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Since 1996 |
Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Doom Starring: The Rock, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak Doom is not a shallow movie because of its source material; on the contrary, the film’s most clever and entertaining sequences are when it most closely resembles the popular PC games it is based off of. What does make Doom such a shallow movie is everything else--clichéd characters, boring story, trite dialogue, uninspired set pieces…the list goes on. Doom isn’t particularly painful to watch. I was never agitated by clunky pacing, such as in The Fantastic Four, nor was I ever left antsy by anticlimactic story development, such as in The Great Raid; in fact, compared to 2005’s other bad movies, Doom is almost tolerable to sit through. But it is still a bad movie, primarily because it is a very boring one. So little happens during the film’s first three quarters. Action is sparse; Marines run down corridors, aiming around corners at shadows and bumps. They run into a mutant or two once or twice, shooting before and asking questions later. We’re told pieces of the back story from a couple scientists, including the marine’s sister, while they work in a lab to salvage the facility’s experiments. Doom never hooks its audience. In the movie’s worst sequence- the first sequence- lab and tech people run down dark corridors, chased by some shrouded zombie-like figures. There’s screaming. There’s blood. There’s gore. But there’s little to no genuine excitement or real suspense; they’ve already forced a loss of interest in the audience, and the giant, looming Doom logo hasn’t even finished filling the screen. Enter the Rapid Response Tactical Squad: they get a call that the Mars research station, Olduvai, is in need of desperate assistance. The Rock plays “Sarge”, the leader of a supposedly top-notch marine unit. I say supposedly- half the members of the squad are dumb, oily, or inexperienced, hardly the crew of a well-trained instant response team. But, well, it is a movie- if the characters prove themselves later, either with some incredible talent or some good character development, I’ll buy it. In two words, they don’t. One member deals in drugs. Another is mentally unstable. One member has a sister aboard the station; his plot is the strongest and most understandable of the crew. We care about him, and his sister, a little bit. We come to care less about the others. But Doom isn’t without
a couple exciting moments. There’s a short sequence where we get
to see the action from a first person point of view, and it works surprisingly
well. Perhaps a taste of how thrilling the movie could have been, or at
least proof of why the games are so popular. The movie’s finale isn’t
bad either- a fight sequence that, if the story leading up to it had been
properly developed, may have been fun and exciting. But
Doom is ultimately hollow and pointless; yet another unfortunate addition
to the bottom-barrel videogame flicks of our time.
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