Doom the movie
Entry posted by Guest ·
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Well Doom the movie is out ( http://imdb.com/title/tt0419706/ ), and I've had a chance to watch it. The film instantly came across as one that was set out in a very similar way to the first Resident Evil film.
The film stars "The Rock" as a rather dull muscle bound character with a gun and a short haircut, sadly not a patch on the performances he can give when given the hance (those in Scorpion King or Walking Tall were pretty decent). The rest of the actors were pretty much unknown to me, save Dexter Fletcher who made an unusual appearance.
I won't spoil it for anyone (although to be fair I don't know what I could give away), but sadly a lot of the plots that could have been used aren't there, and essentially it boils down to the standard, guns/zombies/guns/hero/heroine film. There's no great motivation for much that's going on, even to the point where it'd make more sense to hear the creatures calling out "brrrraaaaiiinsss..." as they appeared. To compound matters if you're not watching closely the details of who is where, what the "Ark" is and where various people physically are and on what planet can get a bit difficult to follow. Given that I'd normally class his film as a 3 or 4 pinter suitable for running at around 2AM when it appears on DVD it may make the first 30 minutes of the film a little beyond the average watcher.
I wouldn't go so far as to say I dislike the film, nor is it the worst thing I've ever seen, but it does deserve a place on my shelf somewhere in the area of the Aliens and Resident Evil shelf. I'd buy it when it's out on disc, but given that I'll do anything to avoid watching Lost on TV that's not saying much.
Resident Evil had a better plot and at least a set of sequels I found interesting and actors playing characters you actually might have cared slightly about. To me Doom was a large waste of a potential goldmine in film revenue, it's what Aliens Vs Predator was instead of what Aliens is. It wasn't at all scary, didn't have a single scene in it that made you jump and various scenes must have been filmed by the drunk guy with a fisheye handicam that was fired off the set of NYPD Blue for moving the camera too much. If you suffer from motion sickness, strap yourself down for this one.
I thought we might have had some redeeming action scenes when they went off to go and get some toys from the new armoury, instead we get a few shots of the newly created BFG and a few shots of a gun rack sporting firearms with bits of plastic stuck to them.
The cover for the film shows off a P90 lookalike which had absolutely nothing to do with the film, and a lot of the gear in the film was pretty standard prop kit bashes (checkout the still shots attached). Again given the amount of material that was available to base the film from the props lacked creativity, although to be fair the prop master and concept artist look to be rather new to the scene. I'm guessing that the prop budget wasn't huge and thus left in the hands of new and as yet undeveloped talent. Whatever the explanation a lot of the stuff looked like it was the result of a BluePeter project with guns, black spray paint, loo rolls and sticky back plastic.
The creatures were pretty dull, and the CGI ruined some of the scenes that would have been better left to real life prosthetics.
In short, it's pretty average bit a good distraction for an hour or so. I was doing some work at the same time as I watched the film, so I can't say that the time was wasted really 
I'd give it a 4/10 on the watchability scale, and a pint rating of 4 with an o-dark-thirty recommended viewing time.
They should have slapped an 18 rating on this one and worked it into a decent hell based thriller. If they'd taken inspiration from the pages of the Hellraiser series, the action scenes and effects from Aliens, and then incorporated a plot that had some bearing on something... (preferably with a view to 2-3 sequels) they'd have got somewhere with this one.
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