Main cast: Amy Mason (Lt Joan Dark), Dominic Mafham (Dr Malcolm Betruger), Luke Allen-Gale (Dr Bennett Stone), Katrina Nare (Dr Veronica Cyr), James Weber Brown (Capt Hector Savage), Louis Mandylor (Chaplain Glover), Clayton Adams (Pvt Steven Winslow), and Jemma More (Pvt Li Chen)
Director: Tony Giglio
No, Doom: Annihilation is not a long-awaited sequel to Doom, although I doubt there are many people wanting a sequel to that one, heh. It’s just another Doom movie, although while there are many references to the first three Doom video games, especially, this movie takes the route taken by many video game adaptations: it mostly makes up its own canon and lore as it goes along. I’m not sure why they make this direct-to-streaming-and-Blu-ray movie, to be honest. Maybe some powerful Hollywood bigwig received some sexual favors in return for casting someone, and now this person has to pay the piper, or maybe this is a way to keep the movie rights to Doom. Who knows, maybe this could also be an attempt to get a tax write-off, or maybe someone lost a bet.
Oh, and I should recommend folks watching this movie to not play some drinking game in which they take a sip every time this movie rips, er, references more established sci-fi horror flicks out there. There is already enough trouble in the world at the moment without adding liver failure to the list.
So, we have a system of teleportation called Gates, and Dr Malcolm Betruger is planning on experimenting on sending someone from Nevada to a moon on Mars, called Phobos, via a Gate. Well, the process, works… sort of. As a group of Marines awakening from cryosleep on Phobos will discover, the fellow that reaches the base in the moon is no longer fully human. That’s right, somehow the journey through that particular Gate takes a detour through hell, and the demons there decide to seize a prime opportunity to cause problem. The possessed fellow in Phobos starts killing and turning the folks there into zombie-like things, and to make matters worse. There is only one character among the cast that has any semblance of angst passed off character, and here’s a shocker, it’s a female character. Will Joan Dark take on the demons in a way that would make a certain Ellen Ripley proud?
Well, I don’t think so. Joan, with her eye-rolling name and all (“Joan of Arc”, get it?), is more of the unfortunate stereotype of the “strong leading lady”, with her coming off more as stand-offish and cold. Her team dislike her, because she was sent to court-martial for insubordination, only to have the whole team sent to Phobos for what is basically a punishment—humiliating babysitting of academics in an unstable environment. This movie doesn’t develop her beyond being one-note surly, and her so-called strength and bravery seems more of her being halfway competent by default.
That’s right, for a bunch of Marines, too many of them are incompetent to embarrassing degrees. I suppose one can argue that maybe they are caught off-guard by the appearance of zombies, but come on, they behave more like armed civilians than trained military personnel. They are armed, and yet, so many of them go down without much more than a blubber to zombie mooks. If this had been a video game, these characters would be controlled by players that can’t aim to save their lives, such as myself. It also doesn’t help that most of these meat bags have barely any discernible presence, and oh yes, there is always that one guy that announces that he’s going to resign to spend time with his wife and kid. Guess what happens to him.
At one point, one of the characters says to another, while speculating about the things that caused the Phobos research base to shut down, “It’s aliens!” Yes, it’s Aliens alright, as this show seems to have the personalities and the dynamics of the Marines done in a way to mirror those of the gang on that movie. If anything, this one seems like the third and unwanted sibling of Aliens and Event Horizon, with all the wealth, intelligence, and beauty having gone to those movies and leaving little for this baby.
The biggest problem of Doom: Annihilation is its pacing. Apart from infrequent bursts of frenetic action, much of the movie consists of boring stock characters arguing about stupid things. Even the action scenes aren’t that impressive, to be honest. These scenes are just fast-running, super-agile zombies attacking people that apparently have zero peripheral vision—it’s not like I can’t find such scenes in other movies of this sort. Hence, with most of the movie being either boring or predictable, this one is on the dull side.
It also doesn’t help that leading lady Amy Mason displays only one single facial expression and talks in a monotone throughout the whole thing. For a while, I actually wonder whether Joan will be revealed to be an android as a twist or something, but then again, the androids in the Alien series display more emotion than her, so maybe I’m being unfair to androids in general.
Most of the rest of the cast are pretty okay, aside from Clayton Adams that seems to confuse acting with talking through gritted teeth, but they never have much to work with as their screen time is generally small. It’s a shame that the one character that gets the most screen time is played by someone that channels “Blink twice if they are holding you hostage, lady!” wooden realness.
Well, would I recommend Doom: Annihilation? Well, I guess it may be okay for a watch if one has nothing else to watch, as there is almost a “so bad, it’s almost good” kind of charm to this thing. Almost, that is—it’s more boring than campy, and hence it never really achieves the charming schlock needed to be a campy cult classic.
