Things I Learned from Movie X: Doom

By Edwin Davies

May 19, 2011

Ugh, motion sickness. Barf.

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Hold up a second, those of you who are quick to judge her. Ask yourself this; is her accent a poor attempt at American, or a brilliant attempt at Martian? How are we to know what people will talk like hundreds of years into the future when we don't talk the same way that people did a hundred years ago? Who is to say that Martian colonists won't develop a way of talking that, to our primitive ears, sounds like someone putting on a silly voice in a film? Not I. Not I.

Don't bow to peer pressure

Towards the end of the film, Sarge and Co. (by which I mean The Rock and his team, not the short-lived late-70s sitcom about a Vietnam vet who opens a removal company that I just invented) discover that the freaky-ass demon things they have spent the rest of the film alternately running after, running from, killing and getting killed by, are being created by a sort of self-propagating virus that alters the DNA structure of everyone who comes into contact with it. In order to contain the infection, Sarge decides in a fit of pique that the best course of action is to kill everyone who may or may not be infected. This understandably causes friction in the group when they encounter people who are clearly not infected, but who Sarge kills anyway.




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The ethics of this situation would be fairly clear cut if it weren't for one brief moment when Sarge and Kid (who I prefer to think of as Fetus Boy) come across a whole corridor full of crazies crawling over a pile of corpses. After they have slaughtered the ones that approach them, a clearly uninfected man appears and asks for mercy, only for Sarge to viciously put him down (with bullets, rather than pithy banter). The thing is, the man isn't hiding amongst the bodies; he just seems to be hanging out near them, suggesting that moments before he was taking part in the veritable bacchanal of innards. Assuming that he is uninfected, which is what the film expects us to believe because otherwise it doesn't have even the light dusting of moral ambiguity that it pretends to, then are we to believe that he was just following the crowd and chomping on some of his fellow scientists to fit in? Are humans by nature so easily swayed? If so, and if we're going to have to start making PSAs about how it's wrong to give in to peer pressure and try cannibalism, then we might as well just declare civilization over and done with right now.


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