"How could it stick closely to the game?"
I don't know about "Doom3" as I never played it. The original DooM actually had a pretty solid plot--solid enough for a typical action movie anyway. It just wasn't necessary to pay any attention to that plot to play the game.
The key elements were:
--the "hero" is shipped out to the boonies (the martain research labs) as punishment for assaulting a superior officer who ordered him to fire on civilians. The military base is on mars itself, while the labs are on mars and both its moons.
--the research being done at these facilities is really shady and being performed by a Haliburton-esque company called UAC with plenty of political ties and basically no oversight.
--they're working on dimensional transport when they seem to open a gate to something . They don't know what, and live subjects who are sent through either come back violently insane, or don't come back at all.
--finally everything starts to go haywire. The labs on Phobos report some sort of creatures attacking the base and Deimos literally vanishes from the sky. The marines are sent in.
--the "hero" is the guy left behind to guard the ship (apparently his new CO here didn't trust him). The rest of the squad is apparently killed violently as gristly sounds some over the radios for a time--then nothing but static. This is where the game starts--with no other course of action, the "hero" goes in alone. He knows almost nothing and his plan isn't much better than "kill a few of whatever killed my buddies before dying".
There are lots of wierd portents, human bodies dismembered and impaled and such, pentagrams carved into the floor, etc. A DooM film done right would be part action and part horror film.
--it's very late before we learn that the Diemos moon vanished through a gateway to Hell itself.
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Basically, this is the sort of movie that would work best if the majority of the movie was buildup in a similar manner as something like "Jurassic Park". There are plenty of opportunities to tie in the UAC with modern corporate corruption.
As far as the monsters go...no monsters in any movie or game I've ever seen are better than the ones from DooM. If the movie didn't use them, that's only to its detriment. The "floatring flaming skulls" were important because they were literally "lost souls"...you can't have Hell without lost souls!
I haven't seen the doom movie and don't plan to. I know plenty of other situations where the game was much better than the movie (Wing Commander being the most famous example because the game actually had bigger stars than the feature film). I don't want to ruin my memory of DooM.
J_A_B