STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS: The Bromance of Kirk and Spock

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) – Directed by J.J. Abrams – Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Benedict Cumberbatch, Karl Urban, John Cho, Alice Eve, Simon Pegg, Peter Weller, Anton Yelchin, and Bruce Greenwood.

Here’s the deal, readers. SPOILERS follow. Lots and lots of spoilers follow. I don’t hold anything back, so don’t read forward if you don’t want to read a full discussion. One last time, SPOILERS AHEAD.

For the love of Odin, will someone give Captain Kirk a man hug?

Because if no one gives him a hug, he’s likely to steal an object of worship from a non-industrialized society, drop his first officer into a volcano, violate the Prime Directive to save said first officer, file a false report, get demoted, get almost instantly promoted, fire his Chief of Engineering, almost start a war with the Klingons, side with a war criminal, put his damaged ship on a collision course with Earth, and then commit certain suicide by sacrificing himself to save said ship just so his best friend in the whole world will confess his bro love for him.

It’s a bit exhausting and STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS gets a bit exhausting in the final act; this is a film that is both highly enjoyable and oddly frustrating, a film that encourages you to not think by giving you a headache whenever you do. INTO DARKNESS comes from the Abrams/Lindelof/Orci/Kurtzman stable and it feels more like a Lindelof film in that narrative logic is sacrificed at the altar of emotional logic. Such a process can work beautifully, but it is storytelling as the mechanism of grand illusion and Damon Lindelof is its Grand Master.

I’m pretty sure you could write the entire screenplay of INTO DARKNESS in an afternoon. This is a film with big CGI pieces, a bit of yelling, and very little story. One of the things I loved about Abrams first STAR TREK film (links to all my STAR TREK reviews can be found at the Star Trek Index page) was how it felt like everyone had a purpose for being there, that every character was an actual person in their own right. I found this to be an immense improvement over the old days, which I have chided for being The Adventures of Kirk, Spock, and the People Who Push Buttons. Unfortunately, we’re right back to the old days. INTO DARKNESS is a movie about the bromance between Kirk and Spock and the People Who Say 4 Things Apiece. Bones, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu are here either to further the Kirk/Spock bro issues or handle the plot things that Kirk and Spock can’t do in that moment, like handling an engineering crisis or talking to the bad guys on the viewscreen phone or flirting with a new female officer. Only Scotty feels like an actual other character, which has nothing to do with the importance of Scotty and everything to do with the importance of being Simon Pegg.

Lindelof seems to care little for the narrative logic of his stories, and so INTO DARKNESS has little narrative logic. When it’s revealed that the bad guy isn’t actually a guy named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) but a guy named Khan, Spock’s “logical” decision isn’t to check the Enterprise’s data banks, but to call Original Spock (Leonard Nimoy) just to ask him if he’s ever heard of a guy named Khan.

Just so we’re all clear: the Enterprise doesn’t have the internet but it does have a direct line to Spock’s secret hideout.

Just so we’re all clear #2: to get information, Spock’s decision is to call a dude from ANOTHER TIMELINE.

Lindelof’s scripts (and whatever the actual breakdown of writing credit, this feels most like a Lindelof script) tend to favor the emotional logic (and yes, those terms are often at cross purposes). All of this madness and chaos and destruction is a result of Kirk wanting Spock to admit he is, and will always be, his bro. And let me be clear – I know it sounds like I’m dogging Lindelof, but I usually enjoy the movies created around his stories quite a bit. I like INTO DARKNESS, but it’s not a smart movie and it’s not a strong screenplay. Compare INTO DARKNESS against Joss Whedon’s Avengers, and Lindelof comes off like a guy in danger of failing Whedon’s film class. Whedon gave every Avenger an arc in the movie – not huge arcs, necessarily, but everyone had a beginning, middle, and end that was separate from the film’s beginning, middle, and end. Lindelof either isn’t smart enough to do that or doesn’t care to do that or is working for people who don’t want him to do that. Whatever the case, those individual arcs don’t make it into the script. How is Uhura or Scotty or Sulu or Chekov or Bones different at the end of the film than they were at the beginning? They have experiences and they perform admirably, but they are all secondary to Kirk and Spock’s evolving friendship.

James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) love each other deeply, but while Kirk is willing to commit to Spock, Spock keeps getting cold feet. He loves Kirk back, but he loves him so much that he can’t allow himself to love him or else he might hurt his wittle feewings. (This is the way I feel about Hostess Fruit Pies.) What we have in STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS is two immature dudes involved in a serious enough bromance that they prove they’re bro love to each other by adopting the other’s main attribute: the emotional bro (Kirk) is willing to think logically and the logical bro (Spock) is compelled to act emotionally: Kirk’s act of bro love is to not fire any of the Enterprise‘s 72 missiles in order to kill one dude, while Spock’s act of devotion is to try and kill that same dude all by himself. For Kirk and Spock to come to a mutually contented location of bro love, all we have to experience is lots and lots of mass destruction.

To the disappointment of slashers and shippers everywhere, Kirk and Spock’s relationship contains none of the homoerotic playfulness of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law’s Sherlock and Watson. It’s just an actual, if emotionally disconnected friendship. In the service of telling this story, however, the women in their lives are pushed to the background. While Kirk is shown in bed with a pair of “cat women,” he shows nothing more than a passing interest in Dr. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve). I don’t know which is the bigger surprise – that Kirk barely looks at her when she strips down to her undies or that he completely misses the fact she bluffs her way onto the ship for the uber-important mission to kill John Harrison, who’s hiding out on a Klingon planet.

That’s right – on a hugely important mission, Carol Marcus sneaks aboard the Enterprise by calling herself Carol Wallace and hitching a ride in Kirk and Spock’s shuttle. Later, Spock realizes this but doesn’t say anything because in a Lindelof script, even the most logical of characters is a f*cking moron forced to adhere to the needs to the script.

Carol is a new character and the script gives her some things to do, and there’s no reason why it has to put her and Kirk into a flirtatious relationship, but she doesn’t do much of anything else, either. Her whole reason for being here is the “big” reveal that she’s the daughter of Starfleet Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller). She gets a nice scene with Bones (Karl Urban) but that’s what INTO DARKNESS does instead of giving people an actual arc – they get a scene so people leave the theater going, “Oh yes, Carol had a scene with Bones and the missle and Sulu got to sit in the captain’s chair and Chekov said funny words in engineering and Bones did a, ‘I’m a Doctor’ line and Uhura got emotional over Spock 17 times.” But little of it means anything.

It’s a grand illusion – there’s little story, little movement, little nuance. INTO DARKNESS is bright and loud and fun and the cast gives great performances in nothing roles. Everyone, in fact, is good at their job: the cast, the crew, the effects people, the director, and even the writers, but the sum of their talents is far inferior to their last effort with the TREK franchise. If the goal is to give you two hours of fun at the movie theater, they succeeded, but almost all of it (and definitely everything non-Kirk and Spock related) is just done to hit you in the eyeballs and then move on to the next thing: Kirk disobeys the Prime Directive! Kirk is demoted! Robocop! Pike is killed! Kirk is promoted! Mickey! Sherlock! Kirk is going to kill Harrison! Tribble! Harrison is Khan! Nimoy! Super Big Enterprise painted black! Spock yells, “Khan!” instead of Kirk! Kirk dies instead of Spock!

In fact, when Khan is Harrison, he’s psychologically interesting. When Khan is Khan, he just punches and kicks people. Blah.

If I think about this movie as a story, it’s a wreck, but if I just want escapism, it’s a pretty good time. But just pretty good. It’s not a great time because so many of the character moments that I loved about the first movie are completely missing here. The best parts of INTO DARKNESS are the small moments when Kirk and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) commiserating over Spock. I would understand (but not agree) with the decision to make this the Kirk and Spock Bromance Show if Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto had become major stars over the past few years but they haven’t. They’re no more famous than Pegg or Saldana, and for my money Karl Urban is the best acting/star combo on the Enterprise, but his great performance is wasted because it’s so small and so insignificant. I like Chris Pine and he does a great job playing the bullheaded Jim Kirk, but put Urban in that role and there’s way more nuance and complexity to the character.

Nuance and complexity … two things that aren’t welcome in INTO DARKNESS.

Contrary to what it may sound like, I had a good time. I even went and bought a $4 commemorative cup after the movie, even though I had already bought a $4 commemorative cup for the superior Iron Man 3. I watched it at a drive-in, I had good popcorn, and I was entertained, although the drive-in experience, the popcorn, and the film all deteriorated as they went. About 30 minutes into the film I was already trying to figure out when I could see it again, but by the time the Super Big Enterprise appeared and Spock calls Spock on the phone … I was ready for the movie to be over.

That’s the thing about illusions – they’re showy and they’re fun, but their entertainment value is brief and fleeting and I end up appreciating the skill in pulling it off more than the illusion itself.

______

When he’s not using a tribble a dead tribble as a lab rat, Mark Bousquet is doing some writing himself. He is the author of multiple novels and collections, including the recently released The Haunting of Kraken Moor, Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

DREDD: This is Not a Negotiation

Dredd (2012) – Directed by Pete Travis – Starring Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Wood Harris, Lena Headey, and Rakie Ayola.

Are you new to the Anxiety? Because if you are, you need to be aware that SPOILERS lie ahead. And that you can follow along on Twitter.

As summer turns to fall, my cinematic tastes change. I’m not talking about the changes that I want to see spinning in my Blu-ray player, but rather what I want to see at the theater. In the summer, I prefer my action movies sprinkled with a huge dose of fun; a serious action movie like The Dark Knight Rises can still do the trick, but I’m more inclined to want to see something like The Avengers when it’s hot outside.

When the summer’s over and the autumn starts asserting its influence with the return of the school year and a dip in temperature, I start wanting action movies that are a bit more pure, a bit more hard, a bit more violent.

Enter DREDD.

Pete Travis’ R-rated adaptation of the Judge Dredd comic is a hard, serious, pure action movie, and I love every second of it. DREDD teases, at times, that it’s going to go down the predictable road and turn soft, but it never relents in its uncompromising vision of Judge Dredd (Karl Urban), a lawman in the dystopian Mega-City One, who does his job and sees his mission through to the end.

Dredd is assigned to evaluate rookie Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thrilby) out on a routine day in the city. DREDD does a fantastic job of making Mega-City One feel real. Sometimes in these post-apocalyptic tales, films can rely a bit too much on just dressing up folks like extras from Mad Max, Escape from New York, and Doomsday, but DREDD largely eschews this aesthetic, and favors a more realistic approach to dressing up the baddies inside Mega-City. The result is a world that feels much more possible; instead of giving us a world that looks dramatically altered from our own, Mega-City looks disturbingly possible.

There are a few costumed crazies running around, but DREDD favors the largely contemporary clothed Ma-Ma gang, led by Madelaine Madrigal (Lena Headey), a former prostitute who has viciously climbed the criminal ladder. She sits at the top of Peach Trees Tower, a 200-story low-income housing block, and when the camera catches sights inside the building of the infirmary and theater, I can see how this building – low income housing that it is – was once something better, something the people of the tower could have felt at home in. DREDD succeeds in these areas because it doesn’t oversell anything.

Ma-Ma has taken control of the Peach Trees and there are seemingly hundreds of normal folk working for her throughout the building. Ma-Ma has a new drug to distribute called Slo-Mo and a turf dispute inside the building brings Dredd and Anderson into her building. One of her lieutenants has caught three guys selling drugs on his floor; Kay (Wood Harris) has caught them before and they didn’t learn their lesson, so now it’s time to do something a bit more permanent. Ma-Ma has them skinned and tossed down the center of the building (Peach Trees is a square building with an empty center) where they land with a sickening thud that catches the attention of the Judges.

It helps the film that it doesn’t try to artificially amp up the tension. There’s no scene where Dredd’s captain says, “The Ma-Ma gang is at it again, Dredd! This is the break we’ve been waiting for! Go get the b*tch!” Instead, Dredd and his evaluee Anderson are exiting the Hall of Justice and Dredd is professionally growling the rules of her evaluation to her, letting her know that the Judges can only respond to a tiny percentage of all reported crimes in Mega-City One (part of an urban sprawl that stretches from Boston to Washington and exists inside a walled-off area) and he tests her on which of a set of crimes they should respond. It’s her choice to head to Peach Trees.

When they arrive at the massive structure, there’s no, “Wait, rookie, this is Ma-Ma’s ground” or any of that. There’s literally so much crime in Mega-City One that a drug lord can take over an entire 200-story building and there are Judges who are not acutely aware of the massive problems in this tower.

I am not going to make the case that DREDD is a super-intelligent movie, but I am going to argue that there’s clearly been a lot of thought that’s gone into all aspects of the film’s production. This is a very well made movie. Critics are often far too willing to dismiss a movie like this as a “dumb action flick” because they’re so blinded by the action that the movie fronts that they miss (or don’t care about) the background details, but time and again, the small decisions that are made by the production crew result in a better film, and the idea that everything that happens here unfolds organically instead of being accompanied by all sorts of artificial fanfare gives the film a sharper edge. Perhaps it sounds a bit counter-intuitive that to make a story feel bigger you need to undersell it, but that’s often the case.

In other words, to make us feel that a story is important, show us that it is instead of simply telling us that’s the case.

DREDD does that through a wide variety of narrative and aesthetic “little” decisions, so when a big decision is made – such as Ma-Ma dropping the Towers’ blast doors after Dredd and Anderson capture Kay, effectively sealing the entire building inside an impenetrable cocoon – it rings louder. She gets on the building’s PA system and announces that there’s two Judges in the building and she wants them dead. All of the regular residents scatter back into their homes, and the Judges realize this is definitely not a good situation.

Even here, though, the Judges do not panic.

Karl Urban is fantastic as Judge Dredd, this growling, by-the-book, uncompromising lawman who never takes off his helmet. He’s not robotic, but he is in control of himself. After Ma-Ma’s announcement, he doesn’t panic, but does acknowledge the difficulty of their situation, telling Anderson they need to get out of the open. The moment the film won me over was after Ma-Ma and her goons use these massive gatling guns to completely eviscerate an entire section of one floor of housing. People are slaughtered left and right, indiscriminately killed in Ma-Ma’s attempt to kill Dredd and Anderson. The two cops escape outside the building (jumping onto a skate ramp that’s outside, near the building’s middle) and can finally call their situation in, but then Dredd determines they need to go back inside. By now, the guns have stopped firing and Ma-Ma’s thugs are searching the ruins and casualties for the two Judges. The camera sticks with Ma-Ma as we hear some new gunfire, and then across the way, we see the menacing figure of Dredd emerge from the smoke and unceremoniously toss Ma-Ma’s first lieutenant over the ledge, and then simply walks back into the smoke, leaving Ma-Ma standing silently on the other side.

There’s no quip from Dredd, no verbal threat … just the sense that Dredd is doing his job and that he doesn’t need his mouth to make his point. When he does use his voice later, however, after he gets control of the Towers’ PA system, it’s to briefly remind everyone in Peach Trees that, “Ma-Ma isn’t the law. I am the law.” Simple, straightforward, and spoken from a position of strength only allowed someone when they know they are in the right.

Dredd keeps this same tone through the entire film, and the film doesn’t attempt to give him a sense of humor or have him develop a new sense of humanity, and I can’t say how thankful I am for those decisions.

DREDD teases us, though, with the possibility we might have to watch these stock character arcs play out. Our main Judge gets a cute rookie sidekick, after all, who isn’t just a rookie, isn’t just a woman, isn’t just cute, but also has psychic abilities, meaning she’ll be able to tell us how everyone feels. It’s an obvious set-up, right? The emotional rookie will touch the heart of the old grouch, and by the end of the film he’ll compromise the law and make the wrong legal decision in order to make the right emotional decision.

Well, it doesn’t happen. As I mentioned, Dredd isn’t a robot. We see him compromise the absolute letter of the law as he acknowledges that sometimes you have to prioritize one crime over another. By the strictest letter of the law, Anderson fails her evaluation the moment she loses her gun, but Dredd still lets her pass. The film doesn’t present this as a huge moment of softening, however. Before he can render his judgment on her performance, Anderson angrily asserts her own agency in the matter, telling Dredd that she knows she’s failed and that she knows she’s going to do something with her life other than being a Judge. When the day has been won, she walks off alone and isn’t even present when Dredd tells the Chief Judge (Rakie Ayola) that she has passed the evaluation.

Olivia Thirlby as Anderson and Karl Urban as Dredd

Olivia Thirlby delivers one of those quietly great performances that no awards committee will ever recognize, but one that helps to make DREDD a much better film. (Have I mentioned lately how much I hate awards?) When I saw her sitting in the Hall of Justice, looking all cutesy and a bit mousey, I was worried that we were going to get stuck with a character in this movie that didn’t belong in this movie, that she’d be the character we’d “identify” with and whose constant screaming and shaking was supposed to tell us how serious everything was. When she gets a little too close to psychically reading beneath Dredd’s surface, I was groaning that we were going to find out he saw his puppy dog get murdered or something to make him a more sympathetic character.

Blessedly, the filmmakers continually frustrate those expectations. Anderson has come up short in her exams, but because she has psychic abilities, the Chief Judge wants to give her another crack, and has arranged for Dredd to take her out on a field test. Anderson is certainly a bit nervous, but she’s also dead set on proving herself. When she has one bad buy injured and bleeding before her, she hesitates on killing him, but when Dredd reminds her what this man’s sentence is, she pulls the trigger and kills him. Later, they end up in the apartment of this man’s wife, but there’s no overblown emotional reaction. Instead, the woman does what Dredd and Anderson want in order to get them out of her apartment and off her floor in order that they don’t kill her husband. Anderson sees a picture of the woman’s husband, realizes who it is, and leaves the apartment; instead of this moment causing Anderson to break, it hardens her and the film never comes back to it.

Dredd, Ma-Ma, Kay, Anderson … all of these characters are adults who do their job.

The conception of the Anderson character also shows how smartly DREDD has been assembled. One of the complaints about the Sylvester Stallone-starring Judge Dredd is the inclusion of the Rob Schneider goofball character, but the decisions to include Schneider’s character and Anderson are the same – they’re here to provide a balance to Dredd’s grimness. Where that earlier film went a bit over-the-top on the silly side, this current film is much more subtle in creating Dredd’s antithesis. Anderson has a softness to her that’s accentuated by Thirlby’s soft features. Big things help reinforce the contrast between them, such as Anderson not wearing a helmet (she argues a helmet can negatively affect her psychic abilities), but all the little things help, too, like Anderson’s gender, height, and unkempt blonde hair. She’s still a Judge, though, and she’s good at it, too, such as when she fights Kay inside of his mind, using her mental abilities to work his brain over in an arguably worse way than Dredd roughed up Kay’s body, or when she gets captured by Kay and brought to Ma-Ma and never loses her head.

There is some humor in the film, but it’s squeezed out of Dredd acting in character, rather than having him work against his character. They’re not hilarious moments, but when he tosses Ma-Ma’s first lieutenant over the railing, I laughed. Or when the Chief Judge asks him what happened in Peach Trees and he stoically replies, “Drug bust.” It’s situationally funny, not a display of Dredd having a finely honed sense of humor.

I have not read much of the Judge Dredd comic in my time, so I can’t tell you that DREDD is true to the character, but I can tell you that I went to this movie wanting to see a serious, violent, action movie, and that’s what this film delivers. Uncompromising is the word I keep coming back to, as I never feel that the filmmakers have altered what their movie wants to be in order to meet some set of industry expectations for how a superhero/action movie should behave.

In that uncompromising vein, I love DREDD not just for what it is, but what it represents.

I can’t wait to see it again.

DOOM: He Went to One Galaxy, His Ass Went to Another

Doom (2005) – Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak – Starring Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Raz Adoti, Dwayne Johnson, Dexter Fletcher, and Doug Jones.

DOOM almost works.

Almost.

If you just want 2 hours of a nice-looking sci-fi shoot ‘em up, DOOM certainly delivers, but it’s one of those films that verges on actually being a good film, instead of just a “hits the spot” film. There are talented actors here (Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Dwayne Johnson, the concierge from Hotel Babylon), a stylish director, and the whole project was overseen by John Wells, a guy who was also a producer and showrunner on two critically and commercially successful TV shows: ER and The West Wing. There’s enough tweaks on the formula to give it a “fresh enough” feel with Urban and Pike playing estranged siblings instead of lovers, the movie turns one of its protagonists into an antagonist 2/3 of the way through the movie, there’s a bit of philosophical wrangling over whether soldiers should follow their orders when their orders are no longer the right thing to do, and it’s an R-rated film that doesn’t shy away from vulgarity, which helps enforce the idea that this is a movie for adults and not kids.

Which is sort of weird, I guess, since the film is based off a video game that was played by teenagers as well as adults, so while I appreciate the attempt to make a grown up shoot ‘em up, I also think it’s curious you would hamstring your potential box office.

There’s a lot here to like, and at times I really do like the film, but ultimately it never really reaches a level where it becomes a good movie.

In DOOM, something bad happens at a research facility owned by Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), so they send in a team of Marines, who you will instantly recognize as “the people who will do the killing.” They all have names and nicknames, but other than the Rock and Karl Urban, they’re rather exchangeable. The film tries to give them personalities – there’s a religious one, the pervert, the sex-first dude, the rookie, etc. – but the film only really half-commits to this idea of them being individual people. Take “the Kid.” He’s a rookie on this mission and even though it’s a “Level 5″ operation (meaning, super-duper serious), they take him along. So he’s nervous and asks the pervert for some “help,” and the pervert gives him two pills which make him high, which gets him yelled at by Reaper (Urban), which leads to …

Nothing really.

There’s all kinds of moments like that. Duke (Raz Adoti) spends much of the movie scamming on Reaper’s sister, Dr. Samantha Grimm (Rosamund Pike), who’s totally okay with the flirting, and this leads to …

Nothing really.

I suppose, if one wanted to, they could make the argument that what DOOM does is depict how life’s subplots can be immediately and violently interrupted by giant mutated monsters, but really, it just ends up feeling like the film is just giving us character bits to keep us moderately entertained so it can slowly drag out the monster mystery. If the film had no real intention on following through with these subplots in a meaningful way, that’s totally fine, but get to the killing quicker. Do filmmakers really think that getting a five-minute intro where we learn that one of them is a pervert and another is a rookie will make us care for the film in a greater way? If you want to build characters, great, build them and see it through, but if all you want to do is make a man vs. monster movie, then do that. Give us their personality en route, in between the shooting and screaming and dying.

Couple quick instances – there’s a secondary female scientist here who’s worried about her missing husband. Samantha tells her to leave to be with her daughter, so she does, but not without telling us, again, that she’s worried about her husband. “Steve will be fine,” Samantha reassures her a couple time. The husband, of course, is not okay, but it’s completely irrelevant because we don’t see the wife’s reaction to it, and there’s nothing important about the husband being missing beyond the reaction to his wife.

Which we don’t get. All we get is a moment where it’s like, “Steve’s dead.” That’s not enough.

The dialogue is pretty weak throughout DOOM, and even though they’ve made an R-rated movie, they think the audience is stupid. Take the brother and sister Grimm. The brother’s Marine nickname is “Reaper.” Get it? Grimm Reaper? Pretty obvious, but, the film is so worried that you’re not going to notice their cleverness that they have Samantha ask her brother, “Reaper? As in Grimm Reaper?”

The violence here isn’t bad, but it’s awfully dark in this facility and so there’s lot of only partially seeing the monsters but seeing lots of gun fire. It’s not really a fun movie, either, as they didn’t feel it was necessary for any of the Marines to be the “joker” character to liven things up.

Yet, right when the film is starting to feel bogged down and I was just wishing it would get itself over and done with, it gets a bit interesting again when the Sarge (Johnson) starts losing it and taking his orders super seriously, deciding everyone (no matter if they’re infected or not) needs to die. There’s a good bit with Reaper where the film is shot through one action sequence from his POV. It’s nice the film overdoes it, and it’s not completely horrible, but while I love POV in video games, I hate it as a cinematic technique. I just don’t think it adds much. It’s nice for a change-up, and DOOM uses it for that (to give a nod to the first-person video game) and then moves on.

Most people die, a couple people live, and the credits roll. By the end of the movie, the good moments (like when Reaper notices that the Martian skeleton on display in Samantha’s lab is frozen in a defensive posture) are outweighed by the bad moments (like when Reaper notices that the Martian skeleton on display in Samantha’s lab is frozen in a defensive posture and Samantha doesn’t say, “No sh*t, dummy, we are scientists up here.”), and DOOM ends up being the kind of film that I’ve now watched and don’t really need to see again, though I wouldn’t leave if we were hanging out and you tossed it into the Blu-Ray player.