Monday, October 31, 2005

Unseen Movie Review: Doom

I'm not seeing this movie for reasons anyone who knows me would understand, but I still wanted to talk about it. So here's my unseen movie review for Doom.

I initially was interested when I heard this was coming out. I always thought Doom had a simplistic but unique backstory - soldiers face an invasion of monsters from Hell. Would you believe they took the Hell backstory out of the movie? Instead, it's about genetic engineering. Unbelievable. That would have been a very edgy story, full of philosophical and spiritual implications that were never explored in the game, which is probably why they took it out. No need to get the Religious Right on their backs. But in terms of bad game adaptations, that's got to be a biggie. That's not quite as bad as putting the Mario Brothers in a world evolved from dinosaurs or making Street Fighter's Chun-Li a news reporter, but it really does go up there. I feel robbed, even though I never planned to see the movie. Especially since all the promotional stuff for the movie is stuff like "Hell Breaks Loose".

And it doesn't sound like the Rock is the hero in the movie. The hero is actually John Grimm, who's supposed to be the unnamed Marine from the game. The Rock sounds like he's actually more like a villain, who's plotting to kill all the surviving humans in the base. Not what I came to see.

One bright spot. The first-person sequence shown in the trailers actually is in the movie, although it's very brief and doesn't sound like it fits into the context. Now if the whole movie had been filmed that way, that would've been interesting, sort of a Blair Witch-type of thing. Anyway,the reviews make it sound truly horrible, so not missing anything there. My unseen rating: D

3 comments:

Maurice Mitchell said...

Yeah, I feel the same way, although I didn't know all that stuff about the film. In terms of video game adaptations this will go down with Mario Bros as one of the worst. The best? Resident Evil.

glomgold said...

Is that what happened in that Mario Brothers movie?! Bob Hoskins was in that right? I'm glad he's found good roles again.

Nigel G Mitchell said...

Yeah, that's what happened in Mario Bros. That movie stank so bad. King Koopa was a mayor of a dinosaur city played by Dennis Hopper in a suit with cornrows in his hair. It was so far from the game, it didn't make sense. Ugh. Fortunately, Bob Hoskins in "Roger Rabbit" canceled that movie out. John Leguizamo was in it, too, a latino comedian playing an Italian plumber. Only in Hollywood.