I saw the Doom movie this afternoon and I have to give it seven thumbs up. Lots of shooting and very little plot — just the way I like it. It was the best movie I’ve seen today and the best videogame movie ever. The only flaw was that they had Eomer beat the Rock. Yeah, as if!
From a scholarly point of view, the most interesting thing about the film was the closing credits. For the unfortunate few who have not yet seen the film yet, during the first part of the end credits they show a FPS-style clip where a gun runs around shooting the credits. What made it so interesting was that the graphics of the clip were of very low quality. It was some sort of psuedo-wireframe animation that almost looked like the Doom 3 game without the textures. I found it very interesting that in order to have the end credits “look like a game” they had to make the graphics look significantly worse than the graphics of the actual game. Presumably, if they had just done some sort of machinima with the Doom 3 engine, it wouldn’t have had the “look” they wanted. The graphics of the game seemingly didn’t match the conception of what the filmmakers thought a game should look like.
Another feature of the film of interest (but of less interest to me since I heard about it going in) was the first-person sequence. It was a neat gimmic, but I kept wondering of the logic of it. Why were we seeing things form his point of view? Why did we stop seeing things from that perspective? There also seemed to be a couple times when there seemed to be cuts in the shot, so that it wasn’t all in one take, which distracted from the gimmic for me.
Anyway, the film is plain mindless fun. You do like things that are fun, don’t you?