‘Doom’ is the Perfect Antidote to ‘The Last of Us’
The Last of Us is an incredibly accomplished adaptation. The characters are divine and the action is tense. Perhaps most importantly, it’s the rare post-apocalyptic show that treats its audience with the respect they deserve. Yet, for as wonderful as the show has been, there’s no denying it’s grim stuff. It’s not exactly the most palatable Sunday night unwind (unless cannibalism calms your nerves, I guess). The show (like the games on which they’re based) also has admittedly struggled with both its Black and queer characters, characters often offered up as sacrificial lambs for the protagonists’ journey. So, in the midst of so much (at times) pleasant unpleasantness, audiences need a palate cleanser. A property so conspicuously neutral, it serves as a baseline for something more complex and stimulating. Why not Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Doom?
I’ve written before about how The Last of Us not only adapts the game’s story but also its mechanics. In form and structure, it watches the same way a video game plays. Strangely, that’s a rarity for video game adaptations. They’re largely considered bottom-barrel cinematic offerings, no doubt accounting for why it’s so easy to declare The Last of Us as the best of them—there’s not that much to compare it to. Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City comes close, sure, and the original Resident Evil film franchise has its fans (despite being aggressively antithetical to the game series). Writ large, however, video game movies borrow story, not gameplay.
That’s why, despite being the gooiest, cheesiest action-horror hybrid imaginable, Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Doom stands out. Sure, it’s exactly what critics point to when assessing everything wrong with the games-to-film pipeline, but there’s something both refreshing and comforting about its commitment to doing only one thing, and doing it pretty well. Doom is just like the games.
In broad sketches, Doom is ostensibly about a squad of marines. They’re led by Dwayne Johnson’s Sarge and Karl Urban’s Reaper as they respond to a distress call on Mars. Years before, the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) discovered the Ark in the Nevada desert. It’s a kind of nebulous wormhole (the mechanics are never clear) that can immediately teleport personnel to Mars. Spurred by capitalistic desires, researchers pounced, and for several decades, they’ve been on the red planet researching something. That something is an ancient Martian chromosome that quite literally turns people into superhuman angels or monstrous devils. Yeah, the spiritual undercurrents aren’t really undercurrents.
Slowly yet assuredly, demons wipe the squad of marines out, all while Rosamund Pike’s Dr. Samantha Grimm spouts nonsense about genetic codes, ancient beings, and excess chromosomes. It’s deeply silly stuff, but it has spunk. Doom never takes itself too seriously. The Rock’s descent into madness is aggressively arbitrary, but there’s gusto in the script’s willingness to demote him from protagonist to good guy gone bad. One moment, he’s saving crew members. The next, he’s executing his own squad in an outrageous effort to stop the demonic Martian outbreak from spreading.
The standout sequence, of course, is a first-person beat from Reaper’s perspective. Mirroring the action of first-person shooter games, Reaper grabs a gun (and later a chainsaw) and mows through wave after wave of enemies. In the days before Hardcore Henry (also worth seeking out), this was the closest audiences had come to seeing a popular game mechanic supplanted into a movie. And it was glorious.
Of course, not everything about Doom has aged well. While The Last of Us struggles with representation in more subtle ways, Doom can be blatantly offensive. While it tapers off once the action starts, the early dialogue is about as tactful as one can expect from a big-budget studio action movie from 2005. The marines throw around casual racism. As the only woman, Pike—obviously overqualified—reads from a script that says, “Scream… scream louder.”
Overall, though, Doom doesn’t care. It’s burly, attractive men with guns mowing down demons. The soundtrack is early-aughts rock, the direction is flashy, and Bartkowiak even throws in some fashionable horror homage for good measure. Intentionally or not, Doom apes both Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Ridley Scott’s Alien. That’s not nothing. As an antidote to The Last of Us’ grim austerity, Doom delivers. It’s a descent into Hell well worth taking.
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