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Fun

- Kasia S. | New York City | 11/20/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This one still boggles me!
I read the finicky reviews and was not expecting anything decent but it wasn't so bad!
Yeah at times I was thinking "why did these people film this? Did they need money?" because it is based on a game and has its own world, it does not follow what we on Earth would call a story taken from life.

The special effects were rough at times and made me think that whoever did Pac Man was still doing his work on this movie, but since it's based on a game I took it with a grain of salt. The creatures were pretty wild and I like "alien chase on starship" whether under water, in outer space or on a Moon type of a movie.

I liked how certain characters, without spoiling anything, changed sides and there were a few nice plot twists. Karl Urban and surprisingly the dude known as The Rock were pretty good in this one.

Fun movie to see, but it's not deep soulful or Oscar nominee material.
Pretty much eye candy, but overall better than I expected."

Very entertaining..

Jem | MD, USA | 01/21/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Sometimes I marvel that so many people and movie critics expect every film to be Oscar material! Lots of action, fast paced, cool special effects--Doom is a solid, entertaining movie. The Rock and Karl Urban carried the story forward (and provided some nice eye candy to boot).

Are you going to find deep philosophical meaning in it? Only if you're drunk. Can you sit back and let go for a couple of hours? Definitely. Bottom line is if you're a fan of action movies, add this movie to the roster."

DOOMed to Fail

Dennis G. Voss Jr. | Lexington, KY USA | 07/20/2007

(2 out of 5 stars)

"The original video game DOOM had a campy, mishmash plot that just kept piling on conventions from different movie and pulp-fiction genres. You got military contractors screwing around with dangerous technologies. A military spaceship crew decimated by evil baddies. A cigar-chomping marine that turns into a one-man carnage machine. You got mosters drawn from a host of mythologies, muddling about in radioactive waste -- and a secret level full of Nazis thrown in for good measure. Was that enough? Course not. After you progressed a bit, they started tossing in huge helpings of occult silliness too. It was one big, funny cartoon full of irreverently portrayed cliches. All this haphazard, tongue-in-cheek borrowing was fine because it played little role in DOOM or DOOM II. The games were about manual dexterity and rapidly escalating firepower.

Problem is, what is a poor screenwriter or director going to do when asked to make an action movie about a video game that was a farcical treatment of action movies? The fans couldn't possibly be satisfied, and non-gamers would be totally at a loss because there was no way to explain everything and still have time to blow stuff up! So they wrote two storylines: The surface, internally consistent one for people who didn't play the game, with the typical melodramatic humorlessness of an effects movie -- and the hidden storyline in which they showed an appreciation for the game by trying to explain as much of the DOOM mythology as they could: zombies, monsters, alien gates, health packs, restarting levels, one-man carnage machines, death matches, you name it.

Was it brilliant? Uh, no ... but not because they failed to be true to DOOM or because their wall textures didn't include the pentagrams. It just wasn't a great movie. The Rock, Karl Urban, and Rosamund Pike all fell below their average performances (which in The Rock's case is not a terribly impressive par score). There were numerous cheap ploys to gross us out or shock us. Sometimes it rushed through ideas, and sometimes it belabored them. All the usual imperfections found in big-budget flick with a guaranteed audience. But it was better than I expected from a movie whose creators knew that, as an artistic venture, their project was doomed to fail.
"

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. *** ?"