Movies to Avoid - DOOM

I remember 1994 for a number of reasons.

In my final undergraduate year of university, one strange night I was ushered to the campus, following a few gin and tonics (or "dinner" as it was known). A group of us were taken to the PC Lab by a friend, and seated at a computer.

What then followed was a three hour networked game of Doom. I had played Wolfenstein 3D, but this was... different. With the headphones on I was immersed in a frantic, desperate battle with not only monsters of a variety of temperaments and facial / bodily disfigurements, but also my friends. There was this strange satisfaction associated with hunting down friends, "camping" and patiently taking them out with a pulse rifle or RPG. The BFG was fun, but required timing and finesse to aim it properly. That winter, in Christchurch, we built borrowed network cards and found ways to hook up our own PCs and play. I have nostalgic memories of watching the X-Files, playing Doom and listening to techno. I even had nightmares about it, and started strafing in everyday life so as to avoid being taken by surprise.

AND SO... I avoided Doom the Movie for personal reasons more than anything. It turns out, with good reason.

First of all, The Rock. I have never seen a film with him before. The overwhelming impression to me was that he looked like quite a nice guy. On several occasions during the film I could picture myself having a beer with him. Nice teeth, healthy looking, happy sort of guy. Why would anyone consider this man threatening? He can't act, so we need some sort of visual cue to be scared of him. The man looks like he shaves when ever the camera pans away from his face. Dull. Uninspiring.

Karl Urban. This guy is a serious actor with a lower case "s". Don't get me wrong, I like all of his acting, generally. I fear for him becoming typecast into roles where he only needs one expression.

The pointless woman character who is an archaeologist, who provides the weakest of plot points, who performs autopsies. What was that all about? At least Ripley strapped on her phalluses (phalli), stripped down to her singlet, looked smelly and mucked in with the lads.

The plot and action were stolen from Aliens. Given that Doom the game stole from this in the first place, this was a bit pointless.

Stan Winston's creature shop were involved in the making of the man-in-suit-demons, and admittedly the 5 or so that we saw looked pretty cool. I couldn't have disagreed more with Mr. Rock when he said how much better the men in suits looked than CGI. If any film needed CGI, Doom would have been an obvious choice. The monsters themselves were few and far between. Where were the legions of Satanic monsters? What were those zombies about? They were boring and pointless. Why couldn't they have stuck to the one man versus Hell 'storyline'.

So to cut a long story short, this film stole almost two hours of my life that I will never get back.

Think about it.