Grab your BFG and get ready to kick some Martian-demon butt inDoom, another entry in the increasingly crowded videogame-to-movie genre. The Rock plays Sarge, the commander of a squad of Marines sent to investigate a disturbance at a scientific research facility on Mars. Among the squad is John Grimm (Karl Urban, who played Eomer inThe Lord of the Rings), who turns out to have had a previous relationship with Samantha (Rosamund Pike,Die Another Day), the scientist who's accompanying the Marines in order to retrieve some vital data from the facility. Based on id Software's legendary first-person shooter,Doomtries its best to look like a game, with dark, angled corridors, ferocious creatures appearing out of nowhere, and a variety of lethal weapons that will, like the aforementioned BFG, warm the cockles of a gamer's heart. There's also one memorable sequence that actually turns the movie into a first-person shooter; the good news is that in the context of the whole film, it's not quite as goofy as it might have been. And that's not a bad frame of reference for the film in general. Considering the game-to-movie field includes such duds asWing Commander, if you go intoDoomwith low expectations, you'll probably find it a surprisingly respectable horror/sci-fi thriller in theResident Evilvein (including its somewhat obligatory subplot of corporate wrongdoing). Also in its favor is that it's unabashedly R-rated, for the extreme gore that is a ...
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