Doom (2005)

Doom arrives from 2005, a year when the video game adaptation was still a genre of quiet shame, and it does little to disturb that reputation. Andrzej Bartkowiak directs a squad of marines toward a Martian research facility, where an unethical corporation has been splicing ancient chromosomes into convicted murderers and discovering, to no one's surprise, that this produces monsters. The plot is largely an excuse for corridors, muzzle flashes, and a first person sequence that remains the film's only genuine claim to invention. As cultural commentary it is nearly silent.

The cast is more varied than the era's action norms, with Dwayne Johnson, Deobia Oparei, and Razaaq Adoti filling out the squad, though the film treats their presence as simple casting and never as a statement. Rosamund Pike plays Dr. Samantha Grimm, a scientist of evident competence, and the screenplay allows her to do laboratory work and deliver exposition without ever suggesting a thesis about women in science. The Union Aerospace Corporation is plainly villainous, a company that experiments on people and worries chiefly about data retrieval, but the film has no interest in following that thread toward any economic argument. It simply needs a faceless employer to be reckless.

What remains is a lean, loud, and thoroughly unserious exercise in creature feature mechanics. There is no sermon here, no moral instruction, no attempt to educate the audience about anything beyond the dangers of standing near a ventilation shaft. Roger Ebert compared it to a child monopolizing your computer, which is unkind but not inaccurate. The film was a box office failure, critically dismissed, and later disowned by several of its own participants. For a taxonomy of social messaging, it offers almost nothing to measure, which is itself a kind of data point.