Samus Aran

The movie starts out very strong. From a gritty opening scene onward, a fast pace is set. The plot remains strong for the first 3/4 of the movie: plenty of mystery, decent suspense in several scenes, and very nice character development.

The problems I have with this movie start to show up during the last 25 minutes or so. The Hollywood cliché machine goes into overdrive, they start playing the "you're supposed to feel *this* now" mood music, and dip deeply into the vat of cheesy lines and horribly predictable plot developments.

I don't know how a movie with such a strong start and middle could flop so painfully in the final leg of the race. While I haven't looked into it, it seems like there was a decent novel in place that was rewritten into a screenplay by a band of roving Hollywood monkeys.

It was great to see Nicole Kidman in this movie, her acting was excellent, and she played a very different character than in any of her other movies. Sean Penn was also very good in this film.

The problems arise when the Hollywood movie machine try to include a "love interest" in every single film, even when it is completely and utterly out of place. This was a political suspense/mystery. It was about power corrupting even the cleanest of souls. This is hardly a new story concept, it is ages old, but it is a good story concept. Why they suddenly turned this around part way through the movie and started building a lopsided love interest is beyond me, it made no sense.

I guess they assume that everyone going to a movie with a popular actor and actress in it want to see them together, even if it doesn't relate to the presented plot at all.

I was rating this movie an 8.0 out of 10.0 for the first three quarters of the film, but once it started up the clichéd mood music and made the ending overly predictable, I couldn't justify rating it more than a 5.0 or 6.0 out of 10.0.

This movie is an average action film, with no relation to the Doom series of video games other than having a corporation called UAC being stationed on Mars and running into some monstrous problems.

The video game was heavy on violence, but more importantly it was heavy on frantic, despair-laced fight for life while being oppressed by the forces of hell. In this movie, there is no portal which is opened to Hell. There are no demons. There is no brave soldier out to save the Earth. There are no bodies found skewered, crucified or tortured. There are no rocket launchers, plasma or chain guns.

The five minute scene of the movie wherein it is in first-person was poorly done. The combination of musical selection and the way the camera moved quickly but without any up/down movement (even the original Doom game had the screen bob up and down to make it feel like you were walking) made the first-person scene seem to be a guy at a carnival shooting gallery, or on a trip through the Fun House. It felt entirely fake, pre-scripted, set on a path and dull. I was looking forward to the first-person scene, and was completely disappointed, except for the last scene with the robotic demon (from Doom III, which I was not a fan of at all).

All the writers/directors have done here is to take the name "UAC", the planet "Mars", and write themselves a generic humans-turning-into-zombies action flick ... and as an action flick, it wasn't entirely bad. Some of the characters were interesting, bits and pieces of the action were fun to watch, so I give it a 5 out of 10.

However, in the field of a video game adaptation, it fails completely. There is none of the heart and soul of Doom in here at all.