I’ll save you the suspense (you’ll need to bring some of your own to the movie) – it’s not terrible! Neither is it particularly unmissable, but it’s at least an different twist on the game’s plot.
How does it stack up against other video game movies? Let’s look at Doom in comparison – I’ll rank ’em as I see ’em.
Doom
Final Fantasy
Mortal Kombat
Resident Evil
Street Fighter/Super Mario Bros (these just go below anything released)
It’s a tough call whether Doom was better than Final Fantasy. As I’m more invested in Doom from my recent relationship with Doom 3, I’ll give it the edge on this one. FF was an amazing technical achievement, but the characters were lifeless, which is something you’d have to give the Doom cast over them (at least at first).
So what happens in Doom? Well, Aliens, only with hellish creatures. I say hell-ish because there aren’t any fireballs here. That’s right: one fireball in the movie, and it’s not from an Imp.
Acting: As you’d expect for an action movie with The Rock in it. Karl Urban’s lips look funny. The rest of the cast do a reasonably passable job, and I actually found myself rooting for them (especially the creepy Opus Dei type), not that it did them much good.
Now I’d love to be able to come across as a sensitive new-age guy, or even a caring understanding nineties type, but for my hard-earned dosh, there were two standout stars in this movie: Rosamund Pike’s boobs. While her Yank accent was slightly unconvincing, they stole every scene they appeared in. And just when you thought they’d given the performance of their career, they’d kick it up a notch. Or a couple of notches. So to speak. This will be the movie for which they’ll be remembered most fondly.
The first person sequence near the end of the movie is just… weird.
So, to see it at the movies, or wait for the DVD release? Well, you won’t be missing anything on the smaller screen, and I wouldn’t be averse to owning it.
Overall: three stars out of five as a mindless action movie with some mildly interesting plot developments that you won’t see coming from the game. And that makes you want to hop back into Doom 3 for some righteous blasting.
I think that Rosamund was wearing some kind of nipple prosthetic, or it was very very cold at all times during the shooting of the movie.
Here is an earlier photo showing a significant size difference, so I guess it is not just the nipples that were prosthetic.
Nah, I think that was about right for bra-less. Don’t think there was any Augmentation Technologie at work there.