Review – Doom

The cut scenes from the game had a better plot. Or at the very least, the plot in the game was clearer and more engaging. Here character motivations are frequently so poorly constructed that it’s hard to believe anyone is doing what they’re doing. Toward the beginning the already-more-or-less-interchangeable Marines get shuffled around so frequently that it’s impossible to keep track of who’s doing what. This problem resolves itself when the monsters start whittling the cast down a bit, but by then it’s already more than a little hard to care about any of the remaining characters. By the end the production breaks down into an extended sequence of first-person-shooter framing followed by that great dark spot endemic to the action movie: the extended hand-to-hand combat sequence. The final result falls well short of the entertainment value of the games (even the old, motion-sickness-inducing versions), and given that the only audience for the movie is probably the game’s fans, I wasn’t exactly surprised to find myself completely alone in the theater just a week or two after the movie’s release. See if desperate