The New Doom Movie (GET REAL, IT'S SHIT)

I agree with you pretty much, Joe. Also I think having a DBP focused around this would be hilarious, I'd join in.

Don't be a stranger deathevo, had me worried there.

hey man, I'll visit more often 

Just had a major burnout on doom and politics and distracted myself with a world of warcraft guild and the autism and friendships I had there were great (until the guild master ended up sperging out and broke the guild up haha)

I hope you've been well

I've been loosely following the dragon-ball shitfest as twitter once again tries to destroy another person's career on one of the comic book channels I follow. The whole thing is a miscarriage of justice and totally fucking bogus. I they all get hung out to dry in court.

The fact that the Doom team wants nothing to do with this shit of a movie is beautiful

This is an underrated comment, optimus!  I totally missed this the first time.  I just watched it again to be sure nothing changed, and it literally still says "DOOM: ANNTHILATION" at the :27 mark!  You know it's gonna be a good movie when they misspell the title of the movie in the official trailer.

Yeah, it does look like a badly placed lens flare/glow effect now that I look again.  Still though, my comment stands.  That should have been caught in the Q/A process.

I've been thinking about the whole "video games movies have to be crap" thing a lot for the past few weeks and have decided it is a colossal load of horse shit. I just spent half an hour writing up a little essay about it in response to a few folks in the Doom Annihilation thread on DW, but maybe some of you will find it interesting, or you might lay out why I'm dead wrong and a total moron:

In response to the whole "Doom/Mario/Resident Evil don't have enough to build on, that's why the movies suck!" take: Great filmmakers and storytellers have done so much more with so much less material countless times before.



Making the movie be "all about Doomguy" would be a mistake in my opinion, but what the 2005 film did was throw the title "DOOM" on a passable-but-generic sci-fi action flick and unfortunately the new film seems to be unfolding somewhat similarly. Hopefully I'm wrong, but if there IS a potential recipe for a good Doom film, that just isn't it.

Taking away the name, I feel the 2005 film was actually unduly panned as a standalone product, it was pretty fun to watch and a budget was clearly there. One reason (although not the main reason) it sucked was because there was almost nothing in the way of game tie-ins or fanservice. I mean shit, why weren't the marines at least in Doomy looking armor? Why did the bfg shoot BLUE plasma? These were extremely easy brownie points to score that they just dropped the ball on, fuck knows how. At least they got Pinky right. Even as absolutely terrible as the Mortal Kombat movie was, at least it looked like Mortal Kombat, y'know? To me, despite being a big mark against it, this is actually not the worst sin the Doom movie committed.

The biggest sin was that it had sweet fuck all to do with Doom. Again, the "no plot elements to work with, no character" argument to me is not only demonstrably wrong but unnecessarily limited from a creative perspective. There is SO MUCH ROOM to fill the world of Doom up with lore since the whole thing is so basic, but there's no need to reinvent the wheel and toss out what little plotline Doom has.

Talented writers are able to take a 'mostly blank setting' and a 'mostly blank slate character with some basic character traits (refuses to kill innocent people, not much respect for authority) and spin it into something interesting. We can't find out some more about why the UAC are doing what they're doing? We can't find out why Doomguy's CO ordered him to fire upon civilians? We can't build a world that tells us anything about the various aspects of the world of DOOM? Doomguy's struggle for survival on the martian terrain going from base to base? Anything?

I mentioned that video game films almost always get their tone wrong, but another important mistake too many of them make is this: They're given a basic world, only the fundamentals of the settings and characters are established, so there's plenty of room to write a story that somehow makes it all fit together while keeping the audience entertained. Yet, they all insist on throwing out what little IS there and just reinventing the wheel, so all the potential fanservice (aka the whole reason a video game film should even exist) is immediately destroyed and you just end up with some random film that just happens to share it's title with an existing game. Why even do it at all at that point?

You could easily add a few other key outsider characters to give him motivation or to add plot elements if necessary. In the games Doomguy receives a transmission at least once informing him of where Earth's hostages are. Let's build on that, there are clearly others alive out there communicating with him, so you don't even have to do the oddly-narrow "Doomguy is literally the only character" approach. Why not give the Doomguy a little backstory? Why not make it so a childhood friend is one of those hostages, giving him some sort of true motivation? Or perhaps make it so that Daisy was given to him by his since-deceased sister or some shit, and so he really wants to get back and protect the only living being he truly cares about, but then he finds Daisy dead and this fuels his roided-out rampage for the final 10 minutes/climax of the film. Maybe this leads him to being so detached and ruthless, maybe this leads him to becoming stonehearted, maybe this leads to him resolving to literally live in Hell and transcend his very humanity for the sake of keeping innocent lives safe?

I mean shit, is it just me or is there way more potential meat on this bone than you guys are giving it credit for? I mean I just thoughtlessly pulled those potential plotlines directly out of my ass and I already think there's way more there to build upon that just isn't being seen. I'm trying to expand on the existing elements, limited as they may be, rather than rewriting it all from scratch. Doomguy is there, the overall skeletal plot of the original Doom/Doom2 is there, expanded upon even, all the classic visual elements could make an appearance and make the fans go "woooh!!!" in the theater (which should be what a video game movie exists to do) like GREEN bfg balls, double-barrel shotguns, exploding barrels, green armor/the general appearance of the soldiers being similar to the game, the dead rabbit head, the city on fire.. I mean there are SO many iconic visual elements that would be dirt cheap to reproduce but would still please general Doom fans! They'd have some "Hey, I recognize that!" moments, which in my estimation are absolutely crucial to videogame films.

There are several action-comedies out there that, despite not being video game based films, provide a great example for what a video game based film aught to be like. Kung Fury provides a great example on the more absurdist end of the spectrum, but Zombieland also comes to mind. Zombieland is so similar to Doom in terms of story content when we throw out all the little details: Some average people are left alive but almost everyone is dead, they have to fight and explore for survival, but there's a ton of zombies out that what's gonna kill em good. The Doom story is: A soldier is left alive but almost everyone is dead, he will have to fight and explore for survival, but there's a ton of demons out there what's gonna kill him good. My point is, when you have a very basic premise, you can somewhat easily expand upon it and turn it into something interesting without contradicting (or ignoring) the basic elements of that world that are already in place.

When people say videogame films are always bad because there "just isn't enough to work with", I never buy that ultra-lazy answer. A big reason they're usually crap is because they pointlessly change basic, fundamental aspects of the world that the game has already established even though that's entirely unnecessary to do when you have a virtually blank slate anyway; the filmmakers also always seem to forget that the only logical reason to ever make a videogame-based movie in the first place is to please fans of said videogame. I mean seriously, why the hell else would you even do it? Throw some damn familiar visuals from the game in there FFS! Again I'll point to Mortal Kombat at least getting the visuals right. To me it's sad that MK is about the only videogame film I've ever seen to get the visuals right... and even then that's pretty much the only thing it has going for it.

I swear I can envision a multitude of different Doom based films that actually work, just on the basic level of being an entertaining romp that pleases most fans. The fact that so many videogame films are awful has convinced the world, wrongfully, that it is an impossible goal to achieve. The blame never seems to be laid at the feet of the directors and writers who took some basic characters and a basic world and spun it into trash rather than gold.

Why is it always the game's "fault" for somehow having an inferior idea-quotient? Sure that argument might fly for a game like Pong or Tetris, but not much else. Wouldn't providing settings, props, basic themes, basic storylines and basic characters - which almost every video game has - to good writers surely result in something.. You know.. Good? Of course it would, we've seen it before. I feel like the blame has been mistakenly placed upon the games themselves (and by proxy the devs) rather than the creatively stunted/limited writers who are incapable of creating cohesive, interesting story trajectories using those basic elements.

Thus concludes my sloppy dissertation on everyone seeming to misunderstand why literally no videogame movies have ever been good. It's all for fun and entertainment, but I think about this kind of stuff a lot, so you can see why I roll my eyes at people saying "FILM IS BAD BECAUSE WOMEN" or "FILM IS BAD BECAUSE GAME". Both takes are just so... lazy.