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It's fun to get swept along by new-game fever - especially when the game is as pleasant a surprise as id Software's robust Doom reboot - but the tide of enthusiasm can carry you to some regrettable places. Don't, as I did, make the mistake of thinking that this would be a perfect moment to reappraise the 2005 Doom movie, which is currently available on Netflix in the UK and across Europe. There is no reappraising to be done here. It's a bad film, probably worse than you remember. Just another rubbish video game movie - except it's not, because of one historically remarkable shot, and because Doom's fearsome magic has eluded other game makers as well as filmmakers. For years, it even eluded id themselves.Before we lay into it, let's acknowledge the impossibility of the task that was set the filmmakers, director Andrzej Bartkowiak and screenwriters David Callaham and Wesley Strick. Even the dumbest action film requires, as basic underpinnings, things that Doom simply doesn't have: more than one character, dialogue, a plot, any kind of motivation or internal logic whatsoever for the action. Although a good Doom movie isn't impossible to imagine, it is a fool's errand from the offset, and it is always going to have to invent most of itself from first principles.
Let's also pause to note that most of this movie's failings have nothing to do with it being a misguided video game adaptation, and are simply those of any bad film. The script comprises nothing but exposition and cliché and can't boast a single laugh. (Strick, who wrote such lurid entertainments as Arachnophobia and Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear remake in the early 90s, had clearly lost his gift for pulp in the intervening years.) A low budget is compounded by uninspired production design to give the film a bland, anonymous look and a total lack of visual excitement; the action switches between Earth and Mars, but if you had the sound muted, you'd never know. For a film directed by a former cinematographer, it is also bafflingly poorly lit. Doom has one great asset, its star Dwayne Johnson, who at the time was still happy for his nom de wrestle The Rock to appear in the credits, but he's wasted. In 2005, his winning screen persona wasn't fully formed yet and the producers had no inkling of how to draw it out, casting him as a sober military meathead instead of the iron-pumped puppydog we now all know and love.
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