Doom: Annihilation (2019)

 

Often studios quickly churn out a film of a certain franchise so they won't lose the rights to that particular property. That is what happened to this one: a quick, cheap revisiting of a franchise that they already let bomb with the big budget adaptation of a few years prior, which was an okay action film, but only had the 'Doom' label slapped onto it because otherwise it wouldn't even make a dent. That film was a failure on many levels.

So is this one, but for different reasons. Because they did try. Oh, they did try, but the lack of a budget or decent actors doesn't help this film one iota. A real shame, really, because this one actually uses real items and storylines from the games. 

On a remote base on Phobos, one of Mars' moons, experiments are being conducted with ancient teleporters, but things go a little south when the experiment brings back more than the scientists were expecting. Meanwhile, a team of marines is en route to this base for a boring security mission, because one of them, a lieutenant Joan Dark, fudged their last mission.

Yes, our lead is called Joan Dark. A little too on the nose for certain, although it was a neat idea to have a Doomgirl instead of a Doomguy. 

Of course, things are bleak when the marines discover most of the personnel has been turned into zombies and one by one they die. They also find demonic creatures that hurl fireballs and after they run across the head scientist dr Betruger, things get even wackier, as Betruger is of course evil and wants to open the gates to hell completely. 

Can Doomgirl stop the onslaught? 

Judging by the fact they went for sequelbait at the end and that no sequel will be made anytime soon, the answer alas is 'No.'.

You can tell they did some effort to make this more akin to the games. Dr Betruger is from 'Doom 3', they actually have coloured keycards like the games, there is a multitude of nods and winks and finally the demonic imps throw fireballs, so there are actually hellspawn here instead of mutated humans. Rejoice! 

The scene that actually takes place in hell is pretty spectacular, even if it is rather short. It's a solid guess most of the budget went to this part of the story. 

But there is much that doesn't work at all, and this is thanks to the paltry budget. The sets look and feel cheap, as do the props. The guns look like Nerf guns spraypainted black and have no weight to them. The imp costume is fine, but there probably only was one. And the digital effects save for the hell-scene are close to videogame cutscenes, in that they just don't feel realistic enough. 

The story is of course perfunctory and the dialogue is at times horrendous. Good thing our lead is passable in the acting department, but the same can't be said for pretty much everyone else. The marines feel forced and most of them are either stupid or clichéd beyond apprehension. Not only is the delivery often weird, but the plain truth is that most of these people couldn't act their way out of a bin bag. 

If given a decent budget and especially better actors, this could have been so much more. As is, it is absolutely a failure of a film, but it does have an A for effort. And, actually, it feels so much closer to the lore of the games than the previous version and actually has action and gore, so this in a way is the superior 'Doom'-adaptation...