Doom
Ages: All Ages

I never enjoyed Doom so much as having "The Rock" handle the shooting while I rested my sweet thumbs. I mostly don't do shooters and so I was curious how Universal was going to port Doom> to the screen. They did an OK job.

It is a tense sci-fi movie about some monster thing getting loose on an experimental laboratory complex in space. Good sets -- long corridors, blue-lit dark spaces, screams, machine gun fire, occasional red splotches, and dark things with long talons lurking and attacking. Doesn't seem like a FPS until about ten minutes before the end when the first person view with gun takes over and then there is lots of fragging.

Music helps increase the tension. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays Sarge, the team commander credibly barking orders and keeping to the mission's plan -- to use extreme force to secure the station. The characters, Duke, Destroyer,Goat and the Kid are well developed and it's is hard to see them pass on.

The monsters are a cross between squirmy aliens and vampires. A neck bite turns you into a raving super-human ghoul on a rampage to kill the uninfected humans. Cheeze -- why can't we all just get along.

Reviewed by: Editor - 02/06