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[Eva02Soul]

For me, personally, the CGI segment was what very narrowly stopped me from dismissing the film as a failed Resident evil clone (all the monsters were viral-infected humans, after all) This bit was the tribute to doom, going all the way back to the originals. A monster around every corner, a selection of big, meaty weapons, a ton of gore and even some chainsaw vs. Pinky action. It was after that point I said 'okay, at least it's doom'

[rlbell]

Originally posted by gregor@Jan 5 2006, 09:39 AM
same here.

i also never understood why they rated it bad.

especially here in my country i hate these film critics. they never understand the gist of movie. Like Doom - it wasn't ment as a broadway show or Gone in the wind movie damn it! the doom is ment as a tribute to DOOM. especially the 1st person sequence.

same like Resident evil - good movie. and then the most stupid thing is when i see movie ratings and then when they are repating the same movie on tv same persons give it different rating (much higher).
Or Mortal combat which really isnt' that bad action movie. they simply rate it low because of their poor knowledge on it's background. to them it's enough that the story is based on computer game or comic book.

C. S. Lewis put his finger right on it when he explained why he would never do a review of a book written in a genre that he disliked. If you do not like the genre of english boarding school fiction, Harry Potter will never please, no matter who writes it. I read two reviews of the film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which were complete opposites. So complete that the only thing that the first reviewer hated (the beaver couple) was the only thing that the other reviewer liked.

How you see a film depends on what you are expecting. Lots of people panned Darkman, and I can understand why. One the important reasons that I enjoyed Darkman was that the friend who recommended it to me said that if I cannot appreciate that it would be a live-action comic book, I should stay away. I can enjoy a good comic book, so I enjoyed the film.

Use or overuse of CGI is not an evil, by itself. It is only a problem when it is done wrong. Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring has a really bad CGI scene when Boromir battle the cave troll. A much more effective shot would have had the badly CGI'd Boromir leap onto the cave troll's shoulder followed by a cut to a blue screened Sean Bean on a tricked up mechanical bull (reminiscent to the fight between Sinbad and the cyclopean centaur in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad [I do not want to talk about the animated greek of the same name, the proper Sinbad is an admirable muslim arab from Scherezade's tales]).

A good film can be a bad film if it is not what the audience expected. The 1998 CGI'd Godzilla was a phenomenal flop, because it betrayed its core target audience. If I am typical of the breed, Godzilla fans do not want to see Juraissic Park. We want to see, and will pay to see, a man in a large rubber suit stomp all over a model city. The Thomas the Tank Engine film got this right when they did not animate the faces of the trains.

I will stop rambling and get back to my point: the review of something depends on whether or not it is the sort of thing that the reviewer likes.

[Chuck the plant]

Originally posted by gregor@Jan 6 2006, 07:11 AM
It did? oh well, i thought macho bullshit, constant action, dark atmosphere, mindless killing, large guns and mosters were all part of Doom - the game. then again i never played Doom 3....

So you mean the obvious lack of the VERY twist that made the games' plot somewhat unique and special didn't even occur to you? You never even thought "now wait a minute, aren't these freaks supposed to be SOULEATING, FLESHTEARING DEMONS FROM HELL and not just another Umbrella-experiment gone wrong?" at least ONCE? :eeeeeh:

Seriously, with ANY OTHER title, the movie would've been an "ok" one (but still full of blatant "Resident Evil"-Ripp offs), but what they made is simply NOT DooM nor does it have ANYTHING to do with the games besides being situated "on Mars"...

[rlbell]

Originally posted by Chuck the plant+Jan 6 2006, 06:03 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Chuck the plant @ Jan 6 2006, 06:03 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-gregor@Jan 6 2006, 07:11 AM
It did? oh well, i thought macho bullshit, constant action, dark atmosphere, mindless killing, large guns and mosters were all part of Doom - the game. then again i never played Doom 3....

So you mean the obvious lack of the VERY twist that made the games' plot somewhat unique and special didn't even occur to you? You never even thought "now wait a minute, aren't these freaks supposed to be SOULEATING, FLESHTEARING DEMONS FROM HELL and not just another Umbrella-experiment gone wrong?" at least ONCE? :eeeeeh:

Seriously, with ANY OTHER title, the movie would've been an "ok" one (but still full of blatant "Resident Evil"-Ripp offs), but what they made is simply NOT DooM nor does it have ANYTHING to do with the games besides being situated "on Mars"... [/b][/quote]
I do not know if Doom was a good film, as I have no interest in seeing it. What made Doom a good video game makes for truly bad cinema. The game was a straightforward, FPS where you are, metaphorically speaking, defending the entry to valhalla against the ice giants (except you might actually win). There is no story line, no developement, just the catharsis of venting all of your pent up anger against everything else in a splatterfest of gore. The reason that you enjoy it is because you are doing it. Watching the film Doom has all of the attraction of watching someone else play the game on hardware you will never be able to afford.

The above is true for me, others may have a different opinion.

[Chuck the plant]

I'm not talking about making the movie EXACTLY like the game. Yet the very background-story could've made for an interesting movie just because of the twist that those beings are neither aliens nor genetic mutants but spawn from hell itself. Of course the movie could and should never begin and end with the hero bashing and shooting armies of enemies and follow him all the while he does it. It's about the idea behind it. And skipping that was the BIGGEST flaw in an already not-so-clever movie project. If one wants to turn a franchise into a movie, one of the WORST ideas is to drop everything that made the franchise interesting and cool and trying to "invent it new". Never worked, never will.

[Mutantmessiah]

I enjoyed the film Sky captain. I thought that it didn't have much story line, but it was good because it cut all the crappy moral stuff. I mean, Sky captain doesn't have a struggle over whether he should kill or not, he just does it. It was the sort of story that if you read in a comic book, you'd dismiss as 'cliched' but as a film it's cool. That's my opinion.

[gufu1992]

um... ...kill what?

[Mutantmessiah]

Kill the villain. I've done some thinking on what i said, and i've revised why i liked it. It's 'cos it's put a new twist on what they've done in films in the past. i.e. They've been to Shangrila in films before. But they haven't been to a computer generated shangrila before. It was ace.

[rlbell]

Originally posted by Chuck the plant@Jan 6 2006, 08:28 PM
I'm not talking about making the movie EXACTLY like the game. Yet the very background-story could've made for an interesting movie just because of the twist that those beings are neither aliens nor genetic mutants but spawn from hell itself. Of course the movie could and should never begin and end with the hero bashing and shooting armies of enemies and follow him all the while he does it. It's about the idea behind it. And skipping that was the BIGGEST flaw in an already not-so-clever movie project. If one wants to turn a franchise into a movie, one of the WORST ideas is to drop everything that made the franchise interesting and cool and trying to "invent it new". Never worked, never will.

The problem here is that it becomes a mixed genre film. People are not necessarily prepared for a science fiction film that includes fantasy elements. The Real Ghostbusters animated series comes closest to doing both simultaneously, and may even have succeeded. Hellboy may also have succeeded. Unfortunately, you cannot easily combine demonic forces and technobabble explanations. As soon as you call demons some monster from another dimension, they are transformed from dark forces of evil to evil aliens/mutants.

While the background story of Hell opening a gate into the physical universe at one of the moons of Mars may have some dramatic possibilities; unless Doom 3 is a lot different from the first two, it is not what inspired a lot of fans to play the game.

Another problem (affecting the entire Science Fiction and Fantasy genres of the art of cinema) is that Hollywood mis-attributes the success of computer games to the flashy graphics and not to the real reason of incorporating engaging storylines into the gameplay. A case in point is Microsoft's Crimson Skies which arranges the campaign on what would make for a very good radio play (nearly a lost art, in itself, saved by the audio book). Action adventure films seem to try to emulate the computer games, instead of provide what the computer game cannot.

While I am on a rant, the worst thing about commercial cinema is that more money is made by merchandising and other tie-ins than the proper cinematic business of getting people to watch the film. The whole point of the pod race in The Phantom Menace was to ensure that there would be an exciting video game associated with the film. The films suffer from the quality of the film going experience being less important than the tie-ins.

[Chuck the plant]

Originally posted by rlbell@Jan 7 2006, 06:21 PM
The problem here is that it becomes a mixed genre film.

Still better and more interesting than that old, cliched and worn-out routine they used instead.