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| Nerds on the Rocks |
Assassin’s Creed opened up this weekend, and despite all the highest hopes of gamers around the world, it sucked. Unlike other craptastic films, though, it’s not on track to do a lot of business, leaving many people to wonder if we will ever get a good video game movie. I mean, this year had so many opportunities and they all failed, so what hope do we have? Well, as a film lover and a huge gamer, let me just toss in my two cents.
- Pick Games That Will Make Good Movies
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| Wikitroid |
This one seems like a no-brainer, and Hollywood at least got this one right this year (before failing in pretty much every other way), but news of future game adaptations is troubling to me. Sony is somehow still trying to make an Uncharted movie and production is stalled on a The Last of Us feature film, there’s a new Tomb Raider on the way, and dear Lord they’re making Minecraft. Let’s delve into these a little deeper, and why some of these are bad ideas.
Games that exist more to sell concepts or limited and basic stories, in my opinion, are the ones best suited to make a film out of. Any of Nintendo’s games, from Mario to The Legend of Zelda (or hopefully Metroid!), don’t have very complex narratives to begin with, just fun ideas and a focus on making the games enjoyable to play. They don’t have source material to be faithful to, just a main character, a villain, a basic plot and a list of enemies and worlds. Since I singled out Metroid, the only thing a director and writer have to do is fill in some more plot and character to Samus’ adventures and we have a movie. Trying to cut down games that do tell complex narratives, though, is just setting a film up for failure.
Take The Last of Us, a game that takes over forty hours to tell its story and makes every cutscene and little conversation between characters count. The events of the game, in which a man tries to escort a girl across the United States after a virus wipes everything out, are written in a way that your attachment to the characters builds over time and gets you emotionally invested in them. By the time the game is over and you hit the heart-wrenching and very morally ambiguous ending, you feel like every minute led to that moment and it hurts all the more to see the conclusion of the game. Why would any studio take such a dense narrative and try to cut away everything that made it work other than to make a crappy movie and make a quick buck? Games like this and Uncharted and even non-action games like Inside and Firewatch (which is basically an interactive movie on its own) are better because they’re games, and trying to make that translation makes it fail. However, that’s not to say it’s impossible, as long as the studios….
- Choose Good Directors
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| ScreenCrush |
Up until this year, video game movies have pretty much been the realm of the worst of the worst in terms of directors. The Resident Evil series has been handled by Paul W.S. Anderson, one of the worst filmmakers in the United States, while others like Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead were put into the care of Uwe Boll, one of the worst filmmakers to ever exist. The logic here is pretty simple as well, folks: putting talentless hacks in charge of a project usually means that it’s going to suck. If a director can’t manage his crew, keep a camera straight or get his/her actors to give decent performances, the movie will be awful. No two ways about it.
In fact, certain video games have almost had really good directors come on board. Peter Jackson wanted to make a Halo movie for a long time, and even with Universal and director Neill Blomkamp on board, they still couldn’t make it work (though we did get District 9 out of it!). Gore Verbinski, director of Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring, was once attached to do a BioShock movie years ago, and probably would’ve been a perfect fit for it. Just this year we had Duncan Jones, who had been on a roll of great films with Moon and Source Code, helming Warcraft and making a decent movieout of it in my opinion. These games have potential that attracts big names, but for some reason things always fall apart.
Think about a world where someone like Ridley Scott or Denis Villeneuve handled Metroid or if Guillermo del Toro did Dark Souls. That’s the kind of world that video games movies need to be made in if they want to be taken seriously or even be good. Some might argue that Duncan Jones’ love of World of Warcraft was a detriment to the film he made, but the fact that he enjoys the game and the world so much contributed a lot of positives that movies like Silent Hill and Bloodrayne just don’t have. Speaking of Duncan Jones, that leads me to my next point:
- Get Filmmakers and Writers Who Have Played the Games
BioShock Infinite
If you were to ask me what the number one problem was with Assassin’s Creed, I’d give you one simple answer: it was clear that the writers never played the games. As I mentioned in my review, Assassin’s Creed bungles two concepts (genetic memory and the Apple of Eden) that were handled pretty well and succinctly in the game, a pitfall that could have been avoided with a simple playthrough or at least some actual research. The Super Mario Bros. movie is an easy target to hit but that’s because it falls victim to the same problem: rather than taking the fun nature of the games and some of the cool, weird things they contain and putting them to film, they made… Something. I still have no words to describe it, honestly.
Before you say anything, I’m not recommending that fanboys write the scripts or direct because that is also where you run into problems. A good writer will be able to separate the good elements of the game from that medium and translate them into a good script, and there are plenty of games that are ripe for that. BioShock, as I mentioned earlier, has a lot of things that could make for a very interesting sci-fi film: a beautiful and complex world, a great villain, terrifying monsters and a deep, philosophical bent that we don’t see done well often in films. While BioShock has a lengthy narrative, it’s one of those where taking these elements and adapting them to a real screenplay could work very well. The story of a person crash landing in a world that isn’t his/her own is a familiar one, and with the basic structure provided there is room for the rest of the games elements to fall in and make it stand out from other films.
Deadpool made a good point this year in its opening credits when it listed the writers of the movie as the “real heroes” of the project, and that’s accurate in most cases. A lot of people (myself included) tend to give most of the credit for what works in a movie to the directors, only adding in writers when there are flaws to be found. I know there are a lot of writers out there working right now who can take Dishonored or Watch Dogs or even something off-the-wall like Earthbound or Super TIME Force and make them good films, and with a generation of writers who have probably played more games like this coming up, I suspect that this problem may soon resolve itself!
- Stop Catering to the Fans
Taringa
Yes, that’s right, you heard me. Listen, this year Ubisoft announced that the Assassin’s Creed franchise had sold over 100 million copies total, so that would stand to reason that a good number of those loyal customers would go see the movie right? Wrong. The film itself, though, is structured in a way that only those fans will actually understand what’s going on, while the general audience is confused and unable to follow the storyline. This is also what doomed Warcraft, as I found myself confused amongst a flurry of characters I didn’t know or care about and a barrage of references I didn’t understand. Basic business indicates that for a film to be successful it needs to reach as much of an audience as possible without sacrificing the integrity of the movie, and I’d argue that every video game movie that isn’t total garbage right out of the gate fails that test because the directors feel that they need to be “faithful” to the fans.
I hate that I’m making this comparison, but studios looking to adapt these games need to take a page from Marvel Studios’ handbook. Marvel makes their films very basic and accessible to everyone, taking their vast worlds and concepts and simplifying them for us in entertaining adventures, but they throw in cute little nods to the comics that fans will understand. This is a perfect balance because the references are either visual or done in throwaway lines that don’t mean anything so that the non-fans won't get lost. DC, on the other hand, tends to have a problem in making things more open to the audience. Remember those weird things in Batman v Superman that attacked Batman in his dream, like the ones with the wings and all that? Those are Parademons, personal servants of Darkseid the lord of Apokolips. Don’t know what those things are? Congratulations, you’re not the target audience for the film, and video game movies make that exact same excuse.
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| An actual exchange I had with a popular game developer over their crappy movie. |
Everything I’ve written so far brings us all to this point, because movies based on appropriate games and directed and scripted by people who know them lead us here on their own. All sorts of games, from younger-skewing ones like Kirby or Banjo-Kazooie to more serious and adult ones like Heavy Rain or Mafia, have the potential to get people in the theaters if done correctly, and nothing turns off a general audience like something that clearly doesn't appeal to them. And sorry, but making a film an insider baseball deal where only fans know what's happening is a surefire path to failure.
There is no guarantee that anything I've written down here will actually cure the video game movie predicament. After all, the studios (and most adults in general) still view games as toys or quick cash grabs, not an art form that deserves equal consideration to film. Overcoming that hurdle alone will take quite some time, and with each bad movie that is made it only makes that divide grow wider. However, I do feel like there's reasons to be hopeful. I remember when I was a kid how my dad took me to see the first X-Men movie and said that when he was a kid superhero movies were mostly jokes that were cheap and were really really bad. Now there are so many of those damn films that they're starting to get on my nerves, but it shows just how far that genre has come. As one of my favorite critics used to say, "There won't be a good video game movie until there is one," and we can only cross our fingers that it'll be on it's way soon.
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| Coming Soon
But definitely not this January!
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