You know it must be a worrying time for the movie business when a videogame conversion attracts more customers than anything else. And true enough, on a weekend that saw box office takings fall for the fourth consecutive week, Doom topped the charts, pulling in $15.4m. Even this was a disappointment: according to Yahoo's weekend analysis, execs were expecting $18-22m.
Here's a slightly surprising stat from the story:
"The film, from Polish director Andrzej Bartkowiak, played mostly to young males, and 69 percent of ticket-buyers had played the Doom video game, Universal said."
So, using my incredible powers of deduction, that means a whole 31% hadn't played the game? They must have been really desperate for entertainment - going to a videogame movie is usually bad enough, but going to a movie conversion of a videogame you haven't even played seems like an act of almost heroic masochism.
Still, the alternatives didn't look too enticing. There was Dreamer, an insipid 'against the odds' tale about a knackered horse and a washed up trainer coming together in an explosion of soullessly choreographed emotional manipulation. Or filmgoers could have selected North Country, playfully described by Yahoo as, "The new Charlize Theron sexual harassment drama".
I've been avoiding reading too much about Doom the movie, but it seems to have been drawing a few grudgingly favourable reviews - especially for the much-talked about FPS sequence, where we suddenly view a shoot-out through the eyes of one of the 'characters' in a homage to the game.
However, the videogames blog PopularCultureGaming picks out its own favourite moment:
"From a scholarly point of view, the most interesting thing about the film was the closing credits. For the unfortunate few who have not yet seen the film yet, during the first part of the end credits they show a FPS-style clip where a gun runs around shooting the credits. What made it so interesting was that the graphics of the clip were of very low quality. It was some sort of psuedo-wireframe animation that almost looked like the Doom 3 game without the textures. I found it very interesting that in order to have the end credits "look like a game" they had to make the graphics look significantly worse than the graphics of the actual game. Presumably, if they had just done some sort of machinima with the Doom 3 engine, it wouldn't have had the "look" they wanted. The graphics of the game seemingly didn't match the conception of what the filmmakers thought a game should look like."
It's amusing, isn't it, that while Hollywood draws ever more heavily from videogame licenses, themes and aesthetic principles, when called upon to represent videogames, the industry's understanding is years out of date. Or perhaps games are so like cinema now that a more stylistic visual language is required in order to inform viewers that they're viewing a pastiche. (Hang on, I seem to have transformed into a Media Studies student.)
Oh well, it's got to be better than that truly horrendous videogame-style sequence in The Beach which I'd managed to blank out of my mind until this morning...
