DOOM

SYNOPSIS:
After a laboratory chief sends an SOS to Earth, a Rapid Response Team is sent to Mars where they discover that genetic scientists have been experimenting with chromosomes that led to mutations. Mutants have begun a killing spree, but they also infect some humans who in turn mutate. The Sarge (The Rock) leads the team, which includes John Grimm (Karl Urban), whose sister Samantha (Rosamund Pike) is a scientist at the facility.

Review by Andrew L. Urban:
If this had been made as a spoof of the 1950s black and white sci-fi horror films, complete with hokey effects, it might have been fun, what with the clash of zombie and sci-fi and mad scientist elements. We might have had actors like Christopher Lee, Johnny Depp, George Clooney and Emma Thompson camping it up for a silly gore fest with a moral.

Played straight (with Robert Russell, Karl Urban, The Rock and Rosamund Pike) the film still ends up as a silly gore fest, but there is zero camping up and scarcely enough sense to carry a moral message. Entirely derivative, Doom is made to look like any other sci fi action horror film - or rather, it's made from bits of many of them. And still you might be bored. Unless you’re a huge fan of the video game on which it is based.

Most of the action takes place underground on Mars, in what appear to be sewers imported form Paris or New York. The soldiers of the RRT carry old fashioned retro guns that are the size of a small tank, even though technology (in the second half of this century) can beam the team from Earth to Mars via a portal that works on goo. The action is staged in darkness and shot hand held, so everything is a flurry of body parts, some of them attached to bodies.

In the latter stages, there is a sequence that is exactly like an electronic game, the camera taking the POV of the game player; we see the gun 'we' carry at the bottom of the frame, as it blasts a stream of zombie-like creatures ahead.

So that's market the film is aiming at, not us movie fans who would have preferred something entertaining to get our cinematic teeth into.