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John Woo & Metroid the Movie?
An anonymous reader writes "John Woo has optioned Nintendo's best-selling video game franchise Metroid for the big screen, says The Hollywood Reporter. Woo will produce the sci-fi movie and has the option to direct. The plan is to release the first film before 2006. The movie will center on the origins of the game's female protagonist, sexy bounty hunter Samus Aran, and relate her adventures battling the insidious life-sucking Metroids and their controlling force, Mother Brain."
directorial talent?
John Woo is a director that realy should not be given too much money to work with. His low budget movies are great, while his cash cow flicks (MI2 etc) just hurt to watch. He needs to get back together with Chow Yun-Fat and make a good action movie again.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I just hope they don't try to make Samus "sexy". The last thing this movie needs is some bubble-brained ditz bouncing around Zebes in a slinky catsuit. What's great about Samus is that she totally whoops butt. And no fricken' Liv Tyler!
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She's going to be in a tank top for the entire movie, most likely. Studio execs wouldn't allow the main character to be in that suit of armor for the entire movie. They need sex appeal and all that.
But I'm afraid it would be like Tomb Raider in outer space... Who else would capture our, uhm, hearts better than Ms. Jolie?
Jessica Alba!
Other than the fact that John Woo movies suck.
As mentioned earlier, they will try to get some sexy chick to play Samus, when the REAL reason the first metroid game for Nintendo was so BADASS was because you didn't find out she was a girl until the end. I think they should do the same thing here, but unfortunately, I expect some boring actress that has never seen a Nintendo to be yelling out stupid catch phrases during multiple explosions resulting in another bullshit Woo movie that *could* have been cool. He's like the shitty pop-star director equivalent of a Britney Spears when it comes to quality.
Since this movie focuses on Samus' *origins* a little sexiness might be possible: they might show Samus before she gets the metal bikini/codpiece.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
You know, I had a fair bit of respect for Samus when I was young. She managed to be a female character without being a slut to the viewers (a la Lara Croft) or being some kind of animal/blob thingey (a la Ms. Pac Man, Dixie Kong). I mean sure, a few people played just to see the best ending at under 3 hours, but realistically she wasn't sold on her sex appeal (heck, you wouldn't *believe* how many people I've met who think Samus is male).
Sure, there's Kings Quest 4 and a few RPGs pulled off decent female characters at the time, but nothing nearly as mainstream. Am I the only one who's worried that Hollywood will ruin the feel of Samus by putting too much emphasis the "sexy" aspect?
This said it was about the origin of Samus. I would assume this would include her upbringing by the aliens that made the suit for her, so there will be no hiding that she is a she. I imagine the first half of the movie will be her growing up, and the second half will be her kicking butt in the suit. It will really just be your standard super hero movie, excpet set in space.
You know, I had a fair bit of respect for Samus when I was young. She managed to be a female character without being a slut to the viewers (a la Lara Croft) or being some kind of animal/blob thingey (a la Ms. Pac Man, Dixie Kong). I mean sure, a few people played just to see the best ending at under 3 hours, but realistically she wasn't sold on her sex appeal (heck, you wouldn't *believe* how many people I've met who think Samus is male).
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment (see my recent post.
I don't really have a problem with the "exploitation" or "sexual objectification" of women in the media. Hey, if it sells, go for it. Pornographic stuff, hey, even child porn or beastiality, I don't have a particular ethical problem with some publisher running out and doing what they want, because I still get to choose what I look at.
What *does* bother me is when *all* the female characters wind up as sexpots, so that I *don't* have an opportunity to watch a movie with a female character that isn't a carefully made up face on top of two giant and frequently exposed breasts. I *liked* Ripley in Aliens 1 through 3. Not a particularly sexual character, very cool, well-played. Sure enough, come Aliens: Resurrection, they've got her stripped down and squirming around in plastic wrap. I liked Metroid -- yes, there's the swimsuit shot at the end (and it *says* something that even my good examples have such major exceptions), but ultimately, there's not a lot of sexualizing Samus through the game. Sure enough, now we get "Samus the sexy bounty hunter". God *damn* it, I like my sexy characters, but there's a time and a place for it, and I'll go watch porn if I want to watch porn -- I don't like seeing all my favorite characters turned into nothing but sexpots.
And the few times there *isn't* a sexpot female lead, a good, strong character, she's frequently used as a plot device to show how sensitive the male co-lead is ("She wanted to be strong and not need help from anyone, but she learned that she needs to rely on the male lead by the end, who naturally doesn't need to rely on her to anywhere near the same degree.")
This is not for reasons of political correctness, censorship, or even "taste". I just plain find it appealing to have non-sexplot strong female characters, and I'm damned tired of the few characters that *aren't* being given over to some director/game designer who firmly sits in the traditional camp and converts them into one.
May we never see th
Yeah, but how often does hollywood actually want to stay true to the story?
If this movie goes well, could a Halo movie be far behind?
Red vs. Blue.
They're good games, hours of entertainment but they are just games. They are not novelisations of potential film scripts and if the Tomb Raider & Mortal Kombat films are anything to go by, the Metroid movie will be another dire game adapation to be a quick money generating scheme from the teenage masses. (I've not seen Resident Evil so I can't comment on that one.)
Why, oh why, when we have a wealth of good science fiction novels on the shelves of our bookstores, can Hollywood not just take a chance and film an Iain Banks, Greg Bear, etc. novel and just give us some good science fiction?
In the past ten years or so, we've had two rubbish Star Trek films, two average Star Wars movies & Solaris (yawn!) Other than that, I cannot think of any other films that could be classified as nitty-gritty science fiction - the Dune mini series was good, I'm looking forward to Ringworld but they're TV releases.
What happened to the early 80s when we had the likes of 2010, Enemy Mine, Blade Runner, Alien & Aliens, etc?
Give us geeks some good sci-fi movies and leave the games for entertainment between trips to the cinema...
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The thing about keeping the gender neutral until the end would be that they'd have to keep the identity of the actress secret and such.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I think that a Metroid Movie should be an almost silent one. Depicting the loneliness of Samus against the mysterious space pirates and Metroids.
John Woo is specialist on complicated and espectacular stunts. Metroid shines on putting you on an alien world. You don't go with your guns blazing in Metroid, dodging bullets ala Matrix.
This has the potential to suck
Perhaps someone should have done a better job anglicizing the name - don't laugh at people pronouncing a word the way it's spelled.
Languages like German in which they also use the Latin alphabet I can understand some discrepency between spelling and pronunciation. But there's no reason for a name that's never been spelled out in English before to be anything less than perfectly phonetic (at least as close as our language will get to the actual pronunciation)
Last post!
Well, we've got a line-up in the past of video-game-based movies that generally suck, though some aren't too bad. The trend seems to be picking up though, and like the Marvel movies, we might see a few "X-men" type movies to match the disaster that was "the Hulk."
So far, we've got a future line-up of: Metroid
Final Fantasy: Advent Children
FFAC (basically a sequel to FF7) looks like it could actually be very cool, sticking much more to the original theme as opposed to CGI-in-space like FFSW was.
Metroid, in-theme also sounds cool... though it could definately go the way of "stuff blowing up in space, lasers, and boobs."
Can anyone mention any video-game-based movies that were worthwhile? How about games that might make promising movies... so far I can think of a few:
-Zelda
-Pretty much any of the Final Fantasys except X2
-Starcraft/Warcraft
-Space Quest? Most games of this genre, particularly the longer-lasting ones, could make a decent miniseries.
-Diablo: Demons, knights, and undead - oh my! heck why not?
-Wing Commander: Some of these were more-or-less movies anyhow. Could make for a decent SCI-FI miniseries
A lot of the "classic" games I played actually developed somewhat interesting stories. Metroid was actually one that - while more action-focuses - had a decent plotline. There is no reason why these couldn't have the potential to be good movies... except that studios already bastardize books/etc enough and video games tend to take a bad beating as far as plot/action.
Alright, remove sexy from this movie. There should be no sexy. Show Samus kicking butt. Give us creapy alien ambiance. But through out the entire movie, don't even mention that she's a she.
Maybe somewhere on teh DVD release, or during the ending credits, we can see her with her helmet off or something.. but we really don't want them to latch on to 'sexy' when the entire game was devoid of sexy until you descovered Samus was a girl.
All the sexy is implied through the post game knowledge that she's female. None of it is overtly displayed. If they're starting off with the idea of sexy, rest assured we'll just be watching situations where samus's running around out of suite for contrived reasons just to demonstrate the sexyness of it all.
In fact, Metroid Prime wasn't even made by Nintendo - it was made by Retro Studios, and published by Nintendo. MP may have been in development for the N64 at the beginning, but it was moved to the GC pretty quickly (before anyone knew it was first-person, etc.)