Today’s quick review: Doom: Annihilation. As punishment for her failure, Lt. Joan Dark (Amy Manson) and her team of marines are assigned to guard duty at a secret research laboratory on Mars’ moon Phobos. They arrive to find the lab overrun by demonic creatures that were once human, the horrific result of Dr. Betruger’s (Dominic Mafham) teleportation experiments. To put an end to the threat, Joan will have to journey to the heart of the lab.
Doom: Annihilation is an action horror movie based on the video game Doom. Doom: Annihilation features a classic setup for dark sci-fi action: a team of soldiers trapped in a dark, monster-infested environment. The movie goes through the motions of the genre reasonably well, but it doesn’t bring anything unique to the table, either in terms of story or spectacle. Mediocre action, a bare-bones plot, and forgettable characters make it an unimpressive watch.
Doom: Annihilation serves up bloody action without much finesse. The demons are a weak point of the movie: the same two designs get reused repeatedly, and neither one is distinctive enough to make the encounters feel special. The fights lack variety, gravitating towards the safe formula of a marine unloading an automatic weapon into a demon until it drops dead. The token attempts at telling a story never really go anywhere either.
This will still be enough for some fans. Doom: Annihilation avoids the biggest missteps of most budget sci-fi. Its story is coherent, its action is at the very least gory, and it’s peppered with a few Easter eggs for fans of video games. But ultimately it’s lacking the sense of identity it needs to really make its premise worthwhile. Even for most action horror fans, it will be badly outclassed by other entries in the genre.
For another adaptation of the same source material, try Doom. For a survival horror movie that takes bigger risks, try Resident Evil. For a more iconic movie with a similar premise, try Alien or Aliens. For a sci-fi horror movie with a stronger plot, try Pandorum.
3.6 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 5.0 for passable action but little else.