Doom is the best videogame-to-movie adaptation ever made, but that's not saying much. Loosely based on ID software's genre-defining shoot-em-up (which itself owes a heavy debt to The Evil Dead) the film follows a troop of factory-finished badass marines on a trip to Mars, where angry monsters are playing skiprope with the intestines of a luckless scientific research team. The marines have names like Sarge, Reaper, Destroyer and Bite Off My Head You Alien Scum. Director Andrzej Bartkowiak shows commendable restraint in keeping the monsters offscreen long enough to give us a passing acquaintance with his musclebound gang of sterotypes. There's even a girl scientist, played by Rosamund Pike, who gets the really cherishable stupid lines ("I'm a forensic anthropologist - I go where the work is," she tells Karl Urban's brooding hero). Character development thus dealt with, the movie turns into a meat grinder as the soldiers meet their blood-soaked doom at the hands of mutated genetic beasties. The original Doom's spooky occult trappings have been dispensed with; science is the bad guy here. Well, science and The Rock, manfully controlling his eyebrows in a rare villainous role. "INVENTIVE SUSPENSE" Towards the end of the film, the camera assumes the classic first person viewpoint of the game, in an extended sequence that's both a nod to fans and a genuinely inventive suspense device. There's nothing to approach this level of panache in the rest of the film, which is essentially a second rate Aliens knock-off. Still, it's a guilty pleasure.Read full review
Doom is just an awesome sci-fi film about a future planet, where all hell breaks loose as a DNA disease is brought back to life by scientists who uncover fossils of "early man like" remains. The scientists get infected and a team of Marines are sent in to figure out what is going on. Starring Dwayne Johnson (formerly The Rock), the awesome Karl Urban, and the lovely Rosamund Pike. It is not really like the game, just a little of the first person shooter game that we all played in college years ago. It takes that idea of those gory creatures and sets the first person perspective loose at times with the gun in front of you and blowing up the incredible "alien hybrids" that come your way. I liked it. The action is there, but the story is a little slow at times. I love to watch it for the special effects and the shooting-gore-meets alien experience. Worthwhile.Read full review
In "Doom," an estranged brother and sister meet on Mars, where she is a forensic archaeologist and he is a soldier sent to quell an uprising of mutants. Desperate to humanize the characters in this video game turned action flick, the writers came up with this bit of tension, when Samantha Grimm (Rosamund Pike) chides her gifted brother for squandering his intellect: "Does it ever bother you that you could have spent your life looking into a microscope instead of a sniper scope?" We expect a moral from a tale about the Grimms, but this claustrophobic mess of a movie offers only carnage. This spectacle is really just a formulaic shoot'em-up, with dead bodies amassing on the floor of an underground Martian laboratory.
This movie is based in the future and a portal has been discovered leading from Earth to Mars. The government has set up a research base on Mars supposedly to examine Martian relics and their lost civilization. Unfortunately the scientists are conducting genetic experiments and surprise surprise, something goes wrong. A group of marines are soon sent to the base to discover what happened to the scientists. Sarge, played by the Rock, leads the unit and they soon are shooting everything from zombie scientists to all manner of ugly beasties. There are lots of problems with this movie. First, and there's no real way to get around this, the acting is terrible. The only exception to this, and I mean the only exception, is Karl Urban (Lord of the Rings). Everyone else who acted in this movie looked like they couldn't wait to go home. To go along with the bad acting, the plot is awful. It's an old and overused theme about saving the dumb scientists or civilians from evil critters. James Cameron's "Aliens" starring Sigourney Weaver was probably the best done of these types of movies. Doom, however, is nowhere near that league. The titles of the characters are also a bit cheesy (Goat, Reaper, Sarge, Kid, etc). I kept waiting for Maverick and Goose to pop out of a dark corridor. Finally, the film is really dark. I don't mean depressing, I mean it's poorly lit. Its probably a safe assumption that's its done to hide the sets or monsters but the audience needs to see something. The score, music, soundtrack, etc, are also horrendous. With all of that being said the movie does stay true to its video game origins and Doom is one of the most popular video games of all time. This movie also has a dark humor about it and you actually laugh at some of the gory scenes and corny one liners like "If it breathes - kill it!" Also, Critics didn't seem to like it but near the end of the movie it switches to a first person shooter view as Reaper (Urban) fights his way through the beasties. Fans of the game, and I'm one, will enjoy seeing some of the old bad guys getting chopped up with the classic Doom chain saw. Doom set out to be a grisly shoot-em-up video game take off and it succeeded. Don't expect brilliant acting and an academy award nominated plot because its not here. Doom is just campy, gory, and sometimes really stupid fun but in the end it's actually entertaining.Read full review
If you are a splatter fan then read on. If you’re not into monsters and gore along with a great looking English actress that plays a sexy researcher then you’re most likely going to hate this film. If you like Romero style movies, you will most definitely find this film entertaining. I was really impressed that the director who was a cinematographer for many years and an action director of a few Steven Segal films was very much capable of making this movie scary and gory with help of Alien effects artists. A job well done!! Check out the NR edition!!!
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