"Arrow Recommends is a column that has my sorry ass advise older movies to your royal asses. I will be flexible in terms of genres i.e. I will cover whatever the bleep I want. For now, it will be the way to keep my voice on the site."
PLOT: A group of roughneck Marines are sent to a lab on Mars to contain some kind of outbreak and retrieve mysterious data. Once there they quickly realize that the shit has hit the shit and the only thing that will clean up the mess is – kicking that monster ass! Lock, load, ra-ta-tat!
"Kill them all, let God sort them out. " – Sarge
LOWDOWN: Who didn’t love playing DOOM in the good old days? I was fairly into it at the time (specially DOOM 3) and when the film adaptation was finally gunned out – everybody – me included, dissed it. I’m not sure what I was expecting then but what I saw on the big screen wasn’t it. Now, life has been taking a toll on me now of late and one way that I deal with those rough patches is to clock testosterone fueled sci-fi horror – it always lifts my spirits.
Thing is, I’ve seen everything too many times (I know Predator and Aliens by heart, every beat, every musical cue, every line) and I yearned for something fresh. So when I heard the news that they'll be making a new DOOM movie (low budget re-do going to disk and VOD that is…sigh…) the 2005 effort popped in my grey matter. And being that I had never seen the UNRATED EXTENDED CUT (GET IT HERE)– voila – I had something new to sink my knives into. So how did my second go-around with DOOM 2005 go? Much better than expected.
I found a lot to party to this time around! This Unrated Extended Cut made for a much more fulfilling chow-down that's for sure. For starters I was tossed in the middle of the action very quickly. The flick started off with a splat and didn’t stop till the violent end. Then we had the stellar creature designs and execution by Stan Winston and his team. Damn, I said hot damn! I was treated to all kinds of groovy looking monsters! Granted some were CG enhanced, but when the practical loving was tossed at the screen, I had a huge smile carved my face. We don’t see that kind of superior artistry today anymore and Winston and cie beyond nailed it as always. As expected, this Unrated Extended Cut pimped out way more action and suspense. It also added some nudity and the graphic violence was jacked up to f*ck yeah! So no complaints here!
What about the characters you may ask? Nothing ground breaking and that was okay for the type of flick this is. Think the usual lot! The Newbie grunt, the religious one (hey that was Ben Daniels from The Exorcist TV show, love that dude), the comic relief (Razaaq Adoti stole many scenes), the straight man (Karl Urban going the low key /intense way), the weirdo (Richard Brake chewing every ounce of scenery he could find) and the ultimate hard ass (The Rock). And in this sea of macho-men swam the lovely Rosemund Pike who held her own as the tough scientist on a mission!
Useless facts time! Doom was initially gonna star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then the Columbine High School shooting went down, the kids behind the murders were Doom fans, hence that killed the production and Arnie booked out and got to the choppa. Then Vin "I hate The Rock" Diesel was approached – he turned it down to go make that Nanny movie. All good, cause we got the best man for this job: Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock. He truly shined here as the by the book leader that just kept getting stricter and stricter as time rolled on (this is me trying to be elusive BTW)! Mucho edgy and entertaining performance!
Add to all that; countless references to the game (BFG made an appearance and there was one dude named Pinky, cute, I wonder what will happen to him), Clint Mansell’s schizo techno meets metal score, the occasional tasty badass macho one-liners (Semper Fi, Motherf*cker! Faithful to the corps!) and Andrzej Bartkowiak’s stylish eye (wild camera movements and a f*ck-load of push ins) and you get a video game adaptation that was almost as good as it could’ve been! The cherry on top was of course the ground breaking First Person Shooter perspective scene during the last act (it was much longer in this Extended Cut), which took 14 days to shoot. Hardcore Henry and End of Watch did it down the line but DOOM was first and it paved the way for that gimmick in movies. So kudos!
So what were the drawbacks? You mean outside of Urban and Pike struggling with their New Zealand accents (hilarious), the random stupid dialogue and dumb moves to serve the plot peppered about? I craved more gun action from the film. I got some throughout and the film truly let her rip in the last act but more gunplay would have been swell. Yes, I'm greedy yet easy to please. Moreover, some scenes were under lit which could be frustrating (that’s bit in the sewer comes to mind). Finally, this adaptation was obviously inspired by DOOM 3 plot wise and it killed me that they didn’t follow the HOW when it comes to the nature of the creatures. There was no need to change it. The game’s reason behind the demon invasion was way cooler than what the flick came up with. But my gut tells me they went that way due to budget restraints. Makes sense. Zombies are cheaper to execute than demons.
On the whole though DOOM was what the Doctor ordered on this blah day. A B-Movie with a budget! Tough guys with guns, creatures, gore, fast pace, cheese galore (there's a guy here named Destroyer – nough said) hard to go wrong for this twat! And looking at it again, it was way more faithful to its source material then I remembered! Yeah lots of the beasties from the game didn’t show up here, but again – budget reasons. This Unrated Extended Cut made me appreciate DOOM way more than the last time I saw it: theatrical cut in 2005. Who knew? The film has aged well and leaned more towards an old school style of filmmaking than I recalled. I had a blast on this run and yeah I am now in the mood to play DOOM 3! So switch off your brain, crack open that brew, embrace the macho posturing, the good and the so bad it's good… and have fun! Game on! Yeah that was lame, but it’s all I got today.