Mister Minutes' Cinema Circus

Originally published on March 23, 2020.

Look, I said not every movie on this journey was gonna be good. While waiting for Doom 2016 to finish downloading
on my PS4, I decided to watch Doom: Annihilation to sate
my demon-killing bloodlust. Oh God what a mistake.

I know better. I know there are precious few good video game movies (hats off to you, Mortal Kombat), yet still I went into this thinking it might at least be some silly, bloody fun for 90 minutes. Oh God what a mistake. What I got was 90 minutes of boring, badly shot, boring, rubber suit-filled, boring, almost bloodless, boring, zombie movie snoozefest. Now, I haven't played the original Doom games, or Doom 2016 (still downloading) - I haven't even seen the 2005 movie with The Rock. So technically, that makes Annihilation my first dip into the Doom universe. Shit.

Well, let's get this over with. A group of Marines (no other Army branch exists in space) awake from "crypto-sleep" on approach to Mars' moon Phobos, where they will be stationed at a science lab that does sciency shit. The team is made up of Strong Angry Woman, Science Dweeb, Lovable Pervert, No-Nonsense Captain, Black Guy, and Ambiguously Gay Woman. If it seems like I've just replaced their names with stock character archetypes that appear in every sci-fi horror movie made after May 25, 1979, don't worry - that's all they had going for them anyway.

After some Amusing Banter, the crew docks with the research facility, only to find the scientists aren't responding, and the doors are locked. They get inside anyway without any interesting problems and, after walking through hallways for like five minutes, run into a shitty blue elf eating some dead guy's chest. But! The shitty blue elf is wearing a scientist's uniform! A detail the Marines never really care about, they just kind of accept that people are turning into monsters. They find a key card on the body of a scientist named William Blazkowicz (which automatically makes the movie bullshit because Terror Billy would never get bodied by lame ass zombies), and meet up with Intern Girl and Fat Kevin Costner, a priest. They are entirely inconsequential to the story. Also along for the ride is Dr. Who Cares, the head scientist. A five year long fight sequence occurs wherein the Marines mow down waves of extras in blue face paint and elf ears. At one point Black Guy shouts "I'm the Ultra Nightmare, mothafuckas!!" and immediately a zombie shoves its hand into his skull like it's reaching for the last Doritos in the bag. The surviving Marines and base staff get back to the Marines' ship, where a demon who's pretending to be the ship's AI (what?) attacks, killing another Marine and Fat Kevin Costner. More boring shit ensues, everyone ends up dead except Strong Angry Woman and Dr. Who Cares, who betrays them cause he's been trying to bring the demons back the whole time oooOOooo, what a twist.

Now, I said "demons" there. Doom is about demons. It's about Hell. It's very clear and plain with the fact that you're fighting Hell Demons. The words "Hell" and "demons" are never once uttered in Doom: Annihilation. There is no Satanic or hellish imagery besides “ancient Sumerian” written in blood on a wall - and, with a cursory Google search, I discovered that the Sumerians used hieroglyphs, not the square script used in the movie. Cool. At the end of the movie, Strong Angry Woman gets sent through a portal to the most boring Hell I've ever seen to do battle with The Entire CGI Budget. Seriously, she ends up on the ground surrounded by a crowd of (like, twenty) demons. These demons are rather cool, skeletal creatures that are obviously CGI, which look amazing compared to the overweight dude in the blue rubber suit seen throughout the rest of the movie. Anyway, a demon master that looks like the Witch-King of Angmar wearing Pinhead's jacket but not as cool says some dumb shit about how humans are a disease, and then Strong Angry Woman one-shots him with the BFG, but even THAT'S BORING, and then she just runs away through the portal and the movie basically ends.

Seriously, I can't describe how fucking boring this movie is. However, I can describe why it's boring. There are no memorable or creative kills, the characters are all zero-dimentional dicks, the monsters are laughably dumb, and nothing happens. I could forgive a lack of story if the movie was just 90 minutes of people obliterating demons and splattering the halls with blood - fuck, that's what the games are - but the sheer amount of nothing happening is just astonishing. The shitty blue elves go down in one shot, the Big Bad Demon explodes with one shot, the CGI demons don't do anything but stand around and chitter (I'm so tired of chittering, chittering isn't scary), and then it just ends on a "cliffhanger" teasing a demon invasion of Earth, which, thank God Universal isn't gonna waste money on a sequel to this garbage.

The only thing I actually "liked" in the movie, that got any sort of chuckle from me, was when the movie shoehorned in stupid cameos of things from the video games. But they weren't specific things from the Doom games, they were just things from video games in general that Doom started. Like, the opening scene features a big pack on the wall labeled "HEALTH STATION", the Marines have an actual HUD with a map in their helmets, and the scientists use colored keycards to get into the different levels. That's it, that's the extent of slightly interesting nods to video games this movie can be bothered with.

Oh my god I haven't even talked about the visuals yet. The sets look like a SyFy Channel movie, one step above spray painted cardboard and Lite Brite consoles. The editing is too fast at times, jumping between uninspired, shoulder-height medium shots. There are no weird angles or zooms or even a simple push-in really. It's all static and boring.

As if all that wasn't enough, the characters are just downright stupid. This movie features such sterling dialogue as

Science Dweeb: "Reserve power's at two percent."

Strong Angry Woman: "Is that bad?"

Like motherfucker what do you think two percent means.

At one point, Science Dweeb postulates that the aliens gave humans the gift of language, and built the pyramids. The only aliens they've encountered so far are the shitty blue elves. If this idiot thinks these braindead zombies gnawing on his co-workers' skulls built the pyramids, he might just be the dumbest prick in this movie.

Doom: Annihilation gets a 2/10 from me. It's a bad horror movie, a bad action movie, a bad Doom movie, and just a boring fucking movie from start to finish. And as we all know, the worst thing a movie can be is boring. Thank god Doom is finished downloading, maybe I can squeeze in some real demon murder before the sun comes up.