Doom is a video game. The film follows the trend to make live action features out of popular video games. It does this sleekly with the full range of special effects.

But, as one watches it, one is forced to ask who the film is for and what good it will do them.

One of the difficulties in watching the film is the constant, pounding action. It is certainly violent. It is also brutal and ugly, inviting the audience to revel in bone and gut crunching mayhem and deaths. The classifications board consumer advice (which makes no moral judgment, simply informs) is rightly, ‘strong violence, gore and language’.

Doom is about soldiers, weaponry (really big guns which should get psychologists going), the ethos of trained killers – although at one stage is does make a point about disobeying ruthless orders. Otherwise, this is an appeal to an extreme macho sensibility (which, in fact, is under fire as more and more stories come out of Iraq or Guantanomo Bay about military torture and abuses).

For the movie buff who wants to abstract from the violence, it is a variation on Alien themes, then Resident Evil and other video game movies followed by The Night of the Living Dead. Former cinematographer Andrez Bartkowiak has become a specialist director of this kind of film with Romeo is Bleeding, Exit Wounds, Cradle to the Grave, violence vehicles for Jet Li, Steven Seagall and The Rock.

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