Search - Doom (Full Screen) on DVD

Not nearly as bad as I feared it would be.

Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 04/21/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Doom (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2005)

It took fourteen years, but one of the finest videogames of all time finally made it to the big screen. And there are some of us who've been waiting the whole time. And we get a movie starring The Rock?

The big surprise is, it's not all that bad.

Sure, it's possible to nitpick. What's a Doom movie without revenants, lost souls, archviles, rocket launchers, and for the love of all that's holy the cyberdemon?But when it comes right down to it, why not The Rock in a movie about a bunch of Marines fighting creatures from the depths of Hell? At least they didn't cast Steven Seagal. And when you've only got a little over an hour and a half, you have to cut a few things. At least we got the BFG. (And I wish the BFG's effect in the game was half as cool as its effect in the movie.)

The plot, what little there is (and pay attention, because it's different than the game, in one major aspect): A colony on Mars, originally started to support an archaeological dig, shut it down after weird, mysterious things began happening. Without anyone knowing, the head of the genetics lab, Dr. Carmack (Robert Russell, of the recent Dune TV miniseries), has reopened the archaeological dig, putting everyone in the colony in grave danger. They don't know that, of course, until it's far too late. They discover remains who have some pretty odd characteristics, which intrigue Carmack. He does some experiments that go, shall we say, awry. Marines, headed up by Sarge (The Rock), head to Mars in order to find out what's going on. Things blow up.

Doom the movie, like Doom the game, is a turn your brain off and watch things getting killed experience. If you were expecting high art, were you playing the same game the rest of us were? This is a movie that's all about violence, special effects, and things blowing up. And that's pretty hard to mess up, as long as you get halfway competent actors and a crack special effects team. Andrzej Bartkowiak (whose name is not Uwe Boll, something for which we can all thank whatever we hold holy) delivers both, and does it in style. The Rock heads up a rather capable acting team-- Reaper (The Chronicles of Riddick's Karl Urban), Duke (Resident Evil: Apocalypse's Raz Adoti), Destroyer (The Four Feathers' Deobia Oparei), The Kid (Al Weaver, recently in Radford's Merchant of Venice adaptation), Goat (Ian Fleming: Bondmaker's Ben Daniels), Mac (Phobia's Yao Chin), and Portman (Munich's Richard Brake). They're assisted on Mars by the quadraplegic Pinky (Layer Cake's Dexter Fletcher), on intel, and the obligatory beautiful scientist Sam (Die Another Day Bond girl Rosamund Pike). All of the above are at least decent actors.

Cliched? Sure, in spades. But again, this isn't a complex flick, just as it wasn't a complex game. And from that angle, this is a wonderfully satisfying film.

Still, I wish they'd found a way to work in the cyberdemon. *** ?"

Underated and underapreciated

The Dude | EH CT | 02/13/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As a big Doom fan throught the video games I was happy with the movie and I will admit there was not much of a story to it but this is doom your suppose to be shooting demons and your suppose to be scared

This is why this movie gets bad reviews because you get a person who has not played the games before and has no knowledge of anything to do with doom and they dont understand most of the movie so they automatically can not appreciate it as a true doom fan

Two Thumbs up Great job"