You're the director

[purist]

So the Doom movie has been released to mixed critical acclaim at best and the majority of those at Doomworld who have seen it have been less than impressed. Well... what if you were making the movie - how would you make it different? I'll get the ball rolling:

Brief plot:

I'd most closely follow the Doom 1 story (what there was of it). Interplanetary teleportation experiments go awry on Phobos unleashing hell on the base. Meanwhile Flynn Taggart (dare I say) and his crew of 'glorified security guards' are about to start shift. Bloody combat ensues for around an hour. Crew team up with surving scientists and briefly hop base to Deimos - not much safer there - more bloody combat. Survivors discover UAC had less than innocent intentions with the teleporters. Taggart nips to hell and back for a showdown with the Cyberdemon (Spiderdemon wouldn't work). Overall it would be a fast-paced, gory, blast-fest as this would be the only true way of re-creating the game.

Characters:

Rather than marines the bulk of military muscle would be 'glorified security guards' who, with the exception of Flynn, have little in the brain department.
The scientist's purpose would be to keep a thread of plot running through the film whilst the brawn are killing and being killed.
Monster wise I would use the whole doom 1 cast - barring the Spiderdemon. The bulk, however, would be zombies, demons and imps - with the rest making only fleeting cameos.

Cast:

Mickey Rourke to play Flynn. His comrades played by Kurt Russell, Hugh Jackman and some filler cast. Christian Bale or Ed Norton would head the science team.

[wildweasel]

I haven't even seen the movie, but here's what my vision would be of it.

The Basic Plot

This would be roughly similar to the introduction of Doom 3. The main characters would be a lone Marine that takes orders from his CO who is holed up in a computer room, a scared scientist that eventually achieves radio contact with the marine, and a UAC board member who originally intended to personally cancel the gateway experiments but arrived too late. The Marine, accompanied by his two partners, must find a way to shut down the teleporter, self destruct the Mars base, and evacuate all the people he can.

Major Events

The movie introduces the characters by cutting to them individually. The Marine arrives via dropship with the board member (who wishes to have nothing to do with him). The board member, upon meeting with the scientist in charge of the project, is given a verbal lashing ("This whole base was designed around this project, and now you tell me that we can't proceed as planned?") and is ignored by the rest of the science team until the incident.

The first major event would be, naturally, the invasion. This would probably play out almost the same as it does in Doom 3 - where the Marine meets a scientist attempting to shut down the experiments because of a flaw that he has found that would result in countless lives being lost. (Well, he was right.)

The film cuts back and forth between the Marine and the board member until the Marine meets up with the head scientist. He's almost in tears - partially from being scared out of his wits, but also deeply regretting having shown the board member what-for. They both assume the board member to be dead, until they happen upon him in a narrow hallway (and the Marine saves his life with a well-placed shotgun blast into an Imp).

The scientist leads both the Marine and the board member to the control room where the experiment is initiated. While the scientist is explaining what it would take to reverse the calculations (thus closing the gateway), an ear-splitting roar emanates from the gateway chamber up ahead - and the Cyberdemon emerges from the shadows. A fight ensues, and both the Marine and the Cyb get a few good shots off - but then the Cyb misfires, causing a chain explosion that leaves a gigantic hole in both himself and the wall (thank goodness the gateway chamber was adjacent to a warehouse, or they'd all be sucked into the weak atmosphere).

But it's not over yet. This thing emerges from the warehouse - about three times as large as the 15-foot Cyberdemon. It barely fits inside the chamber.

Just when the Marine is running out of ammo for his favorite assault rifle (based on the one that appears on the original Doomguy sprite), the scientist tosses him the BFG-9000 ("Where the hell'd you find this?" "Storage locker." "Why didn't you hand it to me before?" "Because I was too busy pissing myself! Now are you going to use it or do you want us all to get stomped flat by this thing?").

Insert several awe-inspiring green plasma explosions here, ultimately causing the gigantic demon to melt into a puddle of goo with some wrecked cannons in the middle of it.

The loose ends are tied up from here, but since I didn't elaborate on the details, there's really nothing to tie up.

The Cast

Kurt Russell as the Marine
George Eads as the Scientist
Harvey Keitel as the Board Member

[purist]

Nice. My movie would start with the security team (I like the idea that apart from the main char - who is a demoted marine - the rest of the team are incompetents) being shipped over to Phobos to swap shifts with the previous crew. Flynn would be flashbacking his story about how he was demoted (striking a senior officer) to his comrades.

Weapons:

For the most part the weapons used would be shotguns and automatics until the team find an armoury in Deimos. The BFG would of course make an appearance but I reckon I'd have the Cyberdemon taken out with a well-calculated tele-frag after no weapon seems to take significant effect.

I'd have fun with the Deimos labs, the scientists would demostrate some of the Doom powerups such as Beserk and invisibility.

[Megalyth]

IMO a good Doom movie would be more successful by playing with the psychological aspect as well as the sci-fi action aspect. When playing the original Doom, Doom3, and even when reading the novels, anyone with a good imagination can't help but place themselves there, in that horrifying situation.

That's one thing I hate about the movie, was the whole "unstoppable badass" portayal of some of the characters, as if they fought demons on a regular basis. In reality most people (even well-trained soldiers) would have a hard time dealing with a Doom-like scenario in it's purest form, much less have the will and strength to fight through it alone.

[Coopersville]

I thought that Doom comic had a sweet plot going! I would have just made a film from that, and I'd put in the Hellknight and Sarge fight scenes to give it extra kick ass-ness.

[Mivalekan]

I would have stayed true to the absolute original, using CGI versions of the original monsters (Baron of Hell would actually look almost exactly like the old Baron of Hell etc). Would be hellza tite :)

[Craigs]

Brief story:

The movie shall be based on the epic journey of a lone space marine; armed with a cock and a porn mag to keep it "loaded". Using these devastating weapons, he fights off zombies, demons, and pedophiles from hell. Along the way he meets a dumb blonde with big implants and a craving for sex, they make love.

-the end.

[Slink]

My Doom movie would follow the novel adaptation very closely, except it would stay truer to the game where the book deviates. Otherwise, the book got the tone right; it has likeable characters, never takes itself seriously, and builds upon the experience of the game rather than undermining it. If there is any Doom story worth being made into a movie (with proper adjustments) it is the first Doom novel.

In terms of art direction, every effort would be made to preserve the look and feel of Classic Doom while expanding on it somewhat to maintain an atmosphere of semi-plausiblity. It would be about as obsessive to detail as Jackson's Lord of the Rings. The monsters would look both grotesque and cartoonish, as they do in the original game.

The movie would be told in a campy, gory, fast-paced, stylistic manner, and seen through the eyes of the main character (Fly Taggart) and some of the narration would cover passages from the book.

I wouldn't try to over-do the novel's explaination about the demons being aliens (which the first book, at least, didn't go out of it's way to prove), and I wouldn't try too hard to make the atmosphere resemble that of Aliens or Resident Evil, but just the original Doom. I would try less for chills and scares than I would for a sense of campy adventure, black humor, and epic grotesquery. In the end, the movie would be an almost trippy experience, with surrealistic and nightmarish visuals (read: weird and not merely gross, "scary" or "evil", as that gets jejune very quickly) and unbelievably bloody (hence amusing) violence. However, I would also try to make it a joy to watch.

I don't have actors in mind (I have characters, as I think any director should), but actors who can keep straight faces, absorb us into their characters, lend courage to the convictions of their ridiculous situation, and physically inahbit their roles are an absolute must. The two main stars will more or less carry the movie.

The cast would include:

Corporal Flynn "Fly" Taggart-- the Doom guy

Pfc. Arlene Edith Sanders-- his female sidekick and best buddy

Lt. Weems-- the bastard whom he assaults at the beginning

Gunnery Sergeant Goforth-- possibly the zombie sergeant, Texan with a sniper rifle.

Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd-- Arlene's lover, who later turns up as a zombie

Bill Rich-- a surviving UAC scientist who helps the heroes defeat the Spider Mastermind and a Cyberdemon in "Warrens"

And the rest of the marine company, which consists of at least 13 others, all of whom either die or are zombiefied too quickly to be important.

The Imp-- there is one imp (well, perhaps two) that actually talk at one point in the novel. This one, the narrator later speculates, might have been "programmed" by the Mastermind.

The Spider Mastermind-- Reportedly it can talk, but it doesn't have any lines in the book. It is a psionic creature.

The rating, of course, would be R for intense and non-stop gruesome violence, brief nudity (the heroes are stripped of all their posessions by the gates at the end of each episode), and occasional profanity. If the MPAA gives it an NC-17, I'd just trim it down and release the uncut DVD. No big deal. But none of that PG-13 crap.

The soundtrack might have some metal like the original Doom game, except it wouldn't have Pantera or Metallica, but perhaps Slayer, Cryptopsy, Carcass, Kreator, Suffocation, Behemoth, and a few others, but I would overdo this. I think Judas Priest's "Painkiller" would make a cool end credits song.

A sequel, "Hell on Earth", would be made of course, but this one would have to deviate from the novel more (as it strayed from the game a little too much).

[Koko Ricky]

Slink said:

The soundtrack might have some metal like the original Doom game, except it wouldn't have Pantera or Metallica, but perhaps Slayer, Cryptopsy, Carcass, Kreator, Suffocation, Behemoth, and a few others, but I would overdo this. I think Judas Priest's "Painkiller" would make a cool end credits song.

I really like everything you had to say about your interpretation of the movie and agreed with essentially all of it, but I particularly liked your choices of music. Underground metal, at least to me, has always been synonymous with Doom, particularly campier death metal bands like Cannibal Corpse, Autopsy, Mortician, Possessed and Necrophagia, as well as old thrash like Venom, Slayer and Rigor Mortis.

EDIT: I would incorporate some of the imagery from Doom 64, however. A mix between the monster designs from Doom and Doom 64 would be most excellent, plus I really liked some of the textural and architectural aspects of Doom 64, particularly the techbase and gothic/hell themes.

[Texas Libra]

Doom as we've always known it was too long to make into a movie in the first place. I still say a TV miniseries or 1-2 season TV show would've worked better.

And for the last friggin' time...what makes anybody on there think that DOOM and metal "music" go together? I think something more like the original score or the Playstation music would work the best. Just because the game focuses on *BLAM BLAM* action and is gory and themed around Hell doesn't mean it needs popular music. It's crap, nothing more.

[baronofhell]

Maybe because a lot of the original Doom music was synthesized versions of metal?

[Slink]

Texas Libra said:

Doom as we've always known it was too long to make into a movie in the first place. I still say a TV miniseries or 1-2 season TV show would've worked better.

And for the last friggin' time...what makes anybody on there think that DOOM and metal "music" go together? I think something more like the original score or the Playstation music would work the best. Just because the game focuses on *BLAM BLAM* action and is gory and themed around Hell doesn't mean it needs popular music. It's crap, nothing more.

A T.V. show? Then we couldn't get all the blood and gore we'd want.

As for metal music? It's more than appropriate, for the reason the poster above me mentioned. And metal isn't popular, at least not to the mainstream, as the bands I mentioned. In fact, most of them were either death metal, black metal, or some combination thereof. A lot of underground metal, in fact, is an acquired taste that takes more than one listen to fully appreciate. Besides, it's one of themost raw and expressive art forms.

EDIT: I would incorporate some of the imagery from Doom 64, however. A mix between the monster designs from Doom and Doom 64 would be most excellent, plus I really liked some of the textural and architectural aspects of Doom 64, particularly the techbase and gothic/hell themes.

I've never been able to play Doom 64, but after looking at few screenshots, I concur. I should also mention that some of the details of the base in Doom 3 were nice too. I say this with a mild amount of reluctance because I felt Doom3 looked too much like Aliens and Resident Evil. But taking a little inspiration from the best of everything should make for a unique atmosphere.

[wallis]

story:
right because doom the game is epic so should the movie. The film would be split into three. The first being about the whole of deimos dissapearing sending the world and media into shock. However on deimos would be our well loved marine...just a little bit nutty from hell and all. And it would follow him and his desperate struggle to survive and eventually kicking demon ass and killing "one" of the masterminds. T'would be an immense hour and a half of him and three friends kicking ass for the first hour while plot was occasionally spunked up. And then the emotional loss of his friends and TA DA he kicks demon ass......
The second movie about shows him dying in hell at the hands of a mysterious demon O_O.....then the movie is a mass epic horror action as the remainder of earth's marines who tried and failed to stop the invasion get holed up in a mysterious construction. Each one by one getting slowly picked off but finally one plucky 18 yr old recruit getting out of the hell hole construction back to the surface.
The Third then being about the previous 18 yr old noe turned thirty yr old. Having lived his life like most human's, surviving by the skin of their teeth constantly attempting to not be enslaved or eaten. He discovers the ruins of a huge UAC building. and blah blah blah blah inside couple of others blah blah blah kicks demon ass blah blah blah kills mysterious demon at end of Doom 1 and YAY earth saved

I think that no-one would like it....but me being sad and all.....LOVE IT and more interested in epic ass kicking....AND FOR GOD SAKE....no darkness...no Doom 3 it would all be classic doom well lit to all appreciate the inventive genius of id softwares monsters