My local cinema has a great deal. If you have a lifetime membership to Hostelling International, you get the $4.25 senior’s/children’s ticket price. That means it costs roughly 1/3rd the price of a ticket at somewhere like the Paramount Festival Square to catch a film. Michelle and I have been seeing more films as a result. While none really blew us away, we’d caught some watchable flicks like Serenity and Elizabethtown.
On Friday, I thought Michelle was going to go to yoga, so I decided to catch DOOM. The Hallowe’en spirit, its cheaper to catch it now than on DVD, I need to get out of the house more; all that.
I’m not going to review this movie. In general, I don’t review movies; I’m not great at it. And far snarkier people than I have had at it already. Suffice it to say I’ve only seen one movie worse than this one: Austin Powers in Goldmember. (How that got a higher Tomatometer reading, i couldn’t tell you. Maybe it got better after I left about 2/3rds of the way through.) I went in with really low expectations, and they didn’t even manage that.
It is so terribly underdeveloped. It has the generic skeleton of a scifi horror, but they forgot to flesh out the parts between guys with guns running from one location of Olduvai to another. Basically the movie works like this: guy sees something, tries to kill it, it gets away from him. He calls everyone, they run over there. The Rock tells them to stay in a location. Someone walks away for a dumb reason, and is killed. Rinse, repeat. They took out the Hell stuff, the Burtrugeur-esque character is called Dr. Carmack, haw-haw, and they bit the Resident Evil T-Virus thing to create the Zombies. They open with a hackneyed character development scene in the barracks that plays like a cheesey version of the opening of Predator with the special ops guys in the helicopter. They do the lockdown in medlab like in Aliens. And, yes, there’s a couple of minutes of terrible First Person Shooter perspective crap that features the most killable pinky ever.
With movie tickets generally going for $12, and the DOOM 3 and RoE games going used for about $20, there is absolutely no reason to go see this movie. If you really want an hours worth of DOOM entertainment, you’d have a better experience with the shareware levels of the original DOOM played with Doomsday.
(As an aside, I caught The Rock on The Daily Show last week. He flat-out lied about what was in the movie. That really bugged me. He knew that he was being gawked at by a bunch of gamers, and said what they wanted to hear. Not fair, Mr Johnson. You’ve come so far into the mainstream, and people are starting to respect you. I loathe the WWE, but have enjoyed you in a number of flicks, particularly Be Cool. Don’t pull this; you’ll squander the credibility you’ve worked so hard to get.)