Doom: The Movie The Show The Experience (2005)

Man, how about that doom annihilation trailer huh? Definitely came out of left field, and most likely will leave out of left field very shortly on release. I suppose that this is the nature of direct to video, a lazy investment by universal to see if schlorped out video game adaptations can turn a profit and besides-

Um, excuse me. Now, as I was saying

I would really appreciate it if you stopped interrupting, also honestly the original DOOM film was

ok what the FUCK is wrong with you, have you watched that film lately it's

stop please

FUCK OFF

WHAT DO YOU WANT

I don't want this review to be taken as a defense of Doom Annihilation. That trailer did not look good, but it's also a sub minute long trailer. This being 2019, so there's no real shock or disgust in my voice as I state that I have seen 20 minute long videos on youtube discussing this minute long trailer. This is the way things are right now, where any kind of social justice in my video games results in a feeding frenzy over a couple of days as people like THE RAGEAHOLIC and THE MONOCLED PLUM bang on the drum that those fucking feminists are at the gates yet again!!!!

Again, I'm pretty sure the movie will be fucking terrible. My only log to add to the fire in this regard is that I find it hilarious that the primary actress for the film got her start as the final girl in BLOOD MONKEY, which was one of my earliest reviews. The wheel ever turns, I guess. It's possible even with such eyebrow raising moments as DIE DIE DIE we'll get some kind of low budget surprise like Dredd and wait actually if that happens it won't matter because everyone upset at Doom Annihilation except me has stopped actually thinking about movies. I say this because these youtube comments trying to rehabilitate Doom 2005 are everywhere, and no one that actually watches movies with any degree of active thought can remotely consider that film to be anything but straight garbage.  

Doom 2005 is not an actively incompetent film. This is not a Legend of Chun-Li or Mortal Kombat Annihilation, where every frame drips a quiet aura of desperation by everyone involved, a frenzied prayer that they wake up and they're not having to block out a scene where a guy with plastic arms is trying to punch out a cgi moosemanasaurus. But these wailings are still some kind of emotion, which is more than I can say for the overall vibe of Doom 2005, which I could most charitably describe as "inert," and less charitably describe as "a fucking unbelievably boring drag." If Doom 2005 could be described in DOOM terms, it would be walking into a friend's room after he's cleared out a level and spending an hour watching him wander around looking for the last secret despite the fact he's maxed out on everything. Eventually he opens a wall behind the start point to find two imps and a single 4 shotgun ammo, and you realize your lifespan is forfeit.

For those who have blessedly forgotten about this film, the plot is "bad stuff happening on mars, marines gotta stop it." There's a lot of convoluted ancillary plot lines to this film, but they don't matter because none of them are remotely relevant. For instance, the film's opening crawl explains that people get to mars via an ancient martian device called THE ARK which teleports people to earth via the capri sun pouch liquid metal cgi. There's some throwaway lines about HMM MAYBE THE MARS PEOPLE ARE OUR ANCESTORS and OH NO THIS TECHNOLOGY CUT OFF A GUYS LEGS ONCE, but ultimately it's just a way for the characters to awkwardly shuffle around from one set to another. Or a subplot about how the main marine, played by Karl Urban, lost his parents to mars research, and while you might think this could have some sort of thrilling revelation along the lines of "karl ur mum's actually a martian" all that comes out of it is a hilarious scene where he stares out of a window as an audio flashback to his parents falling off a cliff plays.

Speaking of the marines, this movie answers the question "what if you made Predator or Aliens, but replaced almost all the humans with six foot tall bowls of salad?" Pretty much everyone in this film is a forgettable dialogue tube, and yes, that includes The Rock. One of the more confusing decisions in this film (and that says a lot) is to write a recently retired wrestler known for his dynamic, charismatic style in and out of the ring as a staid, muted Marine Sarge who's obsessed with DA RULES. I mean, if you wanted a batch of mumbling muscle to snarl out his lines and not do much else, you could have gotten Steve Austin (ba dum tish). Even the scene where he gets the series's iconic weapon, the BFG, he just mumbles out "big fucking gun" (ha ha just like the instruction manual) and then stares at like he's trying to figure out a hard math problem. Truly LETTING LOOSE. 

Likewise, Karl Urban is just sort of there, and while it's tempting to sort of excuse this one as Urban has always sort of existed as a grimy, stoic presence, there's no central premise to what's he's supposed to be.  Presumably he's supposed to be conflicted and filled with anguish about returning to the place his parents died, but again this plot point just results in a pointless flashback they couldn't even bother to film, and otherwise his main emotion in the film is "grouchy."  It's a little confounding to me that people can't stop screaming about "a girl can't be doomguy!!!!" while this movie's ostensible doom marine spends 90% of the movie sulking about like he's five years old and having a shitty birthday party but that's okay because he's a dude? 

Hm! Hm!

Pretty much no one else does much better thanks the writing. This isn't even at slasher film level where every character has some sort of archetypal character trait, we're talking "this guy is young," "this guy has a chaingun," "this guy wants to fuck karl urban's sister and his black so he has a big weiner," or my personal favorite "this guy is japanese and has two lines before being decapitated." Rosamund Pike plays that sister, who walks around in padme's white nipple outfit from Attack of the Clones, acting sort of arch while mumbling out this film's terrible explanation for why there are monsters. For better or worse, since this is 2005, she doesn't actually do anything, though I'd say this is probably for the better since otherwise we'd get some awful "yeah I'm a girl but I can shoot a demon" female empowerment via hollywood committee nonsense.

speaking of penlights this movie is dark as shit

The one actual exception to this rule is Richard Blake's Portman.  You might remember him as the libertine drug dealer in Mandy, or as the only remotely good part of Rob Zombie's 31. For reasons I don't fully understand, unlike everyone else Blake gets to play to his role, that being a cheerful embodiment of perverted id. His first line is about him planning to spend his vacation locked in a hotel room with "three ladyboys" (man I love 2005), and just spends the entire movie leering, whining, and undermining authority. And yes, this is a pretty standard character, but Blake plays it well, and when you're trapped in a movie where everyone else is a moving corpse, you tend to cling to the one beacon of light, even if it's a five-year-old penlight.

I actually rewatched Doom 2005 for this review, and I had to stop it roughly 4 times because I felt like I was smothering my brain with a pillow if I watched this shit for over 30 minutes.  When I watched the film in theaters on release, I remember being most upset over them fucking with the basic plot of Doom 2005, and this is the general sentiment I see from most people when they complain about the film. The premise of every Doom game has been "demons from hell have invaded a place, kill the demons." Seems like a fairly simple thing to adapt to the screen, yes? So instead let's have a convoluted explanation about how the mars people had an extra chromosome that can make you superhuman, but can also turn you into a MONSTER. Ignoring how this is already a medical thing, the movie spends so much time trying to lay the ground rules for this dumb bullshit when ultimately it comes down to, "it's zombies, except they eventually digivolve into Doom 3 imps."

Still, while this is all very dumb, I found while rewatching it that I didn't really care that much about them throwing out the basic premise of Doom. If we've learned anything from how studios treat stupid nerd properties, it's that no producer can resist fucking with established formulas to put in their own surreal, abortive ideas. When you consider that, it's honestly kind of a miracle this film even has the actual Doom monsters. No, the real sinister aspect of this modification on the Doom mythos is that it gives rise to an idea I've seen posted over and over in defense of this stupid pile of shit:

"it's not a great doooooom movie, but it's a great action movie!"

And sure, I get the idea here. It doesn't matter if the characters are basically unleavened corpse loaves, or if the basic plot shouldn't have even gotten past the cocktail napkin stage, as long as you have some epic moments, right? I get that, and that's the real issue with this movie: it's boring as fuck.

MARINES GET IN HERE

Do you want the Doom 2005 experience? Download a windows 95 emulator and play the 3D Maze screensaver for an hour and 20 minutes while muttering "room clear" under your breath. Someone watched the ten minute sequence in Aliens where the Colonial Marines are initially sweeping the colony and thought, "this is good, but what if it was five times as long and was just over the shoulder shots in poorly lit hallways?"  So much of this movie is just people going in rooms and shouting "clear," interspersed with scenes of Rosamund Pike playing with her Creepy Crawlers oven and bug moulds.

When the action finally begins about halfway into the film, it actually gets worse. Aside from an admittedly entertaining scene where a marine brawls a demon in an electrified pit by using a computer monitor as a modified ball and chain, there is no combat in this film that feels remotely creative. Oh no there's zombies pew pew pew got them.  Oh no I got snucked up on and knocked to the floor and the demon is jumping around help. Oh no there's a lot of zombies let's stand still and fire the guns non stop whew.  Especially egregious are the like three scenes where someone sees a baddy but it runs behind a corner, then runs around like three more corners while the marines are just a little too late each time. Congrats, Doom 2005. You're a reinactment of me chasing my cat around after it knocks over my gamepad, except on a 50 million dollar budget.

Action films should be an exercise in allowing the viewer to vicariously experience impossible, exhilarating situations that put your adrenaline to a glorious high.  People compulsively rewatch their favorite action sequences in order to recapture that feeling of kinetics.  I cannot reasonably imagine a person who puts in a blu-ray of Doom 2005 and eagerly skips to the climatic kungfu duel where The Rock and Karl Urban's stunt doubles struggle to finish before the audience remembers that Mortal Kombat was released a decade earlier. I mean, I could imagine it, I just don't want to.

Oh, but I hear you. "What about the first person sequence, mr hater man? there, the audience member is thrust into the role?  surely you've never experienced anything like-"

I have never fully understood this particular last-ditch defense of the movie. Is this really what people say makes the film worth watching, the true reward after 80 minutes of blase alien chases? If you believe this, I beseech you, rewatch one of the roughly 500 youtube clips of the scene.  Try to ignore the inclination to mindlessly rave about it and ask, "what exactly does this clip have that any given light gun arcade game's attract mode not have?" 

The answer is that it did probably did not take thousands of manhours to create the attract mode for House of the Dead 2, and while it is true that the effort of creation can sometimes justify something stupid, I don't really think it applies here.  There is nothing remotely striking or overwhelming about this sequence; a gun floats in midair and shoots zombie extras and cgi monstermen as they slowly run towards him. Eventually he fights the miniboss (a monsterman with a chainsaw) and the final boss (one of those trash bullet sponge pinkies from Doom 3). These fights have an ostensible "melee" component to them, with melee meaning "have the camera shake uncontrollably any time two objects touch because this shit is already awkward enough." Even when I saw this in theaters the first time, when I genuinely wanted to mise-en-scene myself in as the Doom Slayer, I felt a certain degree of emptiness when it all ended. Now, knowing what I am actually looking at, the feeling is incomparably worse.

Coincidentally, Doom 2005's first-person sequence is almost equal in length to another famous rampage segment:

Ok, ok. I know it's a little unfair to compare The Terminator to Doom.  But the police station massacre in The Terminator is fascinating for another reason: despite not dogmatically adhering to the surface concepts and patterns of how to film and recreate a first-person sequence, or hell, existing even before first person shooters were a concept, it captures the particular reason I enjoy this stupid genre a helluva lot more than anything Doom could even hope to grasp in its clumsy imitation. Arnold's T-800 is a true unstoppable presence, a methodical walking armory that, despite the coordinated effort of his enemies, brings in a rain of chaos. There's even an element of intriguing dichotomy in the viewers reaction as, while we full well know that Arnold is very much the bad man here, his presence nontheless exudes the brutal coolness that all fps nerds aspire to (there's probably an article somewhere on how T2 was weakened by making Arnold the hero while robert patrick looks like someone's obnoxious stepdad). And naturally, it helps that there's none of that awful low-rent cgi to clutter up the rampage.

Ultimately, I understand that most of the people that posted these stupid comments as seen in the beginning  barely remembered Doom 2005, and were most likely just shitposting to exemplify how bad they expect Doom Annihilation to be. That's fine, or at least better than tweeting death threats to Annihilation's director. After all, I just wrote (soundless screaming) 2500 words about a film I hadn't thought about for a decade until I read these comments. So who's really laughing here?

Not the Doom Slayer. He's a tough guy, after all.

Touhou: Luna Nights (2019)

I don't think this is a huge surprise if you've taken a look at my archives (and you have read through them, right, otherwise how are you going to find all of the incredibly problematic stuff I've written through the years), but if there's a game series I've been enthusiastic about, it's the modern portable Castlevania series.  I've played the absolute worst of them (it's harmony of dissonance, how can you even ask that) multiple times, and just hearing "Dawn/Aria" fills me with a certain, not entirely unsexual pleasure.

For me, the concept of the metroidvania has always been built around the design philosophy of exploring a place and utterly dominating shitheads with your array of powers, maybe occasionally taking a break to enter and re-enter a room over and over to force a monster to drop some tasty upgrade.  Game Boy Castlevanias are, at their core, a COMFY series.  This is not to say that they're simple affairs, but even at their most difficult, you never feel as though you're being expressly punished for your bad choices.  It was expected that running into a boss for the first time was going to result into you getting batted around like a yarn ball, but careful play would still always tend to result in a win.  And even if you died, who cares, because it is CASTLEVANIA LAW that the save point be right next to the boss room.

You see where I'm going with this, right?

Look, I get we're in the midst of "The Metroidvania Renaissance."  People won't shut up about it, and it's certainly a truth that it feels like we're getting a critically acclaimed title in the "man walks in contained game world and picks up double jump two hours in" conceptual sphere.  I just...can't get into them?  I've played a large share of them, and most are technically very good games!*  But goddamnit, they just don't feel like muh old castlevanias.

This game to a head with Hollow Knight.  Want to hear the gamer confession equivalent of "I murdered my parents?"  I stopped playing Hollow Knight with only like four bosses to fight.  I know, feel free to take a moment to sit down.  Hollow Knight is technically a very, very good game.  The problems I have with it lie within myself, not the game, but I had to accept that I just was not having much fun playing it.  It's...not a comfy game.  This is the case with most modern metroidvanias: fights are no longer brawls where the player is given free reign to smash shit how they see fit, but complicated math problems where the slightest error results in you getting set on the back foot immediately.

I'm saying all this because THANK FUCKING GOD for Touhou Luna Nights for reaffirming my love for the genre.

Luna Nights was developed by Team Ladybug, a small Japanese dev team probably most known prior for "SYNCHRONICITY PROLOGUE," a free metroidvania set in the Shin Megami Tensei universe with what can best be described as the Ikaruga polarity gimmick.  It was a good game, though mostly as a proof of concept that the development team clearly understood the dynamics of the genre.

As noted in the full title, Luna Nights is set in the most weeb of weeb universes, Touhou.  As someone with basically zero experience in that universe aside from the basic concept of "cute youkai girls shoot each other," I can give you The Yersinia Guarantee that unless you just fundamentally hate wholesome anime women, not understanding the plotline will not detract from the gameplay experience.  Suffice it to say the plotline can be boiled down to "you are the touhou in castlevania, get out of the castlevania by fighting the other touhous."

No, what really matters is the gameplay, and Luna Nights here is a glorious parade of "make the player think he's a genius" asskicking.  The most immediate difference between Luna Nights and standard castlevanias is that your character attacks primarily by throwing knives.  While this makes a lot of combat safer than your average whip boi, the drawback is that any attack drains your standard magic meter, and magic regenerates slow as hell in this game.  So what's a gal to do?

Stop time, of course.

Here is the game's big, glorious gimmick.  At any time, your character can slow time for a few seconds, or just straight up instantly freeze all action while being able to move normally, although gated to a separate meter that rapidly depletes the more you scoot around.  While frozen, getting close to enemies results in them vomiting up magic refills, creating an obvious and satisfying gameplay loop of wildly attacking the bads, stopping time, eating your magic flakes, then wildly attacking some more.  The game introduces new wrinkles to this system at the pretty rapid clip via specifically colored platforms and enemies which react to time stop in various delightful ways.

As an advanced technique for TRUE metroidvania aces, Luna Nights references Touhou's shmup origins by allowing you to regain lost life by "grazing" enemies in normal time, which is to say getting real close to them.  Unfortunately, if there's a weakness to the core system, it's probably here, since the amount of life regained from grazing is way more generous than it should be, so that you never have to worry about being a low health once you've learned the actual hitbox of certain baddies.

But maybe that's the point?  The entire drive of Touhou Luna Nights is to steamroll everything in front of you.  There's none of the tense "will i or won't i survive" boy scout roguelike bullshit that every other modern metroidvania wallows in.  Who cares what the health meter is at?  Just relax and look at that sumptuous sprite work!

And man oh man is this game pretty.  I know we're all kind of sick of low-res pixel art, but just look at this, which also serves as a nice reminder that I absolutely cannot explain game mechanics (spoilers for the first few stages of the game if that's a problem):



That protagonist animation is just obvious pandering for Alucard's walk cycle, sure, but holy shit I don't care.  Unlike say, I don't know, BLOODSTAINED, there's a clear amount of work put into each and every sprite, even the ones that don't make a whole lot of sense within the game.**  The smoothness of movement ties in especially well with this game's predilection for platforming; it's far less grating to be knocked to the bottom of a room by the bog-standard bladed clock gear when you get an infinite kick from how your character looks and moves.

All of this comes together with what is arguably the most important part of any metroidvania:

no, not the VIBRANT WORLD.  seriously whoever advanced the concept that what truly defines the best metroidvanias are the "wonder-inducing settings" deserves a tap in the noggin.

It's the bosses.  And oh geez, aside from the first boss (who serves as the obvious "do you remember how to do the time stop" training post), every boss in this game is an absolute triumph.  The previously mentioned gameplay loop of attack/time stop/graze for more magic is perfectly accounted for in the bosses' rhythms, while their attack patterns do a good job of calling back to Touhou's shooter origins while avoiding the obnoxious bullet hell excesses of certain other platformers.*** Unfortunately, every boss cycles through their attacks in the same pattern; while this isn't a big deal when you're just trying to bonk a witch gal with underhand chainsaws throws without getting bonked yourself, it did lessen the enjoyment a smidge during a subsequent playthrough.  Even accounting for that, the boss fights are the crown jewel of this game, and thinking back to them still gives me that aforementioned metroidvania pleasure like when I think back to the fights against Gergoth in Dawn of Sorrow or the first part of the final boss in Portrait of Ruin.

OK, so now it's the point of the review where I tell you the one thing that kind of SUCKS about the game, which for once in my reviewy times I didn't really want to deal with, because ultimately I think Touhou Luna Nights deserves as much support as possible****: this game is short.  There's a total of five stages in the game, and assuming you're some kind of degenerate and not rooting around for all the hidden walls, a total of thirty minutes playtime for each stage is a reasonable assumption.  I bought the game while it was still in early access and at a reduced price so I have zero regrets, but it's harder to argue that 18 dollars for roughly five hours of gameplay to reach 100% completion is entirely sane if you're operating on any sort of budget.

Don't take this to mean that I buy into any time/value money game judgement bullshit, as anyone that argues that shit like Hollow Knight is better solely because it's constantly 10 dollars for OVER THIRTY HOURS OF WALKING DOWN DARK HALLWAYS instantly registers in my book as an idiot.  Still, I can also recognize that times is tough in the nightmare world we're currently living in.  On the other hand, for that short time, this game is just a constant cavalcade of new joys.

So fuck it, who needs to save for healthcare coverage? Change into this maid outfit and let's go to town.

*:if you're curious what I consider not to be good, the answer is primarily Axiom Verge, which I may review one day but suffice to say it's The Babadook of metroidvanias: a clunky, unsatisfying experience loved by idiots who want to make it seem like they totally get the genre they're bellyflopping into
**: seriously, is frankenstein canon in the touhou universe?  Also yes I saw the bloodstained "art upgrade," but no amount of pristine new paint jobs can hide the fact that 2.5d is a art style that should have ended with the nintendo 64.  I'll withhold my actual opinions about the game until I play it, but the obvious guess is "it's going to be order of ecclesia 2, which is to say it'll grindy in the most boring ways possible, have obnoxious boss battles, and be inexplicably in love with its lore"
***: no i don't want to talk about rabi ribi
****: really though a special "fuck off" shoutout to every gaming journalism website that isn't RPS or siliconera who had plenty of time to write articles about people being mean to them in Apex Legends or yet another fucking Overwatch League article but couldn't be bothered to even put out a blurb for a genuinely good modern metroidvania