Product Description

A FRANTIC CALL FOR HELP FROM A REMOTE RESEARCH STATION ON MARSSENDS A TEAM OF MERCENARY MARINES INTO ACTION. THE DESCEND INTO THE OLDUVAI RESEARCH STATION, WHERE THEY FIND A LEGION OF NIGHTMARISH CREATURES, LURKING IN THE DARKNESS, KILLING AT WILL.BASED ON THE HUGELY POPULAR VIDEO GAME.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12642 in DVD
• Brand: UNI DIST CORP. (MCA)
• Released on: 2006-02-07
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 113 minutes

Amazon.com
Grab your BFG and get ready to kick some Martian-demon butt in Doom, another entry in the increasingly crowded videogame-to-movie genre. The Rock plays Sarge, the commander of a squad of Marines sent to investigate a disturbance at a scientific research facility on Mars. Among the squad is John Grimm (Karl Urban, who played Eomer in The Lord of the Rings), who turns out to have had a previous relationship with Samantha (Rosamund Pike, Die Another Day), the scientist who's accompanying the Marines in order to retrieve some vital data from the facility. Based on id Software's legendary first-person shooter, Doom tries its best to look like a game, with dark, angled corridors, ferocious creatures appearing out of nowhere, and a variety of lethal weapons that will, like the aforementioned BFG, warm the cockles of a gamer's heart. There's also one memorable sequence that actually turns the movie into a first-person shooter; the good news is that in the context of the whole film, it's not quite as goofy as it might have been. And that's not a bad frame of reference for the film in general. Considering the game-to-movie field includes such duds as Wing Commander, if you go into Doom with low expectations, you'll probably find it a surprisingly respectable horror/sci-fi thriller in the Resident Evil vein (including its somewhat obligatory subplot of corporate wrongdoing). Also in its favor is that it's unabashedly R-rated, for the extreme gore that is a trademark of the game. After all, the purpose of the movie is to pack scares and thrills into a setting that gamers will quickly recognize. In that sense, it qualifies as a success. --David Horiuchi

Customer Reviews

Very entertaining..
Sometimes I marvel that so many people and movie critics expect every film to be Oscar material! Lots of action, fast paced, cool special effects--Doom is a solid, entertaining movie. The Rock and Karl Urban carried the story forward (and provided some nice eye candy to boot).

Are you going to find deep philosophical meaning in it? Only if you're drunk. Can you sit back and let go for a couple of hours? Definitely. Bottom line is if you're a fan of action movies, add this movie to the roster.

fun
This one still boggles me!
I read the finicky reviews and was not expecting anything decent but it wasn't so bad!
Yeah at times I was thinking "why did these people film this? Did they need money?" because it is based on a game and has its own world, it does not follow what we on Earth would call a story taken from life.

The special effects were rough at times and made me think that whoever did Pac Man was still doing his work on this movie, but since it's based on a game I took it with a grain of salt. The creatures were pretty wild and I like "alien chase on starship" whether under water, in outer space or on a Moon type of a movie.

I liked how certain characters, without spoiling anything, changed sides and there were a few nice plot twists. Karl Urban and surprisingly the dude known as The Rock were pretty good in this one.

Fun movie to see, but it's not deep soulful or Oscar nominee material.
Pretty much eye candy, but overall better than I expected.

DOOMed to Fail
The original video game DOOM had a campy, mishmash plot that just kept piling on conventions from different movie and pulp-fiction genres. You got military contractors screwing around with dangerous technologies. A military spaceship crew decimated by evil baddies. A cigar-chomping marine that turns into a one-man carnage machine. You got mosters drawn from a host of mythologies, muddling about in radioactive waste -- and a secret level full of Nazis thrown in for good measure. Was that enough? Course not. After you progressed a bit, they started tossing in huge helpings of occult silliness too. It was one big, funny cartoon full of irreverently portrayed cliches. All this haphazard, tongue-in-cheek borrowing was fine because it played little role in DOOM or DOOM II. The games were about manual dexterity and rapidly escalating firepower.

Problem is, what is a poor screenwriter or director going to do when asked to make an action movie about a video game that was a farcical treatment of action movies? The fans couldn't possibly be satisfied, and non-gamers would be totally at a loss because there was no way to explain everything and still have time to blow stuff up! So they wrote two storylines: The surface, internally consistent one for people who didn't play the game, with the typical melodramatic humorlessness of an effects movie -- and the hidden storyline in which they showed an appreciation for the game by trying to explain as much of the DOOM mythology as they could: zombies, monsters, alien gates, health packs, restarting levels, one-man carnage machines, death matches, you name it.

Was it brilliant? Uh, no ... but not because they failed to be true to DOOM or because their wall textures didn't include the pentagrams. It just wasn't a great movie. The Rock, Karl Urban, and Rosamund Pike all fell below their average performances (which in The Rock's case is not a terribly impressive par score). There were numerous cheap ploys to gross us out or shock us. Sometimes it rushed through ideas, and sometimes it belabored them. All the usual imperfections found in big-budget flick with a guaranteed audience. But it was better than I expected from a movie whose creators knew that, as an artistic venture, their project was doomed to fail.