Midweek DVD - Doom
Filed under: Gaming, Midweek Movie, Other — Malcolm Owen @ 10:30 pm
Doom is one of the biggest names in gaming. It’s been around for years, and has been fondly remembered by a crowd of geekish teenagers that completed the shareware and installed the Barney mod. Sadly, it suffers from the same thing that many other movies of games fall foul of too: Movie Adaptations of Games Are Rubbish. The only ones that manage to avoid the rule seem to be the Resident Evil films, but only because the whole Resident Evil thing is based on the horror film format in the first place.
I have already reviewed Doom: The Movie at Gametactics, where it got a staggering 4 out of 10. The short version is basically: The Rock plays “Character Based on The Rock’s Persona from WWE” (because that’s apparently the only freaking character he knows how to play), and a bunch of other people form the remaining “Squad”, which, as the usual horror film rules dictate, will almost certainly die by the end of the film, whilst also throwing some game related imagery and the obligatory “like the game but not” computer generated bit at the end from the traditional FPS game perspective, leaving you wanting the time you wasted watching the film back.
This probably leads you to wonder why I’m suggesting you watch Doom if it’s so un-fantastic. The reason? Because I want you to learn that games of movies don’t work. There’s the chance that at some point in the future, some director will see this and take the suggestion to watch Doom. I am hoping that they will find the film to fail on quite a few levels, and realise that they probably will make another film just as bad as this if they tried the same thing out themselves. There’s hope that a kick-ass director will take this as a challenge and make the greatest gaming-based movie of all time, all to prove me wrong, and that’s fine. Just don’t make another Doom. Please.
“Doom (Full-Screen Unrated Extended Edition)” (Andrzej Bartkowiak)
