Love/Hate: Doom – Annihilation (2019)

Welcome back to the Doom Love/Hate series! We’re off on another another “secret level” detour, this time for the second Doom movie, Doom: Annihilation! I bet you didn’t even know that there was another Doom movie; I certainly didn’t! Hell, half the reason why I wanted to cover the other Doom film for this Love/Hate series was because I was fascinated to see what a direct-to-video Doom movie made in 2019 could possibly offer. Like, think about it… this came out well after Doom (2016), so surely they would be able to reflect and capture some of the sauce that brought about the series’ resurgence, right? Is it better than the other Doom movie at least? Read on to find out…

Love

• Hell Finale – Despite aiming to be a more “faithful” adaptation of Doom, I was still quite surprised when our heroine suddenly gets pushed into a portal and ends up in hell… or, well, this film’s rendition of it anyway (it’s more akin to an alien world than it is an occultic pit of damnation). Faithful or not, this surprise finally brought the film some genuine suspense for once, and is the first time that the film manages to capture the spirit of “Doom“. It’s not quite on-par with the first-person sequence from the prior film, but it’s damn close, and it’s cool as hell to get to see our heroine destroying hordes of demons with the BFG9000. It’s also clearly where 90% of the film’s budget went, because we get a ton of special effects shots and some really cool action sequences to boot. It’s easily the best part of the whole movie, and the only must-see sequence.
  • All that said, there is one minor quibble that drags this scene down somewhat, and that’s that the lord demon spends a ridiculous amount of time monologuing as if he has a personal vendetta against our heroine. Like… why the fuck do you care about this woman, just kill her and start your invasion of Earth already!
• Chaplain Glover – Most of the characters in Doom: Annihilation are forgettable and indistinct, but there is one shining beacon of light, and that’s Chaplain Glover (played by Louis Mandylor). He’s the Phobos Base’s resident chaplain, an ex-soldier who got tired of taking lives and decided to save them instead… but he’s not afraid to go kick some ass when needed. He’s mostly just a “wise mentor” role who shows up about halfway through the movie, but Louis Mandylor busts his ass off to make this small and thankless role genuinely memorable and likable.

Mixed

• Doomgal – That’s right, Doom: Annihilation has a female protagonist… and, at the risk of sounding like a chud, I have some mixed thoughts…
  • First of all, I’ll say it up-front: Amy Manson is doing a hell of a job as protagonist Joan Dark (seriously…?). The character is as about as generic of an action movie soldier heroine as you could imagine (a hyper-competent, no-nonsense professional who made a bad call on a mission and now she’s been sent away to Mars as punishment). Despite being very generic, Amy Manson elevates the material and cements Joan as a true badass. She’s out here dual wielding pistols, throwing knives into zombies’ heads, melee fighting zombies, massacring bad guys with the chainsaw, and running around with the BFG9000 like it’s no big deal. She won me over by the end just due to her sheer badassery. The generic characterization means that she doesn’t stand out in the annals of action movie protagonists, but that’s not to take away from the effort Amy Manson puts in.
  • Of course, making your Doom protagonist a woman brings with it a ton of baggage, since Doom has always had a male lead and is rooted in traditional masculinity: extreme violence, heavy metal music and iconography, 80s-style action heroes, one man vs hell machismo, etc. Can you have a female lead in Doom? Of course, but… should you? I feel like a dick for even asking, but I do think it’s a genuine question given what Doom “is”. That said, if you’re going to make a female Doom protagonist, Annihilation takes the wisest approach: Joan Dark just happens to be a woman, and that fact doesn’t really have any bearing on the plot. This is the best way it could be handled, because it doesn’t make her being a woman something that has to be laboured on. Annihilation doesn’t do the “girlboss” thing that people hate, where we’ve got to make her more special for being a woman or halt the movie for a self-congratulatory scene. Hell, the film also, wisely, has other female soldiers in the film, so chuds can’t even claim that the movie acts like the film thinks that women are superior either… it’s just that Joan, specifically, is the best at what she does. At the end of the day, she wins you over just by being a sheer badass… even if the character, at the end of the day, isn’t all that interesting otherwise.
• Imp Design – As you can see from the screenshot above, the imps in this film look… alright, I guess. Their costume looks stiff and rubbery, but at least they’re better than the poop monsters from Doom (2005). They actually shoot fireballs this time too, which differentiates them from a standard “zombie” enemy, but the way that they do this looks kind of weird. Instead of physically hurling a fireball at you, they basically hold their hands out and “kamehameha!” it from their chest, which looks way worse and way more awkward. I mean… at least they are demons this time though, so they have that going for them. The imps in Phobos base also look completely different from the imps in the hell sequence, and I genuinely don’t understand why that was done. I dunno, the demons in this film are a real mixed bag overall.

Hate

• Looks and Feels Amateurish – I’ve seen Doom: Annihilation described as looking like a fan-film, which is an embarrassingly-accurate take. If Annihilation was made by a bunch of passionate amateurs on a shoe-string budget, then I could forgive the cheap-looking sets, the uninteresting lighting, the sauceless direction, and the conspicuous lack of a score for most of the runtime. Unfortunately, this is not a fan-film, so the fact that it looks like a Syfy original really hurts Doom: Annihilation‘s overall impact.
  • Like, it’s been a couple days since I watched the film, and I can’t get over the fact that there’s an action sequence near the end which takes place in a nuclear reactor… which is just a big, empty room with a dirt floor. It genuinely looks like they shot this scene in a barn, that’s the level of production values we’re at for this film.
• The Characters – Aside from the aforementioned Chaplain Glover and Joan Dark, the cast of characters in Annihilation are so fucking dull and forgettable. What is it with Doom movies feeling the need to have this big cast of nothingburger characters who we feel zero connection to because we all know they are going to die sooner rather than later? Like, I’ll retroactively give Doom (2005) some kudos: at least it went to some modicum of effort to make its characters distinguishable and have some personality. I genuinely could not tell most of the cast of Annihilation apart, and I sure as fuck did not care when any of them met their obligatory ends.
• Ham-fisted References – I have complained many times in the past about ham-fisted, self-referential movies, and Doom: Annihilation is absolutely one of those fucking offenders. It’s one thing if the references are put in subtly and organically for people to pick up on if they’re paying attention. Instead Annihilation goes out of its way to make sure that you notice every reference, painstakingly pointing each one out so that you know that they did it. You’ve got characters pointing out explosive barrels, red/blue/yellow card keys as major plot points, another Dr. Carmack, a BJ Blazkowicz name-drop, the chainsaw is Chekhov’s gun’d, characters scream things like “Fuck this, I’m too young to die!” and “I’m your ultra-nightmare, motherfuckers!” Hell, the entire third act revolves around them finding a goddamn secret level!
  • In fact, there are so many references that one of them ends up being really awkward and borderline blasphemous if you’re a fan of the franchise. The BJ Blazkowicz name-drop I mentioned? This comes up because our team of soldiers find a lone, decapitated marine at the base, whose dog tags name him as “William Blazkowicz”. Considering that BJ Blazkowicz is the great-grandfather of Doomguy, you could very well read this scene as the characters finding the real hero of Doom dead and now this group of pretenders have to come in and try to finish the job… that’s actually kind of a brilliant premise now that I’m thinking about it, but I don’t think that’s at all the intent. You see, I think that the filmmakers just wanted to make you point at the screen and whistle, and didn’t considering what they could be implying with a reference like that.

I don’t understand why Doom: Annihilation exists. It was clearly made on a shoe-string budget, so right out of the gate it was kneecapped from achieving its ambitions of being a “proper” Doom adaptation. Making matters worse, it’s not really all that different from Doom (2005) on a structural level – it’s still basically just a bad adaptation of Doom 3, only with more overt references to the games this time. Hell, I even think that Doom (2005) did a better job of capturing the franchise’s spirit than this movie did. They certainly tried and I’ll give them that much at least, but there is a reason why Doom: Annihilation came and went with zero fanfare.

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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