The Doomed Weekend
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Last Saturday I made a rare outing to the local grind house to take in one of those moving pictures that seem to be all the rage. Oh, the excitement that befell your faithful muckraker when I laid eyes on the sparkling awning housing titles of the week’s flavors! In the rear pavilion at the consumer’s buffet known as Grapevine Mills, I found myself rubbernecking the double-helixed blueprint of my technologically-infused formative years. That instant, I knew my weekend was for naught.
Or, Doomed, as it may be.
Yes, I was one of the many who twittered away hours upon hours decimating droves of digital demons, planting them back to their equally decimated digital domiciles. And for the record, that alliteration did require a small bit of effort. Ho-ho. As a youth, I spent almost as much time on my school work as I did with Doom II. And Dark Forces. And Duke Nukem. And Quake, and Half-Life, and Unreal Tournament, ad nausea. Hopefully by now you can see the common link: I like violence. Imaginary violence, that is.
My weekends were long, orgiastic bloodbaths spent interlocked with my schoolyard chums in what can only be described as a geeked frenzy. Our drug of choice was Mountain Dew; caffeine keeps the trigger-happy sharp. We kept late hours, and slaughtered untold numbers of competitors. Those were the days.
For what seemed like years, I was transfixed, front and center, watching with shock and awe as the first-person genre grew up. It more or less started with Castle Wolfenstein, a quaint, by comparison, little romp through a Nazi castle. The company responsible, Texas-based id Software, followed up with a trumpeting, resounding success: Doom.
I am sure you know of it. Doom was responsible for more change in the PC gaming industry than the advent of Windows. The game inspired a series that redefined what PC gaming really was, and where it was headed in the future. Easily the most influential angle the id crew took was the first-person perspective that inspired – and still inspires - consternation and dread in the aging, conservative class. Played from the eyes of the hero, a nameless “space marine” in this case, Doom was thrilling because it was sort of like being there, behind some massive gun dreamed up by a puny nerd … hunkered down inside some murky, pixilated world full of right-angles and repetitive mono tunes.
Okay, nostalgia is not so great in retrospect. Ha.
In the context of a video game, Doom makes perfect sense: run, shoot, flip switch and repeat. Easy, right? Thanks to the interactive medium, the production studio did not have to riddle it with bits of filler, or even a semblance of a narrative. It was raw; it was visceral; it was Doom, and after all, and who are we to question that?
But I’ll be damned if the Doom I watched for an hour and a half on Saturday afternoon was anything like the game I spent so much time with. Sure, you’ve got your murky space station, your rugged marine archetype, the cliché wimpy scientist, and a whole bunch of lip-smacking, tooth grinding ugly-types with malicious intent. Mix in a hollowed-out shell of a plot, a few broken husks of character development, and id’s trademark contrivance, the B.F.G. (the movie calls it the “Bio-Force Gun,” but devotees know what the acronym really means), and some Hollywood exec will wave his wand of necromancy. Vola! There you have it. The worst piece of tinsel town turd this term. Zang.
I’ll not waste your time with the details of the film. Film? Hm. Not quite. More like caterwaul; the ultimate in malodorous, feted, unworthy nidorousness that is Doom’s cinematic throes. That’s more like it. It is a centerpiece film. The entire length of it hinges on a short segment in which the main character, newly infused with ridiculous super powers, goes on a zombie-blasting rampage through the acrid halls of perdition. The catch? It is shot in first-person perspective. Oooooooooooohhhh.
I feel, somehow, bereft. I had better get back to my gaming PC. I feel a round of Quake 4 coming on.
