Doom
The potential
Massive. As an action horror experience, the Doom series is legendary within gaming, and for good reason. Staggeringly bloody and brutal, particularly for the time of the first game, and dripping with tension and atmosphere, Doom filmed properly could be the new Aliens. Only gorier. And it doesn’t get much better than that.
An epic plot, a terrifying situation in the shape of a remote and lonely space colony beset by the hordes of Hell, and lots of lots of fantastically meaty guns. It should have had gamers and horror fans alike nergasming all over their seats.
What we got
So near and yet so, so far. While we were promised that the Doom movie would be one of the first game movies to take a serious, mature and accurate approach to the adaptation, in truth we only half got that.
Sure, the Doom movie has got a colony overrun by monsters, and some well-armed marines sent in to clean things up, but nearly all the other vital components are missing. It’s pretty bloody (although nowhere near as much as it it should be), but where are all the Doom weapons? Where are all the Doom creatures for that matter? And where the Hell is Hell? Biological contamination is nowhere near as scary, and that key change just about sums up all of the movie’s problems. It’s Doom-lite at best, when it should have been a devastating experience.
