Oh, dear God, do I owe myself an apology for watching this. Best I can say is that I watched it while doing household chores, so I didn’t COMPLETELY waste my life.

I can pretty much tell you exactly how this movie came about. Once upon a time there was a studio that found itself having the movie rights to DOOM, the game that, after Wolfenstein 3D, birthed the entire FPS genre of videogames, and a contract with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson for A Movie To Be Named Later. And lo, an executive who neither played videogames nor read fiction did say, “These things I shall combine, that the studio shall make money, and I shall obtain a corner office with bonuses. Hire me a director, and make this shit.”

And so there was a director, who was handed this shit sandwich, and he said to his minions, “These rights and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson have already eaten yea three-fourths of my budget. Find me a writer willing to crap out a script for California’s minimum wage.”

Swiftly a writer was found, who said, “Behold, I have already a script which received a C- in my Screenwriting 352 class at UCLA for being, in the words of my professor, “a shitty retread of World War Z on Mars fueled by methamphetamines dissolved in cheap vodka.”

“Canst thou erase all traces of originality from thy work, so that it may include all this that ye shall find in this 10 year old treatment of the property?” asked the director. And the screenwriter said unto him, “Yea, verily, where is my paycheck?”

In the words of Douglas Adams (paraphrased) they produced a movie that was almost entirely quite unlike DOOM. This movie is the exact opposite of the brilliant imaginations and playful fun that produced such unexpected gems as CLUE and THE LEGO MOVIE. DOOM is sucked dry, not only of any originality, but also of any joy or fun in the original work. It is, on all possible levels, a complete waste of everyone’s time.