Doom Teaser 1

Starring: The Rock

Why is it that every time there is news of a sequel to a popular videogame series, there is excitement and every time there is an announcement for its big screen adaptation, people cringe? Video game movies have a bad rep and rightly so. In the best case scenario, they only serve as guilty pleasures but more often than not, the adaptations are just terrible and the news of a new production underway for an iconic game such as Doom only lead fans to believe that their precious game will not see the fair and proper treatment that it deserves.

Comicon came and went and with it, it brought to the public its first video glimpse of Doom starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. I’m a big fan of The Rock. He is a decent actor and more than anything, I would wish to see him take the mantle of the ‘next big action star’. But I fear that this movie may not do him justice. What I glimpsed this morning in the trailer did not leave me very happy. But all is not lost.

The trailer follows the standard pattern of most horror movies. It tells us of the situation, then something going completely wrong followed by the reconnaissance team coming in to clean up the mess. But surprise surprise, the team runs into problems of its own. While the trailer follows the standard pattern mentioned above, it does differentiate itself in a few ways. Unlike other horror trailers that spend a portion of the time setting up before revealing the horrific event that enlightens us that everything went wrong, this trailer spends only a fraction of its time and goes straight to the meat of the matter, namely the confrontations between the monsters and the team sent in to take them out. It was rather unexpected to see that but pleasantly surprising.

The monsters displayed on screen looked quite ‘Doomish’ in my opinion. The problem with this trailer though doesn’t lie with what is shown but with what isn’t. None of the characters or even the aliens are introduced, it ends even before you understand what is going on and I think this movie’s biggest selling point with the fans, namely its first person perspective is entirely missing from the trailer. I spoke with Karl this morning and he remarked that the trailer is garbage. I wouldn’t go that far but I was left feeling rather bleh with it.

The good news though? The trailer was so bad that it completely destroyed any hopes I had for the movie. There is still a chance that it might work and watching The Rock kick some ass is always fun.