Coming out on Blu-Ray this week is the special edition of Doom, a movie that proves that sometimes, all you need is a name.
Only vaguely resembling the video game, Doom plants us squarely on Mars, along with a half-squad of Space Marines who’ve been sent to investigate recent disturbances at the Union Aerospace Corporation’s facility there. What’s causing the disturbances? Why, what else but a series of genetically engineered horrors!
For those of you who thought that demons were actually causing the problems on Mars in the Doom universe, well, you’re not alone. This is only one of several discrepancies between the original game and the movie.
This isn’t to say, of course, that Doom isn’t a fun and fairly exciting little piece of fluff. There’s lots of gunplay and explosions and big creepy nasties roaming around and getting blasted. There’s a sequence toward the end that’s almost exactly like the video game, in a fairly clever homage. But no one’s ever going to mistake this for an Oscar candidate, or anything more than a mediocre action film featuring nothing less than The Rock. The Rock is very familiar with cheesy action film.
And can we ever smell what The Rock is cooking…no pancakes this time, but rather a half-baked warmed-over leftover of a movie.
