It's easy to forget just how much better video game adaptations are today. We perhaps take shows like Fallout, Arcane, Castlevania, and films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic the Hedgehog for granted, especially when you consider some of the absolute hot garbage that used to be pushed out. If you need any example of how bad things really used to be, all you need to do is look at movies like 2005's Doom, the infamous flick that featured Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson when he was still breaking into the world of being an action star.
If it seems like we're being a bit harsh when talking about Doom, it's worth noting that even one of the film's biggest stars regards the movie as a disaster. Speaking on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast (as noticed by The Independent), Rosamund Pike mentioned how she thought the film would sink her advancing career.
"When I was making Pride & Prejudice, and I was having great fun in my cornfields in my bonnet, I get a call to be in an action franchise. They were making a cinema version, a narrative version of the video game Doom. And I think in my bonnet, in my field of hay bales, 'Yeah, I can do anything. I can jump on this hay bale in my crinoline, so I can certainly go and kill some zombies on Mars.'
"So suddenly I'm in this film with the Rock, and I realise how utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star. There were weights on the set. Every time a gun was brought out, it was kind of like a holy relic for the Doom fans. I was just out of my comfort zone, out of my league, out of my depth.
"I mean, I probably could have ended my career. It was just probably one of the worst films ever made. I mean, it was a catastrophe. You get the sense like you're lucky to have survived that one."
Pike certainly didn't pull her punches, but perhaps rightly so as today the movie has a whopping 18% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer and only a marginally better Popcornmeter audience score of 34%.
Did you watch Doom (2005) and what did you think about it?