Why Did I Watch That? – DOOM
I watched a bad movie today. It is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. Watching bad movies that is. I revel in the terrible plots, paper-thin characters, cheesy effects, and wooden acting. It fuels me. I love them in a way that I can’t quite describe, or feel about bad games or music. To me, bad films deserve to be recognized, talked about, and maybe occasionally ridiculed. This one is no exception.
DOOM is not a good movie by any means, and I’m not here to argue that fact. What I am here to argue is that you should definitely sit down and watch it, if only for one scene in the near two-hour long feature. Where we hop into the brain of Karl Urban for a first-person shooter-esque sequence that has us gunning down demons and tearing through the demented bowls of the Mars facility. It may look a little less than great, especially more than ten years after its release, but that doesn’t make it any less goddamn cool.
The movie itself is a rip-off of many things, Predator and Aliens rammed together the all of the subtlety of a toddler with a sledgehammer, the Rock and Karl Urban going head to head after a scientist sends a distress signal because somehow, they ended up making monsters in their secretive military research base. The cliché used to explain away all the bad things that happen in shitty, low budget movies.
At the very end of the movie, Karl Urban is hurting. So, he is given a shot by a pretty scientist lady, which magically turns him into a super soldier. We cut to his face, and all of a sudden, we are inside of him. Cue a five-minute long “unbroken”, first-person scene. It’s part amazing campy schlock and part cool filmmaking, ripped straight out of the FMV from a 90’s video game. Urban blasts open zombies with an assault rifle, blows one into a raincloud of blood and gore with a landmine that he apparently keeps in his pocket, and fights a weird dog/wheelchair thing as it eats a flashlight and Urban waves around a chainsaw.
It is deliciously stupid and I loved every single damn second of it. The rest of the movie, all of the decidedly not badass meandering around and creepy characters was worth watching for this single five minute long scene. And the fight scene between Urban and the slowly mutating Rock afterwards is pretty cool too, so there is even another reason for you to spend your valuable time watching.
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Tom has been writing about media since he was a senior in high school. He likes long walks on the beach, dark liquor, and when characters reload guns in action movies.
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