Doom

Today I finally went to see something that I've been "waiting" for the last ten years, when they first announced the coming movie project based on the legendary first person shooter game, Doom. There are a few things I don't understand when doing a movie based on a book or a game - why reinvent the wheel?

We all know what happens if you select a good product and use its parts to deliver a high-quality movie experience by paying attention towards detail and try to find the best compromise of the original content and the possibilities of cinema. Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a good example of doing things correctly and literally by the book. They used the characters, the places and the plot - why can't they do it with Doom for example?

Originally, the game Doom is based on Mars (check) and the main character is a marine some cool Acronym Fighter (I think it was Rapid Response Tactical Squad or some other pseudo-militaristic bull) and the gates of hell open and demons break loose and start laying waste to the unsuspecting mortals, where the main character will slaughter his way to the gates of hell alone with a grim attitude and kill the disciples of Lucifer with a different range of weapons there is some crappy plot twist about a failed genetical experiment with an extra chromosome (with a degree in psychology) from a dead Martian civilization who have created some sort of star gate. Then this Acronym-super-trooper-squad of guys (with idiotic aliases such as "Destroyer" and "Reaper" and they even have massive space rifles that can actually check their ownership and call their masters by their name) go through the gate with the basic symptoms of molecular space travel fly their and get their ass kicked and then the good-bad leader turns worse and the bad-good second guy turns better and they fight and guess which one bites the dust?

So, because of this Resident Evil-ish "surprise" of genetical engineering gone wrong forces the movie makers to redesign everything. Even the whole name of the game and movie lose their meaning, since the word "Doom" holds a lot of biblical meaning, easily allowing the original plot from going on. Especially when the biggest fanboys are old-school Doom-players and were naturally expecting to see the pentagrams and inverted crucifixes and the same monsters. Now we saw the same monsters, but they weren't the foot-soldiers of hell, but they were some old doctors turned evil. Great.

So, by having to invent everything again they cannot produce the same quality because they haven't got the resources for it and it is very probable that someone has done it earlier. And by not using the original content, they make sure that their only fans will tell their friends that the movie sucks. Who's producing these things?

Well, I wasn't expecting anything and I had already heard the bad news - so I can't say I was disappointed. But still the overall quality and the lack of common sense is just very hard to understand in this time of quarterly business and requirement for high profits.

Oh yeah, and my thesis proposal was accepted and I got my thesis supervisor. Seems like the end is truly near :)