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Dan Owen reviews
Universal Pictures Video As premiered on
danowen.blogspot.com
- Cert:
- Cat.no: 8239009
- Running time: 100 minutes
- Year: 2005
- Pressing: 2006
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: English
- Widescreen: 2.35:1 (Super 35)
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 9
- Price: £19.99
- Extras:Six featurettes
Director:
- Andrzej Bartkowiak
Producers:
- Lorenzo di Bonaventura and John Wells
Screenplay:
- Dave Callaham and Wesley Strick
Music:
- Clint Mansell
Cast:
- John Grimm: Karl Urban
Sarge: The Rock
Samantha Grimm: Rosamund Pike
Pinky: Dexter Fletcher
Goat: Ben Daniels
The Kid: Al Weaver
Corporal Dean Portman: Richard Brake
Mac: Yao Chin
Duke: Raz Adoti
Destroyer: Deobia Oparei
If imitation is indeed a form of flattery, then James Cameron must be in a permanent blush.
In 1986, Aliens set the benchmark for sci-fi horrors involvingtestosterone-fuelled grunts hunting down alien creatures in confined spaceswith high-tech weaponry. Cameron practically made this set-up its own sub-genre!
7 years later in 1993, Doom became a video game phenomenon; a First PersonShooter that paved the way for dozens of imitators, like Quake and UnrealTournament. A movie adaptation had been mooted since Mortal Kombat (1995).
Now, 12 years after Doom spearheaded a gaming revolution, the movie belatedappears starring professional macho men The Rock (Walking Tall) andKarl Urban (Lord Of The Rings). The plot is disappointingly similarto the countless Aliens rip-offs and modern zombie movies, with a researchstation on Mars becoming infested with marauding creatures, and a ragtaggroup of Marines, led by The Rock’s “Sarge”, being tasked to eliminate thethreat.
If you’re adapting a video game into a movie, you already have inherentproblems to overcome; the fact remains that watching a faithful game writlarge is nowhere near as fun as playing said game. Games are only adaptedbecause studios know there’s an inbuilt audience for the product, and mostgame’s premises are increasingly cinematic (i.e. they steal ideas fromthe movies). As such there’s a vicious circle going on, as even a faithfulDoom movie would merely be a pale imitation of Aliens…
However, Doom isn’t even particularly faithful to its source anyway. Anothergripe with adaptations is that the writers obviously want to put their ownspin on the concept. Nobody really wants to see an exact duplicate of thegame on the big-screen (except diehard purists) because you may as well justplay the game. That said; Doom does excise story elements that were integralto the game’s success - primarily the origin of the creatures has beenchanged from Hell to a laboratory. They’re not demons; they’re geneticaberrations from an experiment that went wrong. Sigh…
I suppose they thought a Hell-based plot wasn’t plausible enough (snigger),but by shifting the emphasis onto genetics, Doom disappoints the hardcoregamers, loses its one faintly original pulp sci-fi component, and becomesnot only a pale imitation of the classic Aliens, but also the poor cousin ofResident Evil!
The Rock is undoubtedly a charismatic man who should be this generation’sArnold Schwarzenegger, but he just can’t seem to find the iconic role tocatapult him to stardom. Doom marks a low-point even for him, as Sarge is apaper thin creation that could have been dumb fun, but winds up beingexasperating and clichéd. He needs his own Terminator, fast.
Karl Urban grunted through Lord Of The Rings in a forgettable beefcake role,but proved to be quite a cool villain inThe Bourne Supremacy,so it’s frustrating that his character in Doom is underwritten and implausible.As John “Reaper” Grimm (all the cast have silly names) he’s actually the onlycharacter with anything approaching a back-story and personality, but that’sfaint praise…
Rosamund Pike is, quite simply, atrocious in this. Pike is hardly anacclaimed actress anyway, famous mainly for a supporting role in BondadventureDie Another Day,but you can usually rely on British actors to elevate material like this. ButPike is totally miscast as Dr Grimm, spending half the movie looking perplexedand locked into the same vacant expression. She quite clearly can’t take anyof this seriously, so why should we?
The supporting cast are your typical amalgam of weirdo’s (Ben Daniels‘self-mutilating Goat), one-note grunts (Raz Adoti‘s Duke), the teennewcomer (Al Weaver‘s The Kid), etc. All of them are just meat forthe killing, with only Dexter Fletcher‘s wheelchair-bound Pinkyproving to be a memorable presence.
Of course, with a movie like Doom you dont expect much in the way of plotdynamics and character relationships. At its core level, Doom should providekinetic action, gore and quips aplenty. Unfortunately, it barely succeeds oneven those moderate terms.
The special effects are shrouded in darkness (to hide their shoddiness yousoon realize – no idea what they spent the $70 million on!) and the editingduring the attacks is so bad you can’t really grasp what’s happening, orto whom most of the time!
The production design successfully apes Doom 3, even throwing in afew direct links for fans (most notably the presence of the BFG — a phallicgun filmed as the ultimate penis as The Rock strolls around it). It’s awell-judged moment of silly gun eroticism that quickly evaporates when saidgun is only fired a few times in the entire film, and never kills anything!
Even stupid teens with little time for plot and characterisation will likelybe disappointed. The game’s premise is bastardized, the variety of creaturessorely limited, and the weaponry nowhere near as eclectic as the games,resulting in a formulaic mess of a film with faint traces of the gamesprinkled here and there.
There is one sequence toward the end of the movie when the action shifts tothe real-time POV of a lead character, effectively transforming the movie intoa photo-realistic version of the game. It’s here that the film’s budgetseems to have been spent; the monsters are better realized, the iconicchainsaw appears, as does the Pinky “demon”, and there’s a sense of vibrancyand dark humour that was missing everywhere else. It’s an oasis in adesert of a bad movie, and even then it just made me want to play the gameand turn this soulless enterprise off.
To summarise, Doom fails because it’s a decade too late, doesn’t adhere tothe game’s mythology to please the core audience of fans, and lacks therequisite scares and laughs that general audiences demand from such trashyfilms. The truth is, while Doom the game was cutting edge in 1993, the2005 movie arrives amidst a slew of doppelgangers with their own ominousprologues, macho soldiers, secret labs and zombies. It’s all been done todeath already…
I’m not a snob about movies; even “bad” movies can entertain on their ownterms as cinematic junk-food, but Doom just fails to recapture even afraction of what made the games such a hit… and for that it can’t beforgiven…
Doom is released as an Unrated Edition DVD, which means 13 extra minutes of”goodness” sprinkled here and there. The disc comes in a keep case with oneof those pointless cardboard slip-cases. A pet peeve of mine.
The menu screens are that familiar use of futuristic displays, seen countlesstimes on similar DVDs, although the opening shot of Mars is quite cool.
The 2.35:1 anamorphic picture isn’t particularly good. The movieis totally filmed in darkness or dull metallic rooms, and the blacks areblurry, with the image lacking punch. Detail levels are okay, and there areno artefacts, but there are noticeable smears and ghosting sometimes.
The best aspect of the movie is definitely its sound mix. The DD5.1audio puts the emphasis on the rear speakers and sub-woofer, with soundalmost constantly pumping out from the rears. A nice level of bass isomnipresent and proves quite effective.
The disc’s menu screens are your typical futuristic menus seen countless oftimes in hundreds of similar titles. A little disappointing, but the loadtimes are good. To make up for it, there are some pretty decent featuretteson this release, most of them more entertaining than the actual movie…
- Basic Training Featurette: a look at how the cast were put through their paces with military trainingby a Special Forces veteran. Very entertaining, particularly when theeffects of a blank round on a styrofoam head is revealed…
- Rock Formation: a mediocre look at the make-up required to transform The Rock into ahalf-demonic creature. Occassionally interesting, but hardly earth-shattering.
- Master Monster Makers: this featurette overstays its welcome, but it’s quite an enjoyable look athow the movie’s creatures were designed and performed. It’s worth notinghow little CGI was used, but it’s a shame the film’s cinematography wasso poor that half the work was obscured by darkness…
- First Person Shooter Sequence: by far the film’s best moment, it’s enlightening to see that this 5-minutesequence was actually directed by a Second Unit and took weeks to complete.It’s certainly good work, and the sequence is included for viewing.
- Doom Nation: a 15-min featurette about the Doom video games themselves, packed withinterviews and clips of the iconic Doom, its sequel Doom II and thequantum leap that was Doom 3. Interesting to see the parallels between gameand film, but this is a little tiresome…
- Game On: only diehard gamers will enjoy this — a series of tips and tricks forplaying Doom 3. Moderately interesting.
Rounding out the disc are trailers for Serenity and Jarhead. But not Doomitself! Anyway, overerall this isn’t a terrible release, with the imagequality not impressing me. On the plus side, the sound mix was good andsome of the extra features are quite diverting.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.