Kathmandu:

In 2005 not many people in America went to the movies. Said actor Heath Ledger, “I feel that a lot of movies that have been presented over the past year have been quite stale, kind of recycling stories.” Professor Toby Miller, author of Global Hollywood said, “Movies will become a specialised event and a great many movies will be released directly to DVD.”

Filmmakers have gone to extraordinary sources to make their movies sell including comics, old television serials and now video games.

Of Doom, it can be said that gamesters will enjoy it more than those of a generation where TV games weren’t a hit. Doom is a game that people are fanatical about and the blood and gore you follow through that film will leave gamers happy and introduce the rest of the world to a best selling video product.

Said critic David Horiuchi, “Get ready to kick some Martian-demon butt in Doom, another entry in the increasingly crowded videogame-to-movie genre. The Rock plays Sarge, the commander of a squad of Marines sent to investigate a disturbance at a scientific research facility on Mars. Among the squad is John Grimm who turns out to have had a previous relationship with Rosamund Pike, the scientist who’s accompanying the Marines in order to retrieve some vital data from the facility. Based on id Software’s legendary first-person shooter, Doom tries its best to look like a game, with dark, angled corridors, ferocious creatures appearing out of nowhere, and a variety of lethal weapons that will, like the aforementioned BFG, warm the cockles of a gamer’s heart. There’s also one memorable sequence that actually turns the movie into a first-person shooter. Also in its favour is that it’s unabashedly R-rated, for the extreme gore that is a trademark of the game. After all, the purpose of the movie is to pack scares and thrills into a setting that gamers will quickly recognise. In that sense, it qualifies as a success.”

Of the acting, I agree with Steven Trautmann of Hollywood.com who says, “First, this isn’t a film that requires much acting. With guns being fired every time someone turns a corner, there isn’t much call for character revelations and tender moments. At least that’s how it must have been pitched to The Rock, because he only covers two emotions in this film: gruff or screaming rage. He pulls it off. Karl Urban, who plays John Grimm aka Reaper, is serviceable in a role that requires him to have, at least, a little depth, more than any of the soldiers. As plucky Samantha Grimm, John’s sister (yeah, nice twist there), Pike runs, frets and figures things out pretty quickly, thank goodness. She and Urban have a nice chemistry as well. Too bad they played brother and sister.”

At the end of the day, the snobbish magazine Sight & Sound writer Alec Worley sounds a rather dismal note when he says, “However, Doom proves yet another of those youth-marketed thrillers (Seed of Chucky, House of Wax, Land of the Dead) so full of casual sadism and gore as to leave you wondering what a movie’s got to do warrant an 18 these days.”

But in all fairness to director Andrzej Bartkowiak, he has kept to game creator James Cameron’s spirit and has added some brilliantly claustrophobic moments through hellish mazes with hellish creatures and has added a savage twist at the end that should keep audiences watching till it comes.