Doom’s 2005 movie is dumb as hell… and that’s exactly why it rules

The night I realised Doom (2005) wasn’t actually bad

I remember the first time I watched the Doom movie. It was a scratched rental DVD, four cheap lagers deep on a weeknight, with someone in the room already practising their best “wow, that sucked” take before the credits even rolled. This was the era when “video game movie” basically meant “guaranteed trash”, and Doom was lumped into the pile with an 18% Rotten Tomatoes score as if that told the whole story.

By the time the credits hit, something annoying had happened: I realised I’d actually had a good time. Not an ironic, “haha this is so bad” kind of fun, but genuine, grinning enjoyment. Doom (2005) isn’t secretly a misunderstood masterpiece or anything. It’s loud, dumb, derivative, and absolutely drenched in testosterone. But that’s the point. It isn’t failing to be serious cinema. It flat-out refuses to try.

And the more game adaptations we’ve had since – the prestige TV runs, the self-important movies that think Easter eggs are a substitute for a pulse – the more I keep coming back to Doom as one of the few that understood its job. It doesn’t want to be Alien. It wants to be the cinematic equivalent of playing Doom at 2am with the speakers too loud and your brain half asleep. On that level? It absolutely delivers.

Rotten Tomatoes hates Doom because it judged the wrong movie

That 18% score dumps Doom on the same tier as stuff like the Assassin’s Creed movie. And that comparison is exactly why I think the whole rating is a joke.

Assassin’s Creed was the kind of adaptation that clearly believed it was saying something deep. Endless exposition, conspiratorial nonsense, po-faced delivery, all wrapped in this washed-out “serious cinema” filter. It took a series that’s fundamentally about parkouring across history and turned it into a lecture.

Doom does the opposite. It never pretends to be clever. It doesn’t try to reinvent sci-fi or impress critics who wrote their review the second they heard “video game adaptation”. It’s gleefully dumb. People yell “motherfucker” and then do something cool. Monsters leap out of the dark like they’re in a haunted house ride. Guns are big. Muscles are bigger. The plot is basically an excuse to move from one corridor to the next.

That’s not a bug. That’s exactly the videogame energy it’s chasing. If you go in expecting an art film you’ll hate it. If you go in expecting a four-beer, shout-at-the-screen B-movie? Suddenly that 18% looks like everyone watched the wrong film in their minds.

The marine intro is pure B-movie perfection

The moment I knew Doom was in on its own joke was the squad introduction. Every decent military sci-fi movie has this scene: Aliens with Bishop playing the knife game and Hudson being a loudmouth, Predator with Blaine’s chewing-tobacco “sexual tyrannosaurus” nonsense. It’s the roll call of future corpses and archetypes, and Doom hits it like it studied the textbook.

Dwayne Johnson’s Sarge – still credited as The Rock – is introduced shirtless. Not because it makes plot sense. Because everyone involved knows exactly what people paid to see. He’s all veins and barked orders, the guy who seems trustworthy purely because he looks like he’s sculpted from a protein shake advert.

Then there’s Portman, the sleaze whose hair looks like it naturally secretes engine oil. Goat, the religious fanatic, quietly reading his Bible and catching fruit without looking – because in a scene like this someone has to catch something without making eye contact to signal they’re cool. Duke fiddles with a handheld Futuretronics Galaxian 2, a tiny wink that yes, this whole thing comes from videogames in the first place.

Mac and Destroyer play baseball with fruit. The Kid cleans up and looks terrified, the designated lamb led to the slaughter. And then there’s Karl Urban’s John “Reaper” Grimm, quietly cleaning his gun with the kind of grim focus that screams “protagonist with tragic backstory”. It is paint-by-numbers, and yet it’s done with such unapologetic gusto that it works.

This is where Doom quietly tells you what it is: a movie happily standing in Aliens’ shadow, paying off the loan with interest, but determined to have more fun with the formula than any actual Alien movie has dared to in years. If this scene makes you roll your eyes, you should tap out right there. For everyone else, it’s the perfect mood-setter.

The Mars plot is nonsense – and that’s completely fine

Let’s be real: Doom’s story has never been the point. Demons from Hell. Mars. Shotgun. Keycard. Repeat until the music stops. The Doom games got a little more self-aware with Doom 2016, but the original vibe was basically “heavy metal album cover comes to life”.

The movie ditches literal Hell in favour of pseudo-science about ancient Martian experiments, extra chromosomes, and gene manipulation. It’s half Resident Evil, half “we binged some cable TV documentaries and got ideas”. Fans who grew up during the Satanic Panic era, where Doom’s pentagrams and demons felt like forbidden fruit, understandably hated that shift. Hell was part of the attitude for them.

Personally? I couldn’t care less that the film replaced Satan with science. Doom was never about lore for me. It was about speed, aggression, and style. The movie actually treats its mythology with less reverence than some of the Doom tie-in novels did, which quietly turned everything into aliens and genetic projects anyway. It’s pulp either way; one flavour just has more Latin chanting.

All I needed was: space base gone wrong; monsters hunting marines; a sense that things are spiralling out of control. Doom delivers that. The Mars research facility is a maze of corridors, labs, sewer tunnels, and dimly lit rooms that may as well have giant invisible triggers saying “monster closet opens here”. It feels like someone tried to convert a level layout into a film set, and honestly, I respect that commitment.

This movie actually understands videogame flow

One of my ongoing gripes with game adaptations is how often they seem ashamed of game logic. They’ll cram in character names and iconography, but heaven forbid a scene actually feel like playing something. Doom doesn’t have that problem. It structures itself almost exactly like a linear shooter from the mid-2000s.

You’ve got the briefing and deployment (the tutorial), initial creepy recon (intro level), a series of escalating encounters, some key objective moments – like investigating the labs, or that weirdly tender autopsy scene – and then the inevitable point where everything goes completely to hell, figuratively if not literally. People split up, objectives go vague, and the whole thing turns into desperate survival.

Markers are clear. There’s a sewer section that might as well flash “yes, this is the sewer level”. There’s a power core area. There’s a claustrophobic lab. There’s a final boss arena-style fight. The marines are constantly having positions called in, doors sealed, checkpoints secured. It feels less like traditional blockbuster pacing and more like somebody mapped their favourite campaign beats into a script.

It even gives you the Big Fucking Gun as a mid-movie power fantasy. The BFG showing up is pure fan service, sure, but it’s also structured like a videogame reward: the moment where the player character unlocks the absurdly overpowered toy, and everyone immediately wants to see what it does. It’s juvenile and glorious.

Throw in scientists who are named after id Software’s real founders, being ripped apart in escalatingly nasty ways, and there’s this constant sense that the film knows exactly which parts of Doom are worth faithfully adapting: scale, speed, and carnage. Not canon bullet points.

The first-person sequence is four minutes of stupid genius

The thing everyone remembers – or pretends to remember just to mock – is the first-person sequence near the end. For a little over four minutes, the movie drops any pretence of subtlety and just says, “Fine, you want a videogame? Here, be Doomguy.”

Reaper wakes up supercharged and we slam straight into his perspective. The camera glides forward like a floating mouse and keyboard rig come to life. Zombies lunge into frame purely to be mulched. Imps leap out, get blasted, move aside for the next target. It really does feel like a haunted house ride where every animatronic is just a sack of gore waiting for a headshot.

Is it goofy? Absolutely. Some of the CG has aged like warm milk. The transitions between rooms are a little too neat. It’s very obviously a stitched-together corridor of stunts and effects shots masquerading as one take. But it’s also audacious in a way almost no other game movie has been. Instead of skirting around the fact it’s based on a first-person shooter, Doom weaponises that perspective as a punchline.

What sells it for me is how committed it is. There’s no cutaway to horrified bystanders, no cynical joke at its own expense. For those four minutes, the film is 100% sincere about being a live-action Doom level. It’s like a fan film with a studio budget snuck into the third act of a Hollywood release. The sequence ends, the film throws in a bareknuckle boss fight for dessert, and then basically tells you to get out of the cinema and go home. No sequel bait. No “see you in the next one”. Respect.

The cast actually knows what movie they’re in

What makes all this chaos hold together is that the main cast plays it at exactly the right pitch. Dwayne Johnson’s Sarge starts out as the gruff, reliable commander and slowly morphs into something uglier. Watching The Rock lean into outright villainy before he became a franchise-saving brand manager is a treat. He growls every order like he’s cutting a wrestling promo and seems to be having the time of his life.

Karl Urban, meanwhile, grounds the whole thing. This is pre-Dredd Karl, but you can already see the DNA: the clenched jaw, the wounded sense of duty, the way he sells absolutely ridiculous lines with dead-serious conviction. Reaper could so easily have been a cardboard “sad space marine” archetype; instead he feels like a guy barely holding himself together under a mountain of family trauma and corporate horror.

Rosamund Pike gets stuck with the thankless role of “beautiful scientist”, an archetype fossilised in late-90s and early-2000s action cinema. But she’s way better than the script deserves. She sells the technobabble, lands the emotional beats with Reaper as his estranged twin sister, and never feels like she’s winking at the camera or embarrassed to be there. The fact she went from this to Gone Girl just proves good actors can elevate even the schlockiest material.

The supporting squad each get just enough seasoning to feel like people rather than cannon fodder. Goat’s religious mania, Destroyer’s stoic toughness, Portman’s sleazy cowardice, The Kid’s naïve eagerness. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s executed with a sincerity that keeps the whole B-movie machine from collapsing into pure parody.

Clint Mansell’s soundtrack is the secret weapon

Here’s the part that never gets talked about enough: Clint Mansell did the score. Yes, the same guy behind Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain decided to go full heavy-industrial for a Doom movie, and the result absolutely slaps.

The soundtrack is all grinding guitars, pounding drums, and sinister synth lines lurking underneath. It doesn’t try to mimic the original Doom’s MIDI metal note-for-note, but it captures the same adrenaline. When the marines gear up and head through the Ark to Mars, the music hits that perfect “time to break everything” tempo. It feels like the moment in a Doom level when the combat music kicks in and you know you’re about to be locked in a room with more demons than ammo.

That sonic identity is crucial. So many dull adaptations slap on generic orchestral wallpaper and call it a day. Doom understands that the games have always sounded as aggressive as they looked. Mansell’s score bridges that gap – not subtle, not refined, but absolutely on-brand for a story about mutated space marines and mystery chromosomes.

Why Doom still beats Doom: Annihilation and the “prestige” era

Revisiting Doom got even more interesting once Doom: Annihilation dropped in 2019. On paper, Annihilation should be the “truer” adaptation. It goes back to demons and a Hell dimension, litters itself with nods to the games, and pretends it’s the start of some grand saga by ending on a cliffhanger.

In practice, it’s just lifeless. The imps look like tired cosplayers lobbing fireballs that wouldn’t scare a five-year-old. The Hell mythology is somehow both overexplained and underwhelming. It plays everything straight but never finds its pulse. The 2005 film may have swapped literal Hell for sci-fi nonsense, but at least it did it with personality and a sense of humour.

And then there’s the whole wave of prestige adaptations we’ve had in recent years – the big-budget TV shows with careful casting, long-running arcs, and obsessive fidelity to scripts. A lot of them are great. I’m not saying everything needs to be Doom-level brainless. Story-driven games with genuine emotional weight should get the respectful, character-driven treatment.

But Doom is not that. Doom is primal. Doom is about pressing forward, ripping and tearing, turning demons into paste with increasingly absurd weapons. Trying to Pinot Noir that experience, to refine it into awards-bait, misses the core appeal completely. Doom (2005) understood that it needed to be closer to a raucous midnight slasher screening than a serious sci-fi drama. Its “crime” was committing to that idea when critics still thought anything based on a game had to justify its existence by pretending to be something else.

What I actually want from a Doom movie

After a couple of decades watching this adaptation cycle spin around, here’s where I’ve landed: not every game needs a faithful page-to-screen transcription. Some just need the right energy. Doom is firmly in that camp.

From a purely “cinema studies” perspective, sure, Doom (2005) is a mess. The script is clunky. The pseudoscience is laughable. The CG has aged badly. The third act swerves into a brawler showdown that feels like it wandered in from a different movie. If a critic wants to hang an 18% around its neck for that, fine.

But as someone who grew up blasting through Doom levels until the sky outside turned from black to grey, this trashy Mars massacre gets something fundamentally right:

• It embraces being loud, crass, and unapologetically violent.
• It structures itself like a shooter, not a prestige drama.
• It treats big guns, dumb one-liners, and monster closets as features, not embarrassments.
• It gives us a first-person sequence so committed it circles back around from cringe to iconic.
• It sounds like Doom, thanks to Mansell’s snarling soundtrack.

That matters more to me than whether the lore footnotes match a wiki page. I don’t need a Doom movie to make me cry. I need it to make me crack open a drink, shout when someone gets yanked into a vent, and grin like an idiot when the BFG finally fires.

Doom (2005) delivers that in spades. It’s the rare video game adaptation that doesn’t seem afraid of its roots. No shame. No self-conscious distance. Just a bunch of big, dumb choices made with absolute conviction.

So yeah, keep the 18%. Keep the snarky letterboxd one-liners and the “lol remember when The Rock did this” memes. I’ll be over here, happily rewatching a so-called failure that understood Doom better than half the more “respectable” adaptations understand their own source material.

Sometimes, the correct way to adapt a game about blasting demons on Mars is to make a movie that feels like it flunked out of film school but aced every class in pure, weaponised videogame chaos. Doom did that. And that’s why, for all its faults, it absolutely rules.