors, monsters, demons, Hell, and decades of video game imagery from which to borrow. Somehow, it is still the most boring example of the genre.
Even the Marine uniforms have those cheap bicycle helmets from Chupacabra Terror. I swear to God they do.
Is Doom: Annihilation technically a better movie than Chupacabra Terror? Well yes. The sets are better, the cameras are newer, and everyone involved appears to have received at least basic instructions regarding which direction to face.
But if I were having a party and had to choose one of them to play, I would put on Chupacabra Terror. It may be a worse movie, but it is entertaining in its badness. It has personality. It gives an audience something to laugh at, shout at, or throw drinks toward.
Doom: Annihilation is too dull to become enjoyable trash. It is not spectacularly incompetent, wonderfully deranged, or memorably offensive. It simply keeps moving through its attractive corridors while steadily draining all life from the room.
Bad movies can be fun. Boring movies are simply boring.
In Conclusion
Doom: Annihilation is a movie about Space Marines fighting the forces of Hell that somehow feels less exciting than an instructional video about proper office conduct.
The sets are respectable, Dominic Mafham has a little fun, and everything else is a dreary collection of weak acting, generic zombies, awkward demons, forgotten key cards, plastic armor, and endless (albeit attractive) corridors. It has every excuse to become outrageous and refuses to use any of them.
Boring is the greatest cinematic sin of all, and for that reason Doom: Annihilation belongs exactly where its portal leads.
