Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my take on DOOM, the big video game flick of the Halloween season. I think I may be the first regular reviewing this film that has played all the Doom games, including DOOM 3, which is the entry into the series that the filmmakers looked at the closest when making the DOOM movie.
Along with Oregon Trail and Castle Wolfenstein, I have fond memories of DOOM as a kid. Those games made me look at computers as something more than just boring grey boxes. I didn't have a computer until my teen years, but I remember forcing my grandparents to buy Doom for their business computer and spending hours on the computer blowing away fireball-throwing demon and machine-gun toting zombies. I played it so much that I found out how to do God Mode and just went through whole levels taking out hellspawn with my spiked brass knuckles.
I have always preferred consoles to computers when it comes to gaming, though. The original Doom was the exception to that rule, but I waited for X-Box to get DOOM 3 before I played it.
I honestly didn't have faith in the DOOM movie at all until Comic-Con where they presented about 3/4ths of the now infamous, but then unknown, First Person Shooter sequence. I then began to suspect that they might have made a fun movie. Months went by and it seemed that the studio was focusing 100% on the FPS sequence for their marketing, which set off warning bells. Did they really have nothing else to sell the movie on?
Then the reviews started coming in. There were a few mixed, but on the whole they were massively negative, so that's how I entered the movie, fresh off of some super negative reviews from the premiere.
You know what? I found myself enjoying the flick. It's flawed, that's for damn sure. It has some extremely retarded moments and the lead actress deserves a punch in the mouth for her crappy performance, but despite all that the movie succeeds where it really counts.
The monsters (except for the Pinky Demon) are all practical and only betray the man in suit a few times during the course of the movie. If I had any complaint in terms of the monsters in the film it'd be that there aren't more of them. Out of 3 games and untold dozens of kickass creatures, there are only 4 in this movie and ones we see the most often are the zombies. No flaming skull heads, no big horned fuckers and none of the Imps throw fireballs.
However, the monsters that do make it into the game are well used and brutal. There's a scene where a particularly nasty huge fucker abuses a cripple that made me smile in a big way. Not that I have anything against the "differently-abled", but seeing a wheelchair crashing against pillars with it's occupant screaming over the growls of a giant monster just works for me. Guess I'm sick.
Story... typical horror game story. Fucked up monsters kill scientists, army men are called in. They're not up for the task and are whittled down to our hero. The film stays on that well used formula until about 3/4ths of the way through, then it takes a sharp left turn.
I can understand letting some of the retarded aspects of the movie make you ignore what does work. The stuff that works well is very cliched, but executed in the right way. It's not original enough to turn someone who isn't digging the movie around, but for me it kept me interested and pulling for the movie to work. Like the macho Army badass stereotype. The Rock does some solid charismatic work here, even though it's not quite the starmaker he's still looking for. He hasn't found his TERMINATOR or CONAN yet. I'm hoping that his turn in Richard Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES will be what finally pushes him over the edge.
Karl Urban is really good in the lead role, very focused and underplayed. It's his best work in a role this size (at least in American films... he was really great in the New Zealand flick THE PRICE OF MILK. The rest of the squad work well together, but aren't anything to write home about, you know? The group interaction is fun, but never reaches the Hicks/Hudson/Gorman/Vasquez/etc genius from Cameron's flick.
Rosamund Pike as Urban's sister and scientist on Mars is simply awful in the movie. Everything she does seems half-assed. Her delivery has no fire. She has a moment where she's screaming at one of the characters slowly committing suicide that is so underplayed that I expected her to yawn in between screams. I really didn't like her in the movie.
Strangely enough, the FPS sequence, while still really neat, comes off a little awkward. There are these really jarring cuts in sequence. I could have sworn that this didn't happen in the Comic-Con footage they showed, but there are at least 3 cuts that really don't work, pulling you out of the flow of the sequence. They don't even try to hide the cut in a blurry pan or anything. But when it works it still really works and they put it at a really great part of the movie so it's not an out and out gimmick. There's a reason the filmmakers chose to put this sequence in and that's more to highlight something that happens to Urban's character than to just show off, although I'm sure that's a reason, too.
The real success of the movie and what makes it a fun stupid movie instead of a stupid stupid movie is how close it stuck to DOOM 3 visually and tonally. The monitors and readouts look straight out of the game, the sounds are straight out of the game, the creatures look just like the game creatures fleshed, the sets look just right. Add on to that the respect it has for the fan favorites (ie the BFG) and how they carefully give these moments really strong scenes. I won't rehash Harry's review, but he's right about the scene where The Rock gets the BFG. The audience exploded in applause when they saw The Rock slowly walking towards the BFG, hanging in thin air just like in the game.
I think Uwe Boll goes to sleep dreaming he could make something like DOOM. I think this film is his greatest ambition and one he doesn't stand a chance at reaching, which is sad because DOOM is just a stupid fun movie, nothing great or lasting.
On the whole, this movie is my favorite video game adaptation to date, but that's damning with feint praise. Unlike the RESIDENT EVIL films, there's at least an attempt to showcase the atmosphere and horror of the game, not just a flashy action movie. Much like Knowles, I'm greatly looking forward to SILENT HILL, which promises to be as faithful (or more) to the game as DOOM was to its game, but also has madman Roger Avary scripting, which could take it out of the goofy guilty pleasure category and into the real movie realm.
And of course... HALO, which has to kick ass. It just has to. I'm betting on those two flicks to be to video game movies what X-Men was to comic book movies... Probably HALO more than SILENT HILL because it'll have a much larger audience.
Anyway, you can probably tell that I'm stammering. Donger is very tired and starts a film festival tomorrow. I have interviews scheduled with a GHOSTBUSTER and the director of a great indie noir flick this week and a couple KONG related interviews set up for next week. Plus a ton of movies to see. So, sorry if this review sucked ass. I promise I'll do better when I'm not falling asleep at the keyboard.
'Til next time, this is Quint bidding you all a fond farewell and adieu.
-Quint
