Brendan Sinclair is GameSpot News' associate editor. Having reviewed Son of the Mask and Blues Brothers 2000, he fears no director, neither God nor Boll. E-mail him at [email protected].

　　I suppose it's a constant battle to try to push your personal envelope and not get stuck in staid patterns. And it's hard to argue against someone liking what they like and returning to it over and over again. Still, there's a big gaming world out there; one that's about to get a lot bigger over the next year or so. I'm doing my best to stay frictionless in the ever-changing world of gaming, and to keep my entertainment bandwidth as wide open and flat out as possible.

　　That internal battle between trying something new or returning to the tried and true must never have taken place for director Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave, Exit Wounds) when he formed a plan of attack for the movie adaptation of id Software's seminal Doom series of first-person shooters. He knew he was simply cashing a check, and he went straight for the rehash from the word "go."

　　If a picture is worth a thousand words, this image from the new Doom movie should be pretty telling.

　　It's disappointing to see yet another in a long line of forgettable game-based movies that approach the subject matter with an eye toward capitalizing on a licensing tie-in, instead of creating an innovative reflection of one medium using the advantages of another. Regardless, Bartkowiak probably made the right call with his treatment of Doom. After all, the series isn't exactly known for its sweeping-yet-nuanced narrative or character development. It's about fast-paced action, atmosphere, and fun.

　　And to that extent, Bartkowiak's film can be considered a success. Doom is a by-the-numbers sci-fi corridor crawl with a mix of action and horror reminiscent of Aliens and Resident Evil. Sadly, Doom is much closer to the latter film than the former, full of ham-fisted dialogue, stock characters (some so two-dimensional, they get away with having names like "Sarge" and "The Kid"), and bad, bad science. But it does do a few things right.

　　First and foremost, the movie hits all the action-horror notes with basic competence. There's a slow-building sense of dread as the film progresses from horror in the first half to action later on. Bartkowiak knows how to make the audience jump a little in their seats. He alternates between building up to scares and bringing them in from out of the blue. Sometimes the tension leads to a payoff, with something worth being afraid of; other times, the immediate danger is just imagined, and the tension continues to build.

　　This leads to a nice situation in which the audience is kept guessing about which characters will be killed off and when. While there are some "immune" protagonists that the audience knows won't be killed off at the 30-minute mark, there's enough uncertainty with the rest of the cast to help increase tension in pretty much any scene that follows the words "let's split up."

　　Unfortunately, Bartkowiak takes a shortcut to achieve that little trait. Once the lead starts flying, the audience is never given a clear handle on the situation at hand. Granted, it increases the tension and keeps the audience in the dark about the number of monsters stalking the research facility, which locations are supposed to be safe or not, or how far characters are from those supposedly safe areas. But it also increases audience frustration, like when a character extricates himself from a firefight and magically appears in a safe zone, which was apparently a couple of feet away. Not to mention that having an unknown number of adversaries keeps the general tension high but prevents the movie from properly building to a climax, because the audience can't really figure out how close the main characters are to success or being hopelessly overrun.

　　The first-person sequence in the movie is a nice touch, but it might take more than a few references to really translate games into movies.

　　In the only hint of "innovation" in the movie, Bartkowiak filmed a first-person sequence from one marine's point of view to mimic the gameplay of the Doom series. While it's an interesting visual trademark, it's also a tremendously distracting one. It works as a nod to gamers, but it doesn't fit with the pace of the movie at all and flows about as well as if the movie randomly cut to a three-minute music video halfway through the third act.

　　Blatant acknowledgements of the source material pop up here and there throughout the movie, but the biggest one is indirect. Instead of attempting to capture the heart of what gamers enjoyed about Doom, the movie's script seems more focused on simply appealing to the adolescent male gamer stereotype, with lots of gratuitous swearing and the kind of creative violence an eighth-grader can't wait to tell his friends about on Monday morning. At the risk of underestimating the American public, I'll predict that Doom will likely perform well at the box office. It's stupid, stupid fun, but it still counts as fun.

　　As games make their way further into popular culture, it's disheartening to see that the mainstream is not waking up to the qualities inherent in games. Instead, we find that more often than not, games are changing in order to better accommodate the tastes of the outside world. Like any niche group, I'd prefer the outside world to get into my interests by understanding what it is about them that interests me. As reactionary as it is, I can't help but worry that something will be lost when my interests start adapting to the outside world's existing wants.

　　Next Up: MMO Games: Friend or Foe? by Justin Calvert