We're Gonna Need Something with a Little Bit More Kick

For most males of my generation, much of the mid nineties were devoted to sitting in front of the computer playing the granddaddy of all shooters, Doom. Before the game, most video games were family friendly plat formers like Mario Brothers and even games that involved killing things like The Legend of Zelda, the killing was very cartoonish. But with Doom, you took a first person account of blasting hell spawn and zombies complete with blood spatter. There was even a time that there more computers that had some form of Doom on it than Windows. The game eventually gave way to the gorier Quake that featured multiplayer through the internet so you could now spend day on end killing your dorm mates.

Then over ten years after its original release and a year after a third installment in the series hit computer screens a movie tie-in made it to theaters despite ever other movie that was based on a videogame has sucked massively. Well of course the one exception being Super Mario Bros. with Bob Hopkins playing the red overall wearing plumber. Okay, enough sarcasm. Transferring Doom into a movie is an odd choice due to the video game being a first person shooter with evil doers being the only other characters in the game. So some changes had to be made for the transition to the big screen. First instead of one space marine shipped off to Mars, we get eight. The biggest change though is that the evil doers don’t come out of portal from hell. Where the actually come from in the movie is bit of a spoiler and I won’t tell you where or how not because I don’t want to spoil you, instead because it’s extremely complicated.

There in lies one of the big problems with the movie, its way too complicated for a film based on a game where all you had to know was kill anything that moves. When the marines hit Mars, they run into a bunch of scientists that bog down the dialog with way too many big words that you needed to take upper level biology and archeology courses in college to understand. The other big problem is you can’t see anything, ever. The lighting in the movie is so dark, even when the evil doers come on screen it’s hard to be scared because you have no clue what you are looking at. The only part of the film that old school gamers can appreciate is they discover of the BFG (my censors won’t let me tell you what it completely stands for but “B” is big and “G” is gun) and the segment where film takes on a first person view. But even those inclusions would make it worth sitting through the rest of the film.

Doom gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.