First Person Cinema

Alice has some screenies from the Doom movie trailer, and a link to see it for yourself. It seems some of the movie is shot a la Carpenter First Person ... except with a computer generated gun on the screen a la ... well, Doom. In fact, so much of the trailer is so obviously made to look like an FPS setup that it makes me wonder how much of movie itself is going to use this schtick.

I'm not sure it's a good schtick. Carpenter used it in Halloween to create a sense of tension, but to also keep his psycho killer invisible to the audience. You were seeing the movie through the perspective of the antagonist, but your focus was usually on his intended victims. Also, the killer is more monster than human - more of an emotion than a man.

That's not really what I want from my protagonist in a movie. I don't want them to be invisible. I want them to be a presence, not just a perspective. There's also a bit of realism at fault here. One of my problems with immersion in FPS games has always been - how many people would hold a chaingun by their head?

I think all they would have had to do is continue to lift from Ridley Scott and go with some HelmetCam or some other device in order to occasionally offer a different camera point. From the trailer, it seems like they're trying too hard to "get in the game". Hey, I liked Doom 3 a lot more than most people and even I don't want to spend a tenspot in order to watch someone else play it for two hours.