With a kick-start from The Rock, 'Doom' roars to life

Friday, October 21, 2005

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Whether "Doom" is the best movie ever made from a video game is a matter best left to endless debate in Internet chat rooms and video arcades. In many respects, it's a more inventively executed version of previous such adaptations: a diminishing group of well-armed soldiers blast away at monsters in a confined setting.

MOVIE REVIEW

DOOM

DIRECTOR: Andrzej Bartkowiak

CAST: Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, The Rock

RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes

RATING: R for strong violence/gore and language

GRADE: C+

LINKS/TRAILERS
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PHOTO GALLERY

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In this case, it's a squad of hardened Marines led by life-size action figure The Rock (as the fanatically driven Sarge) and generic, ruggedly good-looking leading man Karl Urban (as the tormented but dedicated John Grimm, aka Reaper) in a research lab on Mars under attack by something mighty big, powerful and angry.

The problem with most video-game movies is that you're stuck watching someone else play on the big screen. "Doom" manages to take the essential concepts, parameters and action of the game universe and create a story around them that works on its own terms.

That those terms are essentially B-movie cliches whipped together with scientific gobbledygook about ancient Martians, genetic manipulation and a mysterious 24th chromosome that is transmitted like a virus and turns some people superhuman, some into rampaging demons, and the rest into zombies (or, in practical terms, cannon fodder) seems beside the point.

For action fans, director Andrzej Bartkowiak delivers the requisite mayhem with a little more creativity than usual. For video gamers, he delivers the trademark first-person shooter (aka kill-cam) perspective during a search-and-destroy monster hunt rampage, complete with whiplash camera thrashing and driving techno score.

"Doom" may be by the numbers, with a roll call of colorful types systematically exterminated while The Rock entertains with cartoonish expressions and reactions (the closest the film comes to personality). But those numbers add up to the most cleverly engineered video-game movie made to date.