‘Doom’ unfaithful to lore, but decent movie

I was watching the “Doom” from 2005 starring the Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the lead roles a while back, and towards the end of the movie, I came to the realization that it’s not that bad of a movie.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are more than a few aspects of the movie that are handled poorly, especially with how they made Johnson’s character the ultimate villain of the film in a ham-fisted way towards the end of the movie.

The first major problem with DOOM that I saw was that it’s not really a horror movie. It doesn’t actually do a good job of instilling horror or fear into viewers, and in that sense it fails. Given that, it really just becomes an action movie, without any sense of horror despite the presences of zombies and monsters killing people left and right.

So maybe using practical monster suits wasn’t such a good idea. Still I have to say that the suits themselves did look impressive but it reveals another problem. The opposite of bad CGI and special effects, namely bad practical effects to the point that you can tell it is a suit. So maybe a combination of both would have solvedthis issue.

As for the script itself, it’s not bad, but as I mentioned above, the twists and turns required to make “The Rock” the villain ultimately degrade the movie and completely change the focus.

If they really tried and reviewed the script, they could have avoided this problem completely by making the end of the movie just the few marines left clearing the base filled with monsters and zombies with a showdown at the end against a massive monster. It sound lame, but it would have being much better than what they did to Johnson’s character in the movie. For example, building on my suggestion above they could have had a three way fight between Karl Urban, “The Rock”, and one final monster for the climax of the movie.

This leads to the next point: Why did they decide to change the background lore into something completely different? It doesn’t really make sense, considering that the games themselves are about a single badass marine fighting through hell to save humanity. In many ways, the basic plot of the movie still mirrors that of the first game broadly but after a while, and especially at the end, the changes made only leave viewers confused.

Still, overall, it’s not a bad movie despite these problems and hopefully they do make a much better “Doom” movie in the future that is more faithful to the games.