Movie Review : Doom - Page 2

So here is the good, the bad and the ugly.

THE GOOD

• The Rock. Dude it’s THE ROCK. No one can say “What the fuck…” with more conviction and stamina. He’s a presence on the screen. Does it make a good movie? No. Vin Diesels mere presence on the screen in The Chronicles of Riddick was only qualifiable as uber-coolness, yet the movie was rotten to the core. Same here, even The Rock can’t save this fiasco.
• The luscious doe-eyed uber-sexy Rosamund Pike (a.k.a. Miranda Frost from Die Another Day) in her perfect nipply drool inducing sweater running around screaming her head off. She definitely has the woof-woof factor going for her.
• Reaper’s perfect make-up job to make him look like the damage meter face in the heads up display of the game
• The research facility boss’s name is Dr. Carmack. A very good homage to ID games founder and Doom creator, John Carmack
• The black guys weren’t token funny black guys and weren’t the first to die… that’s original
• Soundtrack was just like the in-game soundtrack.

• The BFG. Yeah the Big Fucking Gun sucked too. Because if you’re going to have the BFG you have to use it on a big crowd of bad guys. Not on a wall. The whole fun of the BFG is popping everyone in one big fucking shot and screaming "fuck yeah."
• The back story between Dr. Samantha Grimm and her brother Reaper (get it, Grimm Reaper? Ha! Ha! Hi! Hi! Yeah whatever) which obviously haunts Reaper to no end yet they explore it as a tertiary element. Bottom line, mom and dad died on the base years before.
• Leaving some half-of-a-man in a wheelchair company PR dude to guard the most important check point, the portal to earth. What could possibly go wrong?
• Dark lighting and color filters to hide bad special effects and unfinished sets.

• The whole RRTS team. If you need an elite squad for insane rescue ops, you need a band of brothers, not escaped sex offenders and murderers. Which is what this team is made of. One perv talking about getting out on leave and getting himself 3 she-males. One shell-shocked marine (Reaper) one insane obey-orders or die Sarge. The god-fearing man who cuts himself every time he sins. They lacked cohesiveness so harshly that it’s a wonder they got on the chopper without killing themselves.
• The battle scenes, which is what you came to see this movie for, are certainly not Oscar-caliber performances. Everything is so dark. To give you the impression of intensity, they do camera shakes and blurry scuffs. Whoopee!
• Oh and then Reaper gets adrenalised by his sister, he goes into first person perspective for a good while. I swear it is the most ugly looking piece of film I’ve seen in a long time. Hollywood, should understand that what works for games, doesn’t always translate (rarely does) into good cinematography. The game developers give that bouncing effect because they lack the rendering capabilities to make it better. At least no one was jumping and grunting around to avoid incoming projectiles.
• The Boss Fight. The make-or-break moment of any action based game or movie. It’s a break for this movie. They decided to go mano a mano, or mutanto a mutanto. Good old fashioned fist fights with some wire-jumps between two mutants… woohoo… NOT! Alien Queen vs. Ripley, that’s a boss fight. Neo vs. a hundred Smiths, now that’s a boss fight. Sarge and Reaper going at it, is lame. Boss fights should be bigger than life. But a crumbled arena and guys strong-arming it is simply unsatisfactory.
• The closing credits are a first person perspective run through the hallways with a gun shooting at the credits. It looks horrible. They should have used the Doom 3 gaming engine to render it and it would have proven more interesting to watch.

Article tags

• Action
• • Adventure
• • Horror
• • Review
• • SF
• • Video

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Article Author: David Desjardins

Dave works in the IT industry despite his better judgment. He’s an artist at heart with a critical mind. He enjoys photography more than he could ever express. Dave feels a need to tweak his brain with copious amounts of taurine to stay sharp while absorbing all kinds of media on any medium. …

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