Doom

Sci-Fi

Karl Urban	Reaper
The Rock	Sarge
Rosamund Pike	Dr. Grimm
Richard Brake	Portman
Dexter Fletcher	Pinky
Yao Chin	Mac
Deobia Oparei	Destroyer
Sara Houghton	Dr. Jenna Willits
Ian Hughes	Sandford Crosbie
Robert Russel	Dr Carmack
Ben Daniels
Razaaq Adoti
Al Weaver

Director	Andrzej Bartkowiak
Producer	John Wells; Lorenzo di Bonaventura
Writer	Wesley Strick; David Callaham

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