🚀 go-pugleaf

Latest news on the movie from Ain't It Cool. Sounds more promising than
initial reports did...

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20755




Comic-Con: Quint's got good news for DOOM fans!!!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the first report since the Con closed its
doors today. Today I saw two panels, which I'll fill you in on before
backtracking and hitting the stuff I missed last night. First up is DOOM.

I had written DOOM off after all the word starting coming out on how there
was no Hell, no Mars and no creatures from the games. If they cut out Hell
and Mars and creatures, then they were obviously going for a PG-13. I
figured why the hell call it DOOM? I had really written it off as yet
another shitty video game adaptation.
However, at the panel today they revealed some surprises... Id Software has
been involved since the beginning, the producers, filmmakers and stars all
wanted to make a movie that respected the source material and the studio was
willing to put it out R-rated.
Confirmed in the movie: MARS! IMPS! HELLKNIGHT! THE BARON! PINKY DEMONS!
GORE!
This made me smile. They premiered the trailer and then showed a clip that
truly won me over... I'll get to those after the tidbits of info gleaned
from the panel featuring producers John Wells, Lorenzo DiBoneventura, Todd
Hollenshead (Id CEO), Karl Urban and The Rock.
TIDBITS:

-Karl Urban is the main character, not The Rock, who plays Sarge. The Rock
liked that character better.
SPOILER
-The Rock liked the character of Sarge better because he could explore his
"darker side" and because his character "has a great twist at the end."
END SPOILER
-Karl and The Rock both played the original DOOM as well as its sequels,
especially DOOM 3.

-The Rock on the film: "It's unapologetic as hell, faithful and gory."
-The Demons and Monsters are based off of the creatures in DOOM 3.
-They recreated sets directly from the game, like corridors and labs and
even made the computer screens in the movie have the same style as what's on
the computer screens in the game.
-Why The Rock wanted to do the DOOM movie: "I realized I could shoot the
BFG."
-All the Army guys are were trained by SAS honcho Tom McAdams.
-The BFG was huge, according to The Rock.
-Stan Winston created most of the monsters, with the creative team behind
the movie deciding against overusing CG.
-The monsters are big, most between 6 and 9 feet tall (and these are
practical effects).
-"The intensity of the game is in the movie," said The Rock. From minute 5
we're there. Non-stop train ride to Hell."

-The young screenwriter Dave Callaham is very protective of the game.
-Lorenzo on the plot: He wouldn't go into it much but he did say, "A team on
Mars chasing real evil, bad things."
-When pressed about differences between the games and the movie, Lorenzo
said that we'll see how the monsters came about (Maybe this means no hell?
Not sure.) and the evil little buggers get a chance to fuck up the Earth.
Interesting...
TRAILER & CLIP:
The trailer was really polished and sweet looking. I'd bet you'll see it
very soon, either online or in theaters. The atmosphere looks very much like
DOOM 3. The corridors are right out of the game with the steel grating and
claustrophobic walls.
In the trailer we get to see zombies and glimpses of the rest of the
creatures as well as The Rock firing the BFG at an Imp. The look of the
blast and the sound of it could have been lifted straight out of the game.
Overall it was pretty cool.
The clip was what got me. It was about 3 minutes and it was called FPS
something or other and there is a reason for it. We were told before it
played that the clip showed something that hasn't been done in film
before... they're kind of right... this has been done (POV... DePalma and
Carpenter specifically use it well), but not in the context in which they
did it.

The clip begins with Karl Urban a little beat up, sitting on the floor with
his back to a cabinet. There's a girl in the room with him. He falls and
goes unconscious (at first I thought he had died) as the camera pushes into
his eye. After a bright flash we're in Urban's POV. He gets to his feet,
looks around the room. It's empty. No girl. He walks to a mirror and we see
Urban (reflection), wiping a line of blood from his cheek. He locks and
loads a gun and leaves the room.
This is where it really got me geeky. I love FPS (First Person Shooters)
games and that love started with DOOM and Wolfenstein back in the day. So,
it stands to reason that I loved the clip that followed because it was all
done as a live action first person shooter.
The sounds, the score (temp, natch), the lighting and the sets were all
straight out of the game. From the second he walks out the door, you hear
the creatures and zombies. He comes upon the zombies first, taking them out
with shots to the chest, then head. The gun is lower right screen the whole
time. After a zombie or creature is shot, the gun ducks below frame and the
reloading sound happens.
The camera movement, the strife moves... all looks great... a real live
action video game sequence. It's pretty specific in the details... like the
zombies are fairly easy to kill, while the Imps take a few more shots to
kill and the big clawed fuckers take a lot of ammo... matter of fact, in the
video, the first time we see one of these guys he gets about 5 seconds of
ammo pumped into him before the gun tilts over and shoots the explosive tank
next to it covering the demon in flames. The demon claws at itself as if
trying to tear at the flames.

There are jump moments here that are great, like turning a corner, looking
to one direction, seeing a blood-covered closed door, turning in the other
direction and seeing nothing... walking down the corridor, then turning back
to see a zombie right there. A quick shot from the shotgun (it changes from
automatic rifle to shotgun about halfway through the scene) takes his head
right off.
Most importantly the atmosphere survived. The scene shown was more actiony,
but even here you can see how dark the corridors are, how the tight the
space is...
I was really shocked. This panel completely turned me around. The whole
movie might be bullshit, but this whole sequence was kick-ass... My favorite
part... after shooting a ton of Imps and reloading, the camera is moving
down a dark corridor. It pans casually to the left to see a vague shape and
sends off one shot in a knee-jerk way. After a beat we see that the shape
was Karl Urban's face. It was the reflection of the POV and there's a bullet
mark on the steel or whatever the reflective surface was. I've done that a
dozen times while playing. That made me smile.
The clip ended with one of the big fuckers swiping at us and hitting us. You
hear Urban grunting and then he's knocked off the ledge (still all in POV).
He grabs a grenade (looked more like a timed mine from the GoldenEye game),
places it on the floor and rolls out of the way as the big fucker jumps
down. The explosive goes off and the left hand blocks some of the exploding
creature as it comes up to block the debris and blinding flash.

This was all about 3 minutes and Lorenzo said that it was only half of what
the FPS sequence is.
If the whole movie had been shot like this it would have been very
interesting, but would alienate a huge part of the audience. I love that
they made this nod to the fans as well as showing a sequence uniquely. Maybe
a certain videogame director can learn a thing or two from this bit, at
least. They made a section feel and look like part of the game without
editing in footage from DOOM 1 or 2.
Anyway, I'll leave you with a picture from the panel when they somehow
started joking about The Rock and Karl Urban being gay lovers. The below pic
is after Dwayne says, "Now he knows why they call me The Rock!"

I got tons more, so keep checking back, squirts! See ya' then!
-Quint