The TPS Report - Games, Beats 'n' Blogs

Doom's movie adaptation is finally here. It's set primarily on Mars, with the entire Hell subplot long gone

I actually had high hopes for Doom. I even started out enjoying it. It goes steadily down hill however, until eventually hitting about as low a movie has ever got by the end. Yes, there are major spoilers here, but trust me the movie pretty much spoils itself.

On paper, the Doom movie sounds pleasing. For one, it's rated "R", so we get gore galore, severed limbs, decapitations and even the odd gib. This is no watered down PG-13 bullshit as we see so often see these days, it does indeed have some balls in the violence department. That's freakin' perfect for Doom - the original arse kicking video game franchise.

It even has the classic Doom weapons in there, such as the BFG and - in the best scene of the movie - the good old chainsaw. So I wonder, what went wrong?

The one bit that brought a smile to my face

Pretty much everything else. The film makes the cardinal mistake of trying to pretend Doom has a plot. As a result we get a ton of useless sci-fi spiel shoehorned in that I really could have done without, along with a bunch of pointless background info on characters that's way too syrupy for this sort of mindless frag-fest.

More to the point, with all this chatting there's barely a glimmer of a demon in sight for the entire first half of the flick. This is Doom for fuck's sake! It should be all about the gunning down of hordes.

Sadly, there are none. Other than the startlingly lame comedy zombies, there's barely four full-on demons in the entire flick. A shame too, 'cos the Hell Knights, Imps and Pinky all look ace...for those few seconds we actually see 'em.

I can't stress that enough, because if we'd had waves upon waves of these awesomely monstrous creations getting blown the fuck away in a full-on Aliens style (ya know, like the games), this could have been something.

Truly Hell On Earth

The demons look absolutely awesome, with a nice mixture of suits and CGI. Sadly they are barely seen from beginning to end

Then there's the concept of Hell, or rather the complete lack of it. Hell doesn't figure into the movie in any way whatsoever you see, so that tacked-on storyline is much more of the "infected patient/zombie" ilk, and all absolute nonsense. What should have been teleportation experiments to Hell gone wrong, ends up as weak Resident Evil-esque tosh.

I wanted to see pentagrams and flames and flying skulls. I wanted to see the Arch Vile awakening the spawns of Satan. I wanted Cacodemons and fucking Revenants! There's nothing vaguely approaching that on offer here.

Then there's the acting. Honestly, I think the cast playing the marines give it their best shot. The "Doom Marine", aka Reaper (our protagonist), is even pretty damn good at times.

Karl Urban - of Lord of the Rings fame - certainly has the acting chops for this, but sadly his co-stars ain't up to much

The weak links are Dexter Fletcher, who oddly keeps getting work for some reason, and Rosamund Pike, playing helpless scientist Samantha Grimm. She is a vacuum of talent, and bizarrely features way more than the space marines do. Every time she's on screen, the film dies that little bit more.

Also - and it's one of those traits you don't miss until it's gone - the film has absolutely no sense of humour. It takes itself waaaay too seriously, and is crying out for some Hudson-style wise cracks. As a result, it has zero personality. Coming off Serenity, this particularly grated.

Finally, I gotta mention the much hailed FPS sequence. It's so close to being good, but ultimately comes off like a haunted house ride. It's way too cartoony and over the top, lacking any kind of thrill or suspense, while looking oddly worse than Doom III does. I'll concede the exploding barrels and the "Pinky duel" kick arse, but is it worth sitting through 90 minutes of disappointment for all but 10 seconds of goodness?

Movie Port

The first person shooter sequence could have been a classic, but poor execution and blatant cuts ruin it

While it makes some pivotal mistakes as a film, Doom does admittedly pay reasonable tribute to the game thanks to brief moments like this. The consoles and computer displays are straight out of Doom III, the demons look 100% identical, and the guns as mentioned, do indeed rock.

So by the final act I was kinda at a crossroads with this movie. If there were a big kick arse ending that sent it out with a bang, I perhaps could have overlooked some of the above, enjoying it for what is essentially a no brainer action farce. It needed the Cyberdemon, the Spider Mastermind, or something else grand, epic and bad arse to see the film through to at least some kind of satisfying fanboy conclusion.

Alas, instead of Reaper battling the forces of Hell for a kick arse final showdown...we get Reaper trading kung fu with...The Rock. Using a steel boxing glove.

While some distant plot would have been nice to drive the action, the one we get is horribly out of place and completely goes against all that is Doom

Somewhere along the lines the franchise disappeared and this became something completely different. Something much uglier. And dear lord, that final scene...

Depressingly, this is still the best video game movie ever made by a mile. It just makes you wonder what the outside world must think of us gamers, doesn't it? It's saddening that I can play a game like Shadow of the Colossus, with so much more heart, beauty and artistic merit than pretty much everything Hollywood burped out in the past 12 months, and yet this is our supposed gateway into mainstream recognition.

I just hope Peter Jackson works some magic with the upcoming Halo movie, showing 'em how it's done and thus sending Doom and all its predecessors back to hell.

What a disappointment.