Thoughts on writing a DOOM movie script

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I've always loved the original DOOM games. I was in my early 20s when the first one hit and it hit hard. I can still remember seeing it running on a PC during a night shift and instantly diving in to have a 'go'.

The fact that the whole thing moved and moved quickly struck me as nothing short of witchcraft. How on earth is this possible? PC games up to that point (I'd never encountered id's previous titles) were, for me, the domain of platform games and worthy flight simulators. To be running down corridors and blasting zombies, demons and hell knows what, was just astonishing.

The deeper I got into the game the more I realised there was an intense sense of dread and foreboding. This wasn't just a case of lining up monsters to be gunned down with an ever-increasing arsenal. This was pure horror.

The key things that struck me were:

• Isolation
• Intense satanic imagery
• The shotgun!
• The eerie sounds of nearby monsters
• The hordes of monsters and that sense of being completely over-run by evil

Now, if you're going to translate DOOM into a piece of film, those, for me, are your starting point. 

Where the excellent DOOM 3 fails, is that it introduces other characters. To paraphrase Vonnegut, 'start your story as close to the end as possible'.

The backstory and the wealth of characters certainly adds something to the experience, and you soon fall back into that awful sense of isolation, but were they really necessary? Why not let your imagination fill in the gaps based upon the countless digital journals that lie around. 

The 2005 DOOM movie was largely based upon DOOM 3 and sure enough, a bunch of space marines hacking their way through a Martian base seems, at first, like a reasonable story to tell. But horror, it was not. As adept as Dwayne Johnson and Karl Urban are at playing the action hero, they were let down by a pretty awful plot. At no point did I care about them or what happened to them.

So, to create a story set in the world of DOOM, start with that awful sense of isolation. Let the viewer learn of your protagonist's predicament as they creep around Phobos' abandoned base. Furthermore, DOOM paved the way for outrageous 3D graphics. Why not tell the story using CGI? We certainly have the horsepower to create such an experience with modern rendering tech.

The classic Hollywood structure presents us with 'normal life'. It then presents a hook, something by which we are gripped just enough to propel us forward into the narrative. We will encounter an Inciting Incident which acts to turn normal life on its head and thrust us into the developmental part of the story. We pass through the Point Of No Return (PONR) - that point in the movie (usually the mid-point) where the protagonist has come so far they couldn't possibly turn back. 

Our PONR could be simple. The protagonist learns that his dear friend, loved on, family member is still alive and threatened. Or, Earth is threatened unless the mission is a success. The story could become a selfless act of heroism that transforms our protagonist from scientific pen-pusher to full on badass. They may have never held a gun in their life, let alone fired one. They may even be painfully pacifist and detest the thought of killing people. Creating a character arc and problem to solve ought to be easy given the rich back story available in the DOOM universe. 

So, dear reader, I am off to write the script that should have been written 20 odd years ago in the hope that somebody with some imagination might take it up and actually present us with the movie that we deserve.