"Doom" movie puts viewers behind the gun:
Hollywood is breaking ground on the silver screen by putting movie fans in the seat of trigger-happy game players as it tries to cash in on gaming's popularity this Friday with a film adaptation of the classic title "Doom."
In a novel sequence lasting several minutes, the movie offers a taste of the first-person-shooter gaming style introduced in the original "Doom" title, but whether the gimmick will lure fans awaits weekend box office results.
"Doom," based on the blockbuster video game series considered to be the grandaddy of this generation, pits an elite team of Marines against chromosomally mutated monsters on Mars. When film's action peaks, the camera's perspective changes to that of Karl Urban's "Reaper," the movie's hero, as he blasts a series of gruesome aliens to bits.
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Wells said film makers worried about the length of the sequence because when the "Doom" game came out in December 1993, its first-person-shooter perspective sickened some gamers, including Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who started playing in college and stars as "Sarge" in the film.
"There is always a risk that it becomes physically disorienting ... It's not a visual experience we are used to having" in a film, Wells said.
You'll get the idea in the teaser trailer available at
Yahoo! More on the
sequence:
The subjective camera sequence was a matter of great concern to both the filmmakers and the id folks. It comes fairly late in the movie -- not too late to satisfy fans, hopefully, but at the right point when general audiences are ready for it.
"We had long conversations about how long the audience would be able to stay comfortable with the subjective camera sequence," Wells reveals. "It hasn't been done very much. And it's different if it's happening in front of you on a 14-inch monitor or if you're surrounded by it in the theater.
"So it was a matter of how long you can stay in it before it becomes so disorienting that you, one, lose the narrative train of the picture, and two, just become physically disoriented," the producer continues. "One of the things we looked at were subjective amusement park simulator rides. They had done an extensive amount of research on how much time people could actually stay in them before, when they got off, they fell down on the pavement."
Ironically, id was more skeptical than the filmmakers.
"We were like, 'Maybe this is too much for video game fans and not enough for everybody else,' " Hollenshead says. "But it seems to be far enough along in the movie that people get it at that point. If you started the movie with something like that, I think it would've been confusing."
Odd effects don't make a movie, of course, but at least this isn't a typical Hollywood whineathon based on the evidence so far:
"We always assumed that this was going to be an R-rated picture," Wells adds. "And we felt very strongly that to do 'Doom' as a PG-13 would just, on its face, mean that it sucked."
