There are a handful of other examples - who can forget Alex Murphy awakening in his new body in Robocop, or Arnold scanning the area in Terminator? - but most shots before Doom were from a fixed position, making the perspective easier to express. The sequence doesn’t feel quite like a movie or a video game - the best thing I can compare it to is one of those amusement park rides with big screens and moving chairs. Doom departs from “found footage” flicks like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, which work with the conceit that the characters are always holding cameras to record the action, and instead translates the intense action of the video game into a direct cinematic equivalent.ĭirector Andrzej Bartkowiak, a Polish cinematographer who shot films like The Verdict, Speed and Species and then shifted to making his own action movies ( Romeo Must Die, Exit Wounds), made moviegoers feel like they were inside our Doomguy’s head as he blasted through corridors, massacred tons of zombies and confronted an iconic Pinky creature. The sequence lasts a little over five minutes - an excruciatingly long time to maintain a first-person perspective - and was absolutely the high point of the throwaway IP cash-in. When he wakes up, the camera zooms into his eye and whips around, and all of a sudden we’re seeing everything from his point of view as he rampages through the facility.Ģ5 years later, Doom's legacy is its human connection But the final stretch of mayhem gets weird when an injection of experimental serum knocks out Urban’s Grimm. The majority of Doom plays out as a standard mid-2000s action flick, with lots of CGI that’s not quite up to snuff and wisecracks that don’t land despite Johnson’s easy charisma. The movie follows the game’s plot pretty clearly, with hapless scientists accidentally unleashing a horde of grotesque monsters - in this case mutated humans, not actual demons from Hell - in their search for cheap energy. A pre-superfame Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Karl Urban were cast to play the two male leads, “Sarge” Mahonin and “Reaper” Gimm, Marines sent to face off with brutal foes in cramped Martian hallways. to capitalize on the forthcoming, much-hyped Doom 3. Universal Picturesĭevelopment on the Doom movie began in 2003, with the project eventually fast-tracked by Warner Bros. On the original game’s 25th anniversary, one specific sequence from the film - when the camera breaks away from traditional filming styles to recreate the first-person perspective - is a reminder of what id Software accomplished with nascent 3D graphics and the computing power of MS-DOS. If this one couldn’t make the jump to the big screen what could? In many ways, Doom was the archetypal video game movie - a legendary franchise brought to life and chock full of action. This wasn’t an easy task in every medium. PCs now had an action genre that consoles couldn’t compete with a keyboard and mouse could deliver precise aiming at a frantic pace.ĭoom was a phenomenon that spawned multiple sequels, ports, a legendary comic book and eventually a feature film, each one trying to carry the legacy of that first-person experience forward. Reaper and his sis then ride the elevator up to the light as the movie ends.There were other first-person shooters before 1993’s Doom - developer id Software’s own Wolfenstein 3D, for example - but no game captured the zeitgeist quite like John Romero, John Carmack and Tom Hall’s descent into Martian hell. Essentially, “paper” beats “The Rock” as Sarge is hurdled back through the Ark and dies with the burst of a grenade. Sarge is now slowing becoming a monster from being bitten in the neck, so a final battle between the two ensues. Reaper then becomes a super human soldier, slaying every monster/zombie in sight in FPS-mode until he comes across his final obstacle- Sarge. With a bullet wound in the gut and the zombies closing in, Samantha gives her brother an injection of the serum with the 24th chromosome in order to save his life. Following the killing of surviving civilians and the death of The Kid at the hands of Sarge, Duke dies as he gets pulled through a vent in the floor and Sarge is dragged off by a horde of zombies. Sarge, Reaper, The Kid, Duke, and Samantha Grimm (Reaper’s sister) follow it back through the Ark to find savagely killed civilians everywhere. Eventually, one of the monsters makes it through the Ark and back to Earth. The marines sent to the Martian outpost are slowly eliminated as the source of the havoc is slowly revealed: the scientists working there played god as they manually added a serum to a condemned con that would give him Chromosome 24 (when a humanoid has this extra chromosome, they either become a super human or a monster…the deciding factor for which depends on if the person has psychotic tendencies).
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