Sunday, October 23, 2005

Doom

Adapted from the video game to the big screen, Doom is more video game than a movie, but is fun, gory, and full of game ideas to love, even if the movie is bad overall.
It also has Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson in a crazy performance that makes this movie campy, the only way it could work, and that it does.

The story is a bit modified from the game, specially on the locations and the enemies. Here is the year 2046, and us Humans have discovered/created a portal to Mars 20 years ago that's been investigated by scientist since then. But something happens, they need help, and a group of US Marines, the Hell Fighters, are sent there to rescue the scientist and eliminate anything evil that could try to find its way to Earth.
The marines are like us video game players, and they are even introduced by their guns too. There's their leader Sarge (The Rock), second at command Reaper (Lord of the Rings' Eomer, Karl Urban), big black guy Destroyer (DeObia Oparei), Goat (Ben Daniels), black funny guy Duke (Raz Adoti), crazy Steve Buscemi-in-Armageddon wannabe Portman (Richard Brake), Asian guy Mac (Yao Chin) and the newbie The Kid (Al Weaver).
And for another cool video game reference, Rosamund Pike plays Samantha Grimm, the only female in the movie, who is not a potential love interest for any of the characters, but Reaper's sister.

After they go to Mars, it's more like the video game as they start shooting at everything that movies, while trying to figure out what caused the problem, which is a genetic experiment about the 24th chromosome (us Humans have only 23) which turned people in monsters, but it could also turn them in Super Humans.
The 24th chromosome is injected in one of the characters that is about to die at one point in the movie, and he gets a new life, and in a reference to the 'God Mode' from the video games he transforms into that Super Human, and we get the super cool First Person Camera just like the game. The whole sequence is between 5 and 10 minutes, enough to be amazing. Monsters coming from out of nowhere getting blown into pieces, and then we grab the chainsaw, excellent. There's also the awesome Big Fucking Gun which will give you an erection just like it does to The Rock when he first gets it, you can see it in his eyes. And then when he shoots it, amazing.

Yes, the plot is kind of stupid, but is secondary, the movie is mindless fun, just what it needed to be. The effects are pretty great, the monsters are cool, even though we don't see enough of them. And though some gratuitous nudity would have been much appreciated, Doom is still cool, very fun and it has lots of blood and cursing, just what its audience could want from it. One thing though, wasn't this supposed to be a The Rock movie?