3 out of 5

Directed by: Tony Giglio

This is a completely solid B film.  Which is exactly what it needed to be.  There’s no reality in which we turn Doom the video game into a blow-yer-mind film without straying from what makes Doom Doom, and writer / director Tony Giglio seemed to grasp that, smartly using his limited budget for some good creature effects, a couple key gore moments, and a damned impressively badass concluding section.

Otherwise, Doom: Annihilation is pretty threadbare.  But again: as it should be.  There’s a research station on Phobos to which a military crew has been dispatched; when they arrive, the station is powered down and seemingly staffless.  Until, of course, they dig deeper and start getting overrun by, at first, some zomboid-like humans, then later, some things more devious…  We’re given just enough background of a scientist’s (Dominic Mafham) pursuit for an alternate world, and just enough personality of our main marines (particularly Amy Manson’s Lt. Joan Dark) to give us some throughlines, and then things will play out pretty much as expected.

The sets admittedly look cheap – it’s always strange when movies end up looking lower budgeted than some TV shows – but Giglio handles it well, keeping us rotating from cheap set to cheap set so that we’re not focused on it too long, and instead saving his production dollars for stuntwork and some really sharp looking baddies.  And though I’m classifying all of this as sort of “bad but good,” that’s really not the case – there are some good chuckles via a marine who likes to run away in the thick of things, and there are no idiots or incompetents on the crew.  Sure, there’re definitely some red shirts, and some minor bickering amongst the team, due to some poor decisions in the Lieutenant’s past, but none of their actions or dialogue made me roll my eyes – it all seemed within character and context.

Even up through the final sequence, Giglio manages to bump his material up some noteworthy notches by not ending where 99.999% of flicks would fade to black: he keeps it going, and gives us some sweet action to close it out on.

Of course, you can rip this thing to shreds for not being 100% demons and gore, but I think this was the right way to go: nods to the franchise, awareness of the necessity to have demons and gore, but enough footwork to make it function as a flick anyone can watch and enjoyably waste some time.