“It could have been a lot worse”, were my initial thoughts after I had finished watching Doom. The game itself, when it was released, had a plot that you could write on a pin head. You’re on mars, and it just so happens to harbour a load of zombies and demons from the very pits of hell. That was about all you needed to know, and without any real narrative, it never got in the way of what still ranks as the genre defining First Person Shooter game.

Doom, the movie takes it lead from the latest incarnation of Doom in Doom 3. It then stretches the still wafer thin plot even further, and wraps around hapless idiots who you know are not likely to survive. Most are there to bring up the numbers, with cliches aplenty, from the snivelling idiot, to the gung ho brainless moron, to the clumsy oaf. They’re all hear, wearing their invisible name badges to increase the odds in an illusionary sense.

There’s also a doctor in the film, a scientist if you will who just happens to be the sister of one of the soldiers, and is trying to control an outbreak of some kind. No one quite knows what the out break is, except that the film opens with morons shuffling down a corridor faster than an ice cream van in the middle of an Iraqi civil war. Our soldiers, that include every solider cliche, pack up and ready themselves to investigate. When I say investigate, this should be read as blow a lot of stuff up and shout a lot. Running around corners in the dark is an essential criteria.

The troop is lead by The Rock, a man machine of epic proportions who dwarves his underlings with a proud, beaming grin. Rosamund Pike plays the doctor, and she does look good, in a freaky sort of way. The rest of the actors aren’t really worth mentioning, suffice to say they offer dumb humour and comic death sequences. Dexter Fletcher perhaps the most notable, and likeable death.

I have to say, aside from my cynicism, Doom does rank as one of the best video game to movie translations I’ve seen to date. Unlike others, Doom manages to keep the essence of Doom, or in this case Doom 3, from it’s atmosphere, environments, and, mostimportantly, the monsters themselves.

It may not be much credit, to say it’s an almost straight translation, but those who have played Doom can at least attest to this fact and congratulate the makers for not skewring the games background into a tnagent, like Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Street Fighter, or most recently the Alone in the Dark film, and the Resident Evil series.

Where the film falls on its backside and reminds us of how films should not be done is the latter stages of the end of the film. From the super human battle, to a quite strange First Person Shooter sequence where the viewer is taken on a Doom 3 style journey shotting bad guys with only a gun on show, through the view of the character. It is frankly absurd, and does no favours to a film that does so well up until this point to offer a brainless, but mostly enjoyable, ninety or so minutes of gung ho action.

Verdict: The best game to movie translation, but otherwise an average filler for a rainy day