I saw it tonight. It was everything I expected it to be: A cheesy action thriller. It was pretty well done, in my opinion. Building up to the action parts took a little longer than I’d hoped, and the FPS section of the movie didn’t last for very long (About 5 or 10 minutes), but it was still fine.
One thing that irked me was where all the baddies came from. It would have made a much better game, in my opinion, to have them coming straight from hell rather than genetic mutations. Genetic mutations are so cliche.
I’m thankful that it turned out that the girl was just our protagonist’s estranged sister, rather than ex-lover. I hate when action movies include romantic sub-plots.
And I’d like to say that even if I hadn’t seen The Rock’s interview on the Daily Show last night (which was hillarious), I would have seen his mutation coming a mile away. But it was still fun. I just wish he’d have turned into an even bigger demon than he had.
The Rock seems like a pretty nice guy whenever I’ve seen interviews. On “The Daily Show”, he brought the prop for the BFG 9000 with him, to Stewart’s delight; turns out Jon Stewart has put in plenty of hours playing Doom.
I saw it last night. I thought the FPS section lasted way, way too long… And I love first-person-shooters.
Other than that… Well, it wasn’t good. But as long as you can turn your brain off, it’s a decent waste of an hour and a half.
Although my faourite parts were where they were making fun of other horror movies.
I fell down the hole!
Was this typecasting? The Rock has been a mutation for a long time. 
I finally saw it yesterday. It was fun.
One thing though, I think the Rock was miscast. I just can’t get behind Dwayne being the bad guy. IMO he just doesn’t put out that kind of vibe. Even when he’d use the word “Fuck” it just seemed terribly unnatural coming out of his mouth. I was never a wrestling fan, but I’ve always been semi-impressed by the Rock’s work in film, especially his work in The Run Down. I’m not saying he’s Dustin Hoffman or anything, but he’s doing pretty well for a wrestler come actor. And even in Doom, he did OK, but I think maybe Vin Deisel (who’s got more of a “bad guy” look to him) would have been a better fit.
I was pretty disappointed. And I was expecting - heck, hoping - for major suckitude. But it couldn’t even deliver that. It was mostly just dull. I wanted over-the-top action: what I got was more of a limbo. The bar for this movie was very, very low, and it still managed to crawl under it.
I mean, this is Doom. It’s based on the definitive first person shooter. I’ll say that again: first person shooter. How does it end? With a wrestling match. What the hell?
Then there’s the big black guy with the chaingun. He fires it once in the entire movie. At what? A fuckin’ rhesus monkey. You don’t introduce a chaingun into a cheesy sci-fi action movie, and only use it to shoot a monkey! It’s, like, a law or something!
Also, losing the satanic stuff? Big mistake. Genetic engineering is tired, but Lucifer never gets old. Besides, it just isn’t Doom if you don’t feel like you’re stuck in the cover of a Dio album. Mostly, though, the whole devil thing is a transparent excuse to run around blowing shit the fuck up. Changing that excuse to genetic engineering doesn’t add anything: it just swaps one stupid excuse for action with an equally stupid excuse. How did that make the movie better? I went along with it for a little while, because I assumed they were setting up giving one of the characters a berzerk pack at the end. Which I guess is what was supposed to be happening with Karl Urban in his big fight with the Rock at the end, but even that was anemic. I know I was just bitching about ending the movie with a wrestling match and not a shoot-out, but if they were going to go that route, they could have done so much more with it. Have Urban run around, ripping the limbs off of zombies. Have him punch the Rock through a wall. Goddammit, break some shit! All he did was throw the Rock a little farther than one might ordinarily expect.
The first person scene was painfully lame. That wasn’t an FPS, that was a carnival funhouse. Goddammit, the zombies were popping up in front of him and laughing! Zombies don’t laugh, they eat your fucking brains! I did like the chainsaw fight with Pinky, though. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the idea of the FPS scene, just with the execution. They had Pinky sitting there with a bank of video monitors watching the troops. They could have used that for the FPS stuff, and it would have worked great. There could be a little health/armor/ammo counter in the corner that gets steadily depleted. Would have been a much cooler nod to the original game.
Speaking of which, naming the scientists after id staff is not clever. Nobody cares about Adrian Carmack, okay? John Romero is not a celebrity. It’s a minor point, but it bugged me that there was this apparent expectation that the gamer audience would somehow think this was a cool “in-joke” for the gamers in the audience. It’s not. Nobody gives a shit about those dweebs.
Gah. I could go on and on, and that’s not even including the stupid stuff that didn’t bother me, like giving your super-human immortality serum to a deranged, screaming mass murderer, or the Rock inexplicably turning evil at the end of the second act. That’s the sort of stupid shit they throw into these sorts of movies just to set up big fights. That’s cool. That’s expected. I wanted the movie to be stupid. What I wasn’t expecting was for it to be so incompetent.