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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very entertaining.., January 20, 2006
Sometimes I marvel that so many people and movie critics expect every film to be Oscar material! Lots of action, fast paced, cool special effects--Doom is a solid, entertaining movie. The Rock and Karl Urban carried the story forward (and provided some nice eye candy to boot).
Are you going to find deep philosophical meaning in it? Only if you're drunk. Can you sit back and let go for a couple of hours? Definitely. Bottom line is if you're a fan of action movies, add this movie to the roster.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
DOOMed to Fail, July 20, 2007
The original video game DOOM had a campy, mishmash plot that just kept piling on conventions from different movie and pulp-fiction genres. You got military contractors screwing around with dangerous technologies. A military spaceship crew decimated by evil baddies. A cigar-chomping marine that turns into a one-man carnage machine. You got mosters drawn from a host of mythologies, muddling about in radioactive waste -- and a secret level full of Nazis thrown in for good measure. Was that enough? Course not. After you progressed a bit, they started tossing in huge helpings of occult silliness too. It was one big, funny cartoon full of irreverently portrayed cliches. All this haphazard, tongue-in-cheek borrowing was fine because it played little role in DOOM or DOOM II. The games were about manual dexterity and rapidly escalating firepower.
Problem is, what is a poor screenwriter or director going to do when asked to make an action movie about a video game that was a farcical treatment of action movies? The fans couldn't possibly be satisfied, and non-gamers would be totally at a loss because there was no way to explain everything and still have time to blow stuff up! So they wrote two storylines: The surface, internally consistent one for people who didn't play the game, with the typical melodramatic humorlessness of an effects movie -- and the hidden storyline in which they showed an appreciation for the game by trying to explain as much of the DOOM mythology as they could: zombies, monsters, alien gates, health packs, restarting levels, one-man carnage machines, death matches, you name it.
Was it brilliant? Uh, no ... but not because they failed to be true to DOOM or because their wall textures didn't include the pentagrams. It just wasn't a great movie. The Rock, Karl Urban, and Rosamund Pike all fell below their average performances (which in The Rock's case is not a terribly impressive par score). There were numerous cheap ploys to gross us out or shock us. Sometimes it rushed through ideas, and sometimes it belabored them. All the usual imperfections found in big-budget flick with a guaranteed audience. But it was better than I expected from a movie whose creators knew that, as an artistic venture, their project was doomed to fail.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Does not deserve its title, April 21, 2006
Being a huge fan of Doom and Doom2 games from Id Software, I was really disappointed when I learned the original game idea - of UAC corporation researching teleportation and accidentally opening portal to Hell - was stripped away from this movie, being replaced with some "genetic experiments gone bad" cliche. I dont want to know who and why decided to change the way it should be, but it just doesnt work. No Cyberdemon in Doom movie? What a shame... This movie does not deserve its title. And without demonspawn from hell - well, it is just another Aliens clone. Do yourself a favor and watch Resident Evil instead - where "genetic experimentation" idea really works. Not to mention that Resident Evil is much better movie overall - no yawning through half of the movie for action to start.
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