Film Reviews

Doom

• Rating:
• Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak
• Starring: Karl Urban
• Details: US, 105mins, 15s.

The year is 2046 and a crack team of hardened space marines, led by The Rock, are sent to Mars to help contain a virus that changes people into vicious super-strong zombie-like monsters. With the help of a female forensic archaeologist (Pike), they descend into the tunnels of the space station to take out the monsters and stop the virus getting back to earth. This proves harder than first thought, as the marines are picked off one by one and the Sarge starts to act a little odd. Adapting a film from a computer game is always going to cause problems, as games don't really rely on character development and, in a first person shoot-em-up like Doom, the character is the player. Unable to translate this to film (until interactive films become the norm), the writers patch together a bunch of stereotypical characters; the kid, the religious one, the tough mission-fixated leader, the wild one and the hero. Feeling like a roll-call of other sci-fi action movies, lifting elements from Aliens (the live action feed to base) to Jesse Ventura's 'big gun' from Predator, Doom brings nothing new to the genre and ends up as a second-hand shoot-em-up. The point of view action sequence towards the end (come on, you knew it was coming) is a fun nod to the game but after a couple of seconds it becomes very boring, not unlike looking over someone's shoulder and not getting a game.

Review by Gavin Burke