I spent some time watching a movie I wish I hadn’t. DOOM Annihilation is really bad. For some reason, Universal Studios thought that it would be great to make this movie. Director Tony Giglio is known for being a writer on the Death Race series and director of classics like Soccer Dog and S.W.A.T.: Under Siege. I watched the movie on Netflix, well I didn’t really want to spend any money on this movie.
Plot
UAC sciences have discovered ancient gates that can teleport individuals from the Mars moon Phobos to a base in Nevada. A volunteer jumps through and makes it to Mars, the problem is he’s not the same anymore. The trip changed him into one of those undead creatures. At this point the scientists are just excited it all worked, that is until something else comes through the gate.
Marines are sent in as a security measure at the Phobos base. They arrive a little too late as demons have taken over the base. I won’t go into any more detail on what happens during the movie. The plot is actually the best part of the movie, it has some intrigue and a few twists that made it a better story than the DOOM movie. Now that’s enough praise for this film. It just gets worse and worse.
Performance
If you’ve seen some of Tony Giglio’s movies, you know that not a lot of time is spent on the talent. The best acting came from the demon towards the end of DOOM Annihilation, that’s where he speaks in his language and you have to read the subtitles. You can get better acting in this movie.Â
Using a female lead did take away from the overused idea about one DOOM slayer who’s only this all-powerful guy. We have video games to keep that going. Amy Manson did a great job as the main character, introducing her into the game world would be a nice idea. Other than that I just felt like everyone was either overacting or just didn’t care. The alcoholic pilot was just too much and he caused me to cheer when he finally died.
Cinematography
The production value of this film is really something else. How much was spent on getting those doors to open? Or better yet, how much did they spend on those enormous colored keys? It seemed like too much money was wasted either in catering for the actors or on smaller details that most people will ignore. I’m going to post the trailer below this paragraph, the movie doesn’t look any better when you actually watch it.
As you can see just from the trailer a few things did work. All of the shots that show the base or anything in space really looked great. Almost as good as The Expanse, the demons at the end and the Overlord all looked really good. Now here is just a few of the things that failed miserably.
- Imps
- Armor
- Weapons
- Fight scenes
- Overall acting
You can tell from the story that there was a lot of positive thoughts put into this movie. It just fails to present itself as a DOOM movie. The 2005 movie is just a better version.
Verdict
Since DOOM Eternal is releasing this week I thought it was a great idea to watch DOOM Annihilation. It was just a bad idea. Literally just go online and read the story. The way people write it makes it seem like the movie is even better. Just wait and play DOOM Eternal when it comes out this week. I hope Universal will just stop making these movies. I honestly will still recommend this movie over Io, nothing has been as bad as that film
