Doom: Annihilation is a pale imitation of the fun, innovative, violent games

There is a fascinating discussion of 2018’s A Book Club from Folding Ideas that talks about how a movie producer can still profit even if audiences don’t like their movie. Doom: Annihilation seems like one of those cases.

The Doom series of games itself always dove headfirst into its own mythology built around Satanic imagery and relentless violence, focusing on fun and intensity over nuance or story. That’s not a bad place to start for a horror movie, but Doom: Annihilation, which just popped up on Netflix, is held back by a misguided loyalty to the basic plot structure of those games — scientists mess with arcane artifacts, Marines have to try to pick up the pieces after demons flood through an ancient doorway — while ditching the sense of anarchy and fun that made them so enjoyable.

It’s not enough for a Doom movie to bring in the blood and monsters, it should mimic the games by holding your head underneath the horror for so long that you feel like you really do have to fight in order to come up for air. And Doom: Annihilation never rises above a slog.

The greatest sin of Doom: Annihilation, which reboots the franchise after The Rock gave it a stab in 2005, is that it’s no fun to watch. The violence isn’t very violent, and every actor seems to have been there for the contractually obligated amount of time per day, and not a minute longer. Everything is brightly lit, even the “scary” scenes, and it’s all shot with such drab clarity that every set ends up looking like it came from a slightly bloody soap opera. It’s not even an underwhelming version of Doom, it’s an underwhelming version of James Cameron’s Aliens, mimicking much of that movie’s pacing and visual language.

The previous Doom film may have strayed significantly from the source material, but The Rock is always his own campy special effect, and the extended first-person sequence near the end at least tried to replicate the gonzo energy of the games that made me love this world to begin with. Annihilation may line up more with the game’s lore, but it gave up any hint of a personality in order to do so, without having the guts — excuse my pun — to put its own stamp on the material.

I was paid to watch the movie, which I didn’t pay for, on Netflix. And I hope that the people onscreen, or behind the camera, were paid to make it. Watching the damned thing certainly felt like work, and judging by the tired, deflated action in the movie, making may have been just as boring.

Doom: Annihilation is available on Netflix now.