Doom

Video game to movie translations are renowned for having a tumultuous history. Well, let's put it in even simpler terms: they usually suck. Hard. It's a constant battle between how faithful one should remain to the source material; be too faithful and lose the mainstream audience, or just capitalize on the name and scare most everyone off. Doom is unfortunately a film belonging to the latter category. In choosing one of the most well known and revered video games of all time to translate to the screen, Doom comes off as a film low on monsters, low on blood, and amazingly given the source material, very low on the gunplay.

In what has become something of a standard for survival horror games, an out of the way research station has seemingly unlocked something that they never should have been toying with in the first place, and with communication now cut a team of experts (i.e. guys with big guns) have been sent in to discover what has gone wrong. A group of marines led by Sarge (The Rock in a lackluster role; see below) and the enigmatic, silent Reaper (Karl Urban) are to reclaim the facility, which coincidentally is the location where Reaper's parents died and where his sister (Rosamund Pike) works as a researcher. Yeah, that's pretty much it. They go to the facility on Mars and naturally find it abandoned, and, well, spend a lot of time walking through dark corridors yelling at each other. Occasionally a monster will make an appearance and attack, and on an even rarer basis someone will fire off a gun, but that's about it.

That being said for the plot, I must say everything after that has but the furthest resemblance from Doom as possible. I haven't played the game a whole lot, but I do know that there are a few basic ideals that make Doom what it is that the movie ignores. I know that the game revolves almost entirely around over the top battles to the death with hordes of monsters while you fight them off with high powered weapons. Here it's almost non-existent. For the better portion of the movie there are maybe 3 or 4 monsters (I kid you not), and until the last ten minutes or so there are even fewer firefights than there are sightings of these monsters. Additionally, remember how the whole basis of the game comes from hell itself? In the movie they merely changed it to a virus that infects and transforms "evil" people into monsters. Instead of Doom, they essentially made a half-assed version of Resident Evil in space. Aside from a few references to the game itself (Sarge, the BFG, some of the monsters) you could have easily changed the movie's title to anything else and nobody would have been the wiser.

Usually I go along the lines of people doing the best they got with limited material, but I can't even say that here. The material they had was poor, and more often than not the people delivering it were pretty poor too. For a hero, Karl Urban just looks bored more than anything else (though given the movie who would blame him). Rosamund Pike similarly plays things rather bored for an ex-Bond Girl, while The Rock's considerable charm and charisma are squandered (more on that below.) Beyond that, nobody, but nobody gives a performance worth acknowledging or giving a second glance at. The marines are as stereotypically misogynistic as it gets, and few have any sympathetic or redeeming qualities. When we're supposed to sympathize with someone dying off, it's more often than not "Gee, I'm glad he's dead", assuming you can even tell who actually died in the first place.

Director Andrzej Bartkowiak has led an extensive and arguably quality career as a cinematographer, taking the helm of some supremely styled movies like Falling Down, Speed and The Devil's Advocate. When it comes to directing, well, this man does it like a novice. His experience thus far has been in some minor action flicks starring rappers, so when approached with Doom I have no idea what he was thinking. Even Paul W.S. Anderson could have done better. Seriously. We're not in Uwe Boll territory as the movie isn't that bad, but it does have its moments of being pretty damn close. I just don't get how someone could base a movie off of Doom and make it so damn boring. I really, I just don't get it. There's no tension, there's no scares, there's almost no blood. There's just lots and lots of dark corridors, cursing and yelling. That's it. A good director could have even made something even with that. Bartkowiak should stick to directing rappers.

Doom's one saving grace would probably come in its decent visual effects, and although they're only roughly on par with stuff you'd catch in the direct to video bin, in a movie like this they seem that much better. Going heavy on the digital effects works more often than not to give a video game sort of feel to the movie, and the big First Person Shooter scene (the one the trailers milk to no end) giving the perspective of Reaper as he wipes out a slew of monsters is suitably well done. The monsters (given the few there are) are pretty convincing and surprisingly well done when it comes to those involving full men-in-suits, and the all digital Pinky Demon I must admit was pretty fun to watch. Watching the BFG getting used (even though it's only used thrice in the entire movie) is suitably satisfying, but that's about it. There's nothing really impressive or new that this movie pulled off, visually or otherwise.

Once again, I never thought I'd say this in the context of something with source material known to be some of the most violent around, but Doom was severely lacking in the gore department. Yes, there are a few random bloody zombie moments and rat eating, and in the FPS segment there are a couple of pretty cool bloody kills, but all in all Doom squanders what really could have been an all out bloodbath for. well, to be perfectly honest I don't know what they squandered it for, given that there's not a whole lot else there to begin with.

I have not been nor will I probably ever be a fan of professional wrestling. That being said, I really enjoy The Rock. In most anything and everything he has been in outside of the arena of battle, he has been a charismatic and genuinely fun guy, who if given the proper material can actually be a pretty decent actor. Unfortunately, Doom is not the proper material for the man. Instead of having a role that would have allowed him to actually do much of anything, he is relegated to alternate between screaming and yelling. Given, he's supposed to be an asshole, but all in all his considerable skill was extremely underused, and his sudden change from protagonist to antagonist in the end comes seemingly out of nowhere. Still, his mere presence in the movie helps elevate it from all out bomb status to something remotely entertaining, as he does have his moments. Big Fucking Gun. Oh yeah.

There are few monsters, few guns and little blood. This is not Doom. This is a pale imitation of a classic franchise. You could do yourself better and get more entertainment out of buying a copy of the video game and seeing what it should be like as opposed to what it was. Save your money, if you really want to see it, wait for it to appear on TV.