Doom movie won’t suck

Doom movie won’t suck: "Doom movie won’t suck

R-rating, The Rock – how can it fail?

By Marc Ninthly: Mi�rcoles 20 Julio 2005, 13:43
WOLFENSTEIN 3D, Doom and Doom II all helped ruin my social life. In return, they expanded my knowledge of modern weaponry (real and imagined), my ability to stare unblinking at a screen for 14 hours, led to bladder control of heroic proportions and nurtured an inexplicable lust to kill computer-generated foes.

After six or seven hours of intense carnage, they also made me very jumpy and caused weeks of dreams in which I’d often work out how to clear a particularly difficult level. So strong was the pull of Doom that these solutions would be tried out immediately on waking, before dashing out the door breakfast-less, for the drudgery of public transport and arriving late to work. Despite all this ‘wasted time’, I’ve rarely felt that same pumped-up, edge-of-the-seat, checking over my shoulder in the dark, kind of excitement as I did with the Doom family. And now we have a movie due in a few months.

While I initially felt a little flutter of excitement at the prospect of seeing my old friends like the Baron of Hell on the big screen, it was swamped by memories of other game-to-movie releases. My joy withered and disappeared faster than the pop career of an ex-member of S Club 7. I endured torturous flashbacks of Super Mario Bros, Tomb Raider, Wing Commander, Resident Evil, Double Dragon, Street Fighter and Mortal Combat. When I finished weeping, I just erased the Doom movie from my short-term memory and quashed any fledgling hope of something half decent for a number of reasons.

Movies provide you with a big concentrated dose of entertainment in a short span of time. Even my favourite movies - and I really like my home cinema - only get aired about twice a year. This doesn’t include re-watching favourite bits but on the whole we are looking at no more than six hours each a year.

Compare that to what a game offers. Weeks of intense, single-minded effort and time-wasting coupled with scouring the Web for forums and virtual friends for help, new maps, mods and walkthroughs. Then after a year, you take it out again and willingly put yourself through it all again. Then come the add-on packs, followed by a whole new game. A movie can never really compete with any of that. So, having forgotten Doom the Movie, I now see reports that it may not actually suck after all. Why?

Well, it seems that they have based the story – loosely – on Doom 3 and it’s going to be ‘Over 18s-only’. This means that you too will end up watching it alongside some pimply 12-year olds. At the recent San Diego Comic Con, games critics from Gamecloud got a preview of early footage and are now saying it might not be too bad. They even got to see a scene shot from the first-person perspective with magazines being slotted into guns before braving corridors overrun with demon spawn. While this is a great nod to the gaming fraternity, they also tried the ‘game-feel’ thing with Alien Vs Predator which proved to be more annoying than anything else.

The Rock, that amiable monster from wrestling takes on the role of Sarge while Karl Urban has shed his hippie Lord of the Rings locks for the lead role of John Grimm. And haven’t we all been John Grimm at one time or another? Still, despite all the good vibes, I can’t help but think that they’ll screw it up. The CGI, like Resident Evil, will be hokey, the script will be sub-Aliens and that by the time it comes out, that reassuring R-rating will have been watered down by some greedy, hand-wringing studio producer desperate to suck the cash from a younger teen audience. Even Tomb Raider, fronted by fat-lip Jolie, proved a limp affair. I truly hope that I’m wrong but most of the signs so far indicate that movies based on games are rubbish. Even if Doom the Movie beats the odds and turns out OK, it still won’t be a patch on the thrill of the games. It will probably help shift a few million more of them though and that’s always a good thing."

Articulo publicado en The Inquierer.net