Andrzej Bartkowiak’s 2005 DOOM movie is a cult-classic video game adaptation that is as equally beloved as it is hated. Starring Karl Urban as protagonist John Grimm and The Rock as Sarge, the movie is a dumb sci-fi action film that bares passing resemblance to the video game series its based on.
Time has been kind to the DOOM movie with many now accepting the adaptation’s flaws more as its aged. (I mean, that first-person sequence was pretty hype.) However, co-star Rosamund Pike, who played Samantha Grimm, still believes it to be one of the worst movies ever made.
Speaking on the How to Fail podcast, thanks IGN, Pike recalled getting the call to be in the DOOM movie while she was making Pride & Prejudice. “They were making a cinema version, a narrative version, of the video game DOOM,” she recalled. “And, I think, in my bonnet, in my field of hay bales, ‘Yeah, I can do anything. I can jump on this hay bale in my crinoline, so I can certainly go and kill some zombies on Mars.”
Pike explained that “the whole thing was reimagined”, and she realised “how utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star”. The actress explained that there were weights on set for The Rock and others to life. “Every time a gun was brought out it was like a whole relic for the DOOM fans,” she said. “There was the routine before a take. It felt more like a sort of Māori, All Blacks kind of pre-game warm up.”
“The film was an absolute bomb. It probably could have ended my career,” Pike said, remembering the critical disaster the film became on launch. “It was probably one of the worst films ever made. I mean, it was a catastrophe. I don’t read the reviews, but you get the sense like, you’re lucky to have survived that one.”
The actress revealed afterwards that the failure of the film caused her to do her research into video games, adding that she “didn’t know enough about video games”. Thankfully, the movie didn’t kill her career with Pike starring in critically acclaimed films like Gone Girl and major TV productions like The Wheel of Time.
It also helps that, nowadays, DOOM (2005) isn’t even the worst live-action adaptation of the series in movie form. DOOM Annihilation, released in 2019, may be more accurate to the gameplay of the franchise, but the movie simply isn’t as fun to watch. While 2005 is fun-bad, Annihilation is just mostly bad, and that’s worse.
Many fans have a soft spot for the live-action DOOM movie, even if it isn’t a very good film. Seeing The Rock’s rapid turn into a villain is fun, and the aforementioned first-person sequence still holds up. It’s bad, but I think it’s been forgiven now.
