Fair warning: I gave up on this review about halfway through. What can I say? I suffered through the movie, couldn’t manage to get through writing a cohesive review.
Follows a group of UAC Marines as they respond to a distress call from a top secret scientific base on Phobos, a Martian moon, only to discover it’s been overrun by demons who threaten to create Hell on Earth.
I freely admit that I enjoy nothing more than sitting down and watching a truly horrible sci-fi movie at the end of a long workday, but even I have standards when it comes to what constitutes “bad sci-fi.”
Doom: Annihilation absolutely does not fit the bill.
From the very first moment that we see our main character, one disgraced Lieutenant Joan Dark (and yes, that’s a play on Joan of Arc), she is entirely unbelievable. This is not a reflection on actor, Amy Manson, as the acting in this film was surprisingly good without being over-the-top cheesy.
However, while I don’t mind the decision to have a female lead in a science fiction / action movie, if you want the audience to believe her, then you need to make her believable. And Joan Dark wasn’t convincing as a marine, friend, or even really as a person. There was no depth, nothing for the audience to relate to.
The death of her (very religious) mother made her lose her faith in God, but it’s mentioned so briefly that you forget the moment even happened (or that she had a mom in the first place). What should have been a poignant moment where Joan remembers her faith turns out to be a blink and you’ll miss it demons-are-afraid-of-crosses plot point.
For a movie about space marines, there was no point where I was able to believe that this woman was a soldier.
The CG work wasn’t the best, but for what I assume is a smaller budget film they weren’t terrible. The space scenes and the hellscape, in particular, were extremely well done and I thought that the tablet tech was also really cool. Again, there are moments where this movie does something right, they are just few and far between.
Throughout, Joan is mean just to be mean. This here girl don’t need no man and certainly doesn’t have feelings for a guy she was in a four-month relationship with. Though, he very clearly is still in love with her and I can guarantee that will be a plot point in the future.
Lol, the “doomed moon.” Roll credits!
I’m sorry, but I feel like Hollywood has pretty much exhausted the “an entire unit has been given a shit assignment over the actions of one person” trope. This will surely be yet another future plot point.
In order to fight the enemy, you gotta stop fighting yourself
Captain Savage
Meandering Michelle 