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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."
I talk about stuff.
and hide the main character in a suit so people who never played the game don't realize she's a she until the very end when she takes off her helmet. They should not, however, emulate the game's graphics or endlessly confusing mazes. However, the turning into a ball and other stuff of that nature would be cool.
Jessica Alba!
Very nice! I like it!
It would be even better if they kept her gender a secret until later in the movie. Hardcore video game enthusists would know the secret, but it would be a surprise for everyone else. Even better would be to throw out some indirection to make the gamers thing that they changed her to a he for the movie. :-D
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You're right. He does better with less. I really liked his early movies, but all his recent ones reek of Hollywood money-magic. Every shot, every plot, every thought has to rock or forget it, IMHO. Instead of "The Natives take the fort", try actually going into detail about it, and examine the usefullness of shots in their reflection of plots. Metroid movie? Sounds like an easy out, because Woo will only have to film it from the side!
Maybe this will be big break for The Minibosses?
Wouldn't it be cool if we get to watch flashbacks to training? In these flashbacks, you see several men and women and have no idea which one is going to *be* the metroid warrior. They could make it look like it's going to be some guy, then at the end of the movie they reveal that it's the chick you least expected it to be!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
He's flat out said that he doesn't want to do the over-the-top ballet of violence, it's bad for children. (I'd like to put a bullet in tipper gore's head for that). It seems to really be a trend anyway, directors mostly mellow with age. But he doesn't try to make excusses, he acknowledges and embraces it.
That said. While his action sequences are nothing short of operatic, it's his meditations on fraternity and duty that I find resonate with me. If he wants to give a little back to the kids ala Robert Rodriguez, I'm not going to kick sand on his picnic. Hell I'll probably see it.
Truth be told, my secret dream was for him to direct the second of three badass Star Wars prequels. Chow Yun Fat/Tony Leung/Philip Kwok would make a badass Mandalorian bounty hunter.
Little girl in a massive space suit with near godlike powers she inherited during the course of the movie... I'd be watching the people react around me during that scene!
But yeah, a movie needs it's signature fuck toy so you're right on the money. Unfortunately.
She is the ultimate Kick-A** B*tch. Anyone who has seen even a few episodes of Farscape would agree.
Absolutely NONE of the metroid games have any speaking characters at all, the closest there is are those "pirate data terminals" in prime. Who is Samus gonna talk to for 2 hours? Is she gonna keep a hunter's log or something like that? She clearly doesn't operate under any kind of military or any other organization so arguing with her superiors won't work. The chozo are all long dead, so that's out unless they spend a huge amount of time showing her training. Space pirates could talk I guess, they obviously have language but who wants to hear them do anything but snarl?
As much as I'd love to see Samus on the big screen, I don't think there's enough material to flesh out into an entire movie that will keep casual viewers interested while staying close enough to the original concept to keep the fans happy. It would definitely make for some fantastic action sequences but as a movie? I can't see it.
I can only imagine Metroid as a CG only movie like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. If this movie is done with live actors it will most likely suck. I don't think there is any female actor that could effectively embrace the character of Samus.
I would use a named actress who was ridiculously beautiful and had wire-fu experience. Kate Beckensdale comes to mind.
I would put her in the preview, with another reasonable maybe action star in the credits. She would be talking to the person in the armor, which would be sick with style. Her name, Samus would not be mentioned, instead the topic at hand is the alien infestation.
Open the movie with the prerequiset establishing action sequence. Asteroid blows up, and 'tada', to reveal she's in the armor! And then she's out of the armor in a futuristic swimsuit which might be from the video game, or Appleseed, cue story that leads to a hour long breathless action finally. Maybe do a die hard buddy picture, she's on the inside with the alien hords busting sweet moves and snappy one liners, while the person the audiance indentifies with is on the outside offering folksy homespun feel-good wisdom for the 22nd century. Wal*Mart will be reference under penalty of death. Pumpkinhead will be referenced under penalty of twinky.
And that's why I'm Roger Ebert and you're not. Check out my movies Beyond Valley of The Dolls, and The Bra of God.
This movie will suffer the same thing the recent Metroids have suffered, with the possible exception of Prime because of the way it was done--obsessing over Samus the character and her origins.
It's a bit like the difference between GTA3 and Vice City. One was an originless, storyless everyman people could live vicariously through, the second game was good but included a character hard for me to relate with.
The same with the Metroids. They keep trying to introduce plot and storylines now, cut-scenes and so forth, when the first game and Super Metroid were about being sent to some far-flung planet and travelling deeper and deeper underground into claustrophic caverns and tunnels, battling bizarre creatures. The fact that you were in a cool-looking suit was great, but even better was that it was just taken for granted that you were Samus Aran, a woman. It was never really a big deal. Even in Super Metroid, in which you already knew it was a woman. She just happened to be one.
This movie's going to play off the whole woman thing and make it extremely cheesy. I liked Samus when she was just some mysterious, silent bounty hunter you knew little about. Now they're trying to fill in her origins, storyline, motivations, and so on, and it doesn't feel like it belongs. Somehow, Prime pulled it off because they never really revealed too much and kept things myserious and ambient. Most of the plot was revealed through Chozo lore on the walls.
I guess it's one of those situations where you know you and your game-playing buddies who love Metroid could sit around one night and come up with a better story and movie tone than the one that's going to come out from John Woo...and it's going to be extremely frustrating when you see the resulting movie. Then again, this doesn't necessarily mean a movie will get made...just that he's signed on if one happens.
Ok, I agree with alot of the things you've said here.
:-)
I strive to produce constructive controversy.
I do take some serious offense to your carefree attitude towards child pornography though. You should seriously reconsider your thoughts on the matter. The real problem with child porrnography isn't the people who look at it. And just because you can choose not to doesn't change the fact that whoever is taking the pictures is abusing children. I'm all for personal freedoms. I'm getting close to libertarian in the majority of my views. But this is exploitation of individuals who have no choice in the matter, and that is simply unacceptable.
Hmm...well, for starters, it's certainly possible to produce material that is child pornography without sexually abusing children -- painting a portrait intended to incite lust that portrays anyone under the age of consent is child pornography, though it (well, presumably) doesn't involve the abuse of children. A performance of, say, Romeo and Juliet contains nearly all the elements necessary to classify something as child porn (Juliet, you will remember, is thirteen when Romeo is sleeping with her), only lacking proven intent on the part of the producer to incite lust. You know how a lot of people take excerpts from movies, the bits where an actress exposes a nipple or her rear, or something? Doing so to a scene from Romeo and Juliet could quite easily fill in the last bit, and qualify the resultant work as child pornography.
Second of all (and this is where a lot of people start to get royally peeved), I really can't manage to get upset if someone takes a picture of a naked kid. For ages and ages and ages, all of us ran around in the buff. A lot of societies had kids, especially, doing the same up until awfully recently, until Christianity and Victorian values completed a worldwide spread. Aside from some kind of highly artifical Victorian value set (yeah, the one that says that women that have sex before marriage are 'dishonored'), I fail to see how someone suffers damange from having their picture taken.
We can certainly have laws about physical crimes without requiring laws regarding the posession and distribution of pornography. It's quite legal to produce, say, snuff pornography, but it's not legal to kill someone in the production of such material. (This really was a hot topic for the FBI at one point -- the public fear that some snuff films were *real* -- IIRC, Snopes ran a bit on it -- but years of digging didn't turn up a single real lead.)
So then the question becomes...where is the benefit to us in banning this material, to our society? I just can't think of one. The big one might be that sexually-oriented media containing portrayals of children might *inspire* people to run out and commit real crimes that *do* harm a child. That is, IMHO, a pretty legitimate concern, but it doesn't seem that there are any grounds to support a link between looking at content and the actual acting out of something. There is a huge amount of pornography that depicts illegal acts -- snuff, rape, etc, and yet we don't seem to feel that it warrants banning, which seems to be quite inconsistent with our policy on child porn. We allow (in the US) video games, TV shows movies, comic books, and all sorts of media that contain murders, torture, killings...we don't seem to require a ban there.
As far as I can tell, the ban on child porn, very unique as far as bans on pure information goes, doesn't have much rational grounding. It really exists more from fear -- a parent's fear that *anything*, *anything* that might seem a plausible threat to their child *must* be eliminated.
I really like pointing out times when it seems that people are doing something that doesn't seem make all that much sense -- and child porn is a great example.
Child porn seems an awful lot like me to marijuana. Look at marijuana criminalization (and let me preface this by saying that I've oppo
May we never see th
Gunpei Yokoi made Metroid, Metroid 2 and Super Metroid, not Miyamoto. Miyamoto also didn't create Pokemon, that was Satoshi Tajiri.
I remember reading that there weren't any new Metroid games after Super Metroid because Yokoi didn't want any more to be made. I don't know if he had enough power within Nintendo for that to be the case (could Miyamoto really stop Nintendo from making more Mario and Zelda games?). From what I understand, the Metroid franchise isn't as big in Japan as America, and that might have been a factor as well. He left Nintendo in 1996, possibly because of the failure of the Virtual Boy, and died in a car accident in 1997. A bunch of threads on Usenet lamented that with his death, there'd be no more sequels for Metroid or Kid Icarus.
Metroid 64 news / rumors trickled out, but I can't remember if that was while he was still living. I think Miyamoto was involved in Prime's development, but I don't remember how much. Might not have been too much, since Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker were also in development, along with whatever other long range projects were on his plate (Mario 128, Pikmin 2).