A Doomed effort from the start
Okay I admit there's been an urge to blog steadily building in my system. This urge was causing all sorts of problems for me, making me do all sorts of irrational things like sleeping before 10 p.m. for two nights in a row! I knew I would have to eventually give in lest something bad happened...

Bad in this case can be definied as "Doom the movie," which I went to see last night with some friends. I got there slightly late and missed not only the previews but also the first 5 minutes of the film. Looking back now, I'm glad I did. I realise now that even if I had arrived 30 minutes late (the movie ran 104 minutes) I probably would have derived the same level of enjoyment out of the experience ie. the first-person shooter sequence created to make gamers go 'whoa.' For the sake of not spoiling it for others who don't know better and plan on viewing it sometime, I'll refrain from get into the details of the "plot." Without even getting into the specifics of Doom's weak example of script writing, there is an overall lacking which can be felt by anyone who has played any of the games which spawned the movie. I can understand that the transition from video game to the big screen is often a challenging one; this is likely especially true for a first-person action-driven series such as Doom.

For example, consider the plot of the original video game Doom for PC. You are a marine, one of the most hardened warriors on earth, who has been deported to Mars for assaulting a senior officer when ordered to kill unarmed civilians. You are forced to work for the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), a military-industrial conglomerate that is performing secret experiments with teleportation between the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Suddenly, something goes wrong and creatures from Hell come out of the teleportation gates overruning the bases with demons. Realising that you are the only one left alive you try to survive and in the process you have to fight and fight and fight and... you get the picture.

As fan of the series ever since the original games' release in 1993 however, I am largely disappointed in the poor showing of director Andrzej Bartkowiak ("Romeo Must Die," "Cradle 2 the Grave"). Now I know that movies often take artistic licenses with things like plots; even so, cutting out the entire Hell element of the plot is too much. It changes the nature of the quintessensial Doom marine, the hardcore Earth warrior fighting for survival against the minions of evil. Most importantly though, this takes out the bread and butter of the Doom series. Anyone entertaining other conceptions of the movie can dissuade themselves of such notions right now - there are no minions of Hell in the movie. And by that I don't mean that there are no partly invisible spectres; there are no flaming lost souls (the heads that are on fire), no large red cacademons (red ball with one eye), no fiendish revenants (skeleton with rocket launcher built on his shoulders) - not even the ubiquitous fireball-spiting brown imp. For me this was a big let down in a movie with the same name as the game. If the producers had felt that having "monsters of Hell" might have seen as too Satanic and objectionable, I'm sure there were other ways to incorporate creatures other than zombies (although a pinky from Doom III does make an appearance).

Of course it is more likely that studio executives were merely hoping to make a relatively cheap film that would top the box office during Halloween weekend, and in this regard the movie can probably be regarded as a success. *sigh* Sometimes practicalities of business are truly a pity.

Aside from that complaint of mine, everyone else in Doom was standard fare for a campy zombie-shooter. Surprisingly the Rock's character barely displayed any trace of the dry humour that made the actor a passable action figure in his other films. Playing the role of the stoic dutiful anti-hero, there were moments that his character seemed to scream for development before that was quashed with a robotic "I'm a solider, I do as I'm told" line. The closest that his character comes to a humourous moment is when he quips, "I'm not supposed to die" while fighting off a horde of zombies. A failure of the script or a failure of the actor?

If there is one thing that I can credit the movie with, its the lack of a typical romantic subplot. Instead the 'oddly beautiful scientist' (Rosamund Pike) is the sister of the hero character (Karl Urban), together share a tragic family past on the Mars base. Unfortunately although it dodged that bullet, every other B-movie action cliche is used in Doom.

Even racial cliches are apparent in the movie as one of my fellow Doom 'victims' pointed out yesterday. When one of the black marines goes down, its an incredible fight as the man fights the zombie creature despite being slammed into walls, electrocuted, and thrown into a pit. When the asian marine dies, he is not only one of the first to go, but he is taken by surprise and goes down without a sound.

There's a mildly philosophical interpretation which can be extrapolated to the movie which my (useless) artsie mind has come upon but it is probably going far beyond the intent of the script-writers so for the spoilers sake I'll refrain from delving into it.

All in all, if you plan to watch this film don't expect too much. If you have a high performance gaming computer at home or an X-Box, you're probably better off playing Doom III at home if you've not already done so. For more information about the 1990s phenomenon which iD Software unleashed upon the world, click here.

Ugh I can't believe I've blogged again...