Do not be deceived by the title of Doom: Annihilation, or the fact that IMDb claims it “follows” Andrzej Bartkowiak’s mostly-awful Doom. The new film from writer/director Tony Giglio (S.W.A.T. Under Siege) is a remake, not a sequel, and despite its low budget it’s bound to satisfy more fans of the historic video game than that Dwayne Johnson film ever did.
Doom: Annihilation stars Amy Manson (Once Upon a Time) as Joan Dark, a marine whose unit has just been assigned to a secret scientific installation on Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. It’s a plum gig for any scientist, like Dark’s ex-boyfriend Bennet (Luke Allen-Gale, Crazyhead), but for Dark and her team it’s punishment for a grievous mistake she made in a previous assignment.
Dark and her unit arrive just in time: Dr. Malcolm Betruger (Dominic Mafham, Backdraft II) has just used ancient ruins and modern technology to open a teleportation portal between Phobos and Earth. Never mind that it looks like the portal to Hell, it COULD be the key to interplanetary travel, so Betruger fires it up and – wouldn’t you know it? – opens a portal to Hell.
Now, the space station is full of monsters and it’s up to Dark and her crew to save as many scientists as possible, fix the nuclear reactor and find a way off of that god forsaken rock. Along the way they will kill a heck of a lot of zombies, and quite a few fireball-throwing demons in big rubber suits.
What a joy it is to see those rubber suits. Doom: Annihilation has some satisfying VFX for the external shots of the space station (especially for a straight-to-video release), but inside it’s mostly practical. The monsters are pleasingly practical creations, at least until the big climax, the sets are pleasingly reminiscent of the games, and mostly plausible.
“Mostly” is the operative word, of course. Doom: Annihilation sometimes transitions from an impressive production to straight-up b-grade schlock. There’s a scene in a hydroponics bay which is set up like a labyrinth of vines from which zombies could be lurking around every corner, but it’s painfully obvious the filmmakers only had two or three rows of vines and are cheating it as hard as they can to get away with it.
There’s another sequence that takes place in what looks like a sewage plant, and although the characters argue that even high tech installations need sewage, they fail to explain why sewage workers on a space station would need a chainsaw mounted on the wall. How exactly do you plumb with a chainsaw? I guess we’ll never know, but at least it’s an effective zombie-killer.
It would be easy to complain about the simple storyline and uncomplicated characters in Doom: Annihilation, but the film has no aspirations beyond putting space marines in a confined space with demons and watching them fight. Amy Manson brings a little bit of depth to a role that, in the games, is frequently just called “Doomguy.” Her unit is filled with characters who, by and large, have only one defining characteristic – one of them doesn’t trust her, another one knows French, another one has lucky underwear – but they’re mostly here to be murdered anyway. The details just help you keep track of who’s bitten the dust and who’s still kicking.
Tony Giglio does a solid job of presenting Doom: Annihilation like a modest, but effective sci-fi action thriller. Unfortunately the film never quite clicks as a horror movie. The big rubber monsters look creepy until they do a cartoonish “Hadoken” and shoot CGI fireballs out of their hands. The cinematography by Alexander Krumov (Jarhead: Law of Return) is clean and efficient but rarely expressionistic, to the point of actually selling the intensity of the violence or the anxiety of the characters. It looks very slick but it doesn’t necessarily sell the story.
Doom: Annihilation isn’t especially ambitious. All it really had to do was be better than the Doom movie from 2005, and it is. It’s a lot better. It makes sense, it doesn’t step on the elements of the video game franchise that work, and it’s edited and shot in such a way that you can actually tell what’s going on most of the time. In a vacuum it’s merely a solid straight-to-video flick but in comparison it’s bound to be a relief for Doom fans. There aren’t a lot of great video game movies out there, but one thing’s for sure… Doom: Annihilation isn’t one of the bad ones.
