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Does A Good Game Make A Good Movie Idea?
Brakz0rz writes "Here's a BBCi article by Daniel Etherington with an overview on how videogames translate onto the big screen. I can't say I've been impressed by any such effort so far. The article touches on John Woo's upcoming Metroid adaptation. Etherington writes, "One of these days, someone has just got to make a decent video game movie. How about Peter Jackson doing Zelda? Now that would be promising." I would enjoy that more than the games franchised from the LOTR trilogy."
Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Mario...
games make TERRIBLE movies
How about a metal gear solid movie. Imagine if that came out in the movie format instead of the game format... Wait it did come out in the movie format! What sucks though is that lots of these game-movie adaptions stray away from the main story of the series which is what makes the series so unique to begin with. Case in point, Final Fantasy Spirits Within.
The same way a movie makes a bad game idea.
Something suffers because the time to market seems to influence the outcome of the product,
Two words: Tomb Raider
God spare us all....
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Games and movies have different life cycles.
A decent game often gets better in its second abnd third versions as technology improves and the story lines get more mature.
Films sequels are rarely better than the original and often dramatically worse.
Today, games make more money than films. A successful game franchise - that has many years of life left - can be ruined by one poor film tie-in.
So the ideal model is to take a good film and turn it into a series of games, and to resist at all costs the temptation to make film sequels. (Yes, I'm thinking of the Matrix).
LoTR does not really count as a film + sequels since it is based on an existing story and was shot in one go.
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Well there was that Super Mario Bros movie...
It is good that video game movies are a fairly recent innovation. Lest we end up watching pong for 90 minutes.
I think that movies make even worse video games, though:ET for the Atari anyone?
John Woo and Metroid sounds promising, but God help us if somebody tries to make a movie about Nibbles. Or does Tremors already count?
Clue was pretty good and it's "based" on a game.
I'd like to see a GOOD Final Fantasy movie based on one of the actual games. Six has always been my favourite, I'm sure the story is strong enough to be made into a good movie, but there's so much to it that two hours may not be enough. It might make a good two-part or three-part movie like LOTR, though, I doubt it has enough audience to have anyone know what the Hell it was.
I'd wager to say most movies made from games in the past (like the awful Streetfighter movie and Super Mario Bros) are just trying to capitalize on the name. I did like the first Mortal Kombat movie, though, and Tomb Raider was silly but at least entertaining.
Maybe we need more movies made from RPGs, they seem to have more in the way of actual plot to begin with.
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What do you call Pulp Fiction then? I think it's Tarantino influencing GTA, not GTA influencing Tarantino.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
I am still waiting anxiously for Pong: the Movie to come out in theaters.
That game provided me more dramatic entertainment than two thirds of the movies I've seen. It convinced me beyond any doubt that games are a form of art.
The Raven
The reason why games usually make terrible movies is pretty obvious. It's because the movies are usually made out of high-profile action games - to cash in on the name, as is standard practise in Hollywood.
These kinds of games are, of course, plot-free zones. Hence, the movie makers fill the void in an ad-hoc fashion, usually with horrible results.
Speaking of Zelda, anyone remember the old Zelda cartoons that we had on TV once? That's a classic example of what I'm talking about; those cartoons made my eyes bleed. Badly.
I can imagine that it WOULD be possible to make a good movie out of a good, plot-filled game, such as the old Lucasarts/Lucasfilm Games ones. Those would at least be funny. But, that hasn't happened yet. I'm still crossing my fingers ...
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Just last Thursday I heard a lecture about digital effects in movies and games by George Joblove and Douglas Kay, two former ILM-ers who have now moved to Sony Imageworks and Mondo Media, respectively. One of the clips that Douglas Kay showed was a concept for a project they're doing which is a combined movie and game. The idea is that the movie is done entirely digitally, and at a technological level that can be reproduced on a game console, so that there is a seemless transition between the movie environment and the game. Sounded like a good idea to me.
This side up.
Those jedi knight FPS games might make a good series of movies if they scaled back on the special effects and wrote some better dialog.
Can't wait for M*U*L*E - The Movie.
Now if only EA would release the damn game for a modern platform . . .
It is funny how these type of stories come up now and then because, for awhile now, I've been really set on the idea of a Grim Fandango movie. I can't think of any game which could more readily translated onto the big screen. Even as a video game it still boasted an incredibly well developed story with a wonderful atmosphere and stellar voice acting.
My dream? Pixar doing Grim Fandango. Something like that would, in my mind, help make up for all the Tomb Raiders and Mortal Combats.
forma3
If you liked "Saturday Night Fever", you'll love Dance Dance Revolution: The Movie!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Example: most adventure/shoot-em-up games are almost all fighting, with the occasional puzzle. These are entertaining because they tax your reflexes or your strategic thinking. It's fun to do that yourself, and so they're entertaining, but it's boring to watch someone else do that for more than about 10 minutes.
Also, because there's so much time spent in fighting & puzzles, the story background and character development in games is often (yes, often, not always, but very often) weak to non-existent. A shining example: Final Fantasy. That game has more character development than most adventure games do, and it was still a boring movie.
Short answer: there's a long gap between things that are fun to *do* and things that are fun to *watch*. The only thing that clearly falls in both catagories is sex, but I'm not going to go there right now.
How about Peter Jackson doing Zelda?
I can't wait to see what the original zelda theme sounds like when a full symphony plays it.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic would make an outstanding movie. If someone actually bothered to make it, the storyline and characters are much better than anything Lucas is putting out in the "current" trilogy.
Video games are a different medium than films. Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were more action-oriented games with hardly any plot. Hmmm... what kind of a movie do you think is going to arise out of a video game like that?
Basing a movie off of an RPG, such as KOTOR, would at least give the writers and directors more meat to play with. They probably wouldn't have to do too much yet still remain true to the game.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Seriously, that chick was getting kidnapped or shanghaighed so many times that she probably has to have 911 preprogrammed on speeddial in her cellphone just to keep up.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Zelda. That game was actually inspired by Ridley Scott's Legend, so a movie based on Zelda would almost be a full circle then...
Castlevania.
A couple of years ago I had hear John Woo was interested in making a Symphony of the Night film. Konami apparently has a trilogy of scripts floating around. I can see it must have never gone anywhere. John Woo has been expressing his interest in making a videogame movie for a while now. Honestly, I don't have high hopes for this Metroid game.
I want a movie about the first Castlevania game before everything turned to cheesy anime hell, when it was a European horror game about Simon Belmont just fighting zombies and trying to destroy Dracula.
By the way, I know many here probably don't consider it a great film, but I remember Mortal Kombat doing pretty well when it came out, and lots of people went to see it simply because it was a fun action flick with a great techno theme song. In my eyes, it was the first true successful game-to-film translation, even if it isn't regarded as a classic movie (few are). I guess Tomb Raider would have to be considered as well since it did successfully, but I never saw it.
They're even making Spy Hunter starring The Rock. It's insane.
I always thought that Nethack would make a good movie.
The biggest question is who to cast as '@'
It depends on the game, I dunno if I was the only person watching the Final Fantasy movie thinking "This should be a video game" there was too much in the movie to be explained in that short time frame of a movie. I'm sure any good video game turned into a movie will probably be bad since we're expecting too much of it. And they'd try to make a blockbuster, not a movie that's true to the game. But then again Final Fantasy Avant Children is coming out, that seems like it's true to the story of Final Fantasy and not just trying to be some movie that just happens to have the name of a popular video game in it when having almost nothing to do with the game itself (Mario Brothers.)
There are a couple of basic problems with translating a video game to a movie:
(1) Most video games have thin, unelaborated setup plots. Nobody cares when it's the game, as long as the play/action is good. When it comes time to move things to the silver screen, though, it's much more important.
(2) A good video game movie could be based on a character's adventure in the world set up by the game -- but in addition to simply treating it as a sequence of scenes where the character accomplishes the same goals as the video game (or even some new goals you make up), and throwing in cool effects and kick-butt action, you'd have to make the character emotionally and intellectually three-dimensional. Why do they do what they do? Where are they vulnerable and strong? How do they grow/change over the course of the movie? However, most video game movies don't try to do this at all -- just walk through the levels, kids! -- and so you get bored out of your skull.
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I remember an exception : Willow was a perfect match on screen and in its 16 colors pixel adaptation...
I just remembered I need to boot my computer... with my Tredair!
A good story makes a good story.
"Good Game" is not a descriptive enough term to determine whether or not some bit of content will translate well to another format. Game 'genres' are comparatively less like genres and more like species. You can find common ground between the worst Ahnuld action flick and your favorite movie (assuming they are not the same) - differences in movie genres are all content-based.
But while the ancestor of the arcade genre are arcade action games, graphic adventures have their roots in interactive fiction, MMORPGs hail from MU*s, CRPGs descend from board games, and other physical games translate to video well without need of additional story (e.g. Chessmaster, Hoyle's). Differences in game genres are both form- and content-based, and not to any set ratio.
So the answer fully depends on why the game is "good". If it's good because it has a compelling story, great characters, etc., then duh, it will probably make a good movie. If not, then in the absence of a good script doctor it will not.
The only reason they're occasionally, misbegottenly commingled is the built-in audience for whichever is the later rendering. And it's not reason enough, for my money.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
It wasn't all that bad. It was an okay action movie. I mean, it had Christopher Lambert.
Mortal Kombat 2, on the other hand, was such an incredibly disgusting piece of shit it almost makes Tomb Raider look like Indiana Jones.
I think an online team based game using the battle room as inspiration would be great. Lets just hope Warner Brothers does right by Orson...
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
Why not just make the movies directly from the game using the cut scenes and footage of expert player gameplay. Sega did something like this with the first Shenmue game for Dreamcast. It's actually rather interesting to watch.
Heck, it might even sell more games. Though I would go for a direct to DVD release rather than a theatre release since to market may not be very big.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
A good story makes a good movie. The Legend of Zelda series more or less historically suck for stories and are about exploration. (I have played and beaten all the games but the N64 ones). In Wind Waker the story was about Hyrule but not about Link. A good story is one where the characters themselves change and learn more about their own selves and manage to change in some capacity. That makes a good movie.
What makes a good video however is being fun and entertaining. Take Metroid as an example. A fun game but no story at all. So now we have a game that is fun to play, but is kinda boring in review. From a game to movie perspective Megaman X makes much more sense and has ore to work with. You have the outsider (X as the first reploid and as such the father of the maverics), the internal conflict of the main character (why and I here and why do I fight), character progression (the destruction and rebirth of Zero and how it affected X's relationship with him).
MGS would make a better movie than any of my previous examples, however. You have a progression of plot with characters reveling much about themselves throughout the game/story as opposed to get key X to find location y and kill boss z.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
How about we come up with something original. Why not make an original movie...not a re-make, not based on a tv show, not based on a video game, not based on a SNL skit...
How about someone make a movie that's original?
Hmmmm....nah, it'll never work! The kids don't like stuff like that.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Wing Commander was an excellent game series. Wing Commander the Movie actually made me vomit. It was so bad that they couldn't even get Mark Hamill (who played the lead character in the last three games' cutscenes) to show up as Blair.
I've seen a few posts in this discussion bagging out the Final Fantasy-The Spirits within movie, with complaints like this one:
I have a slightly different recollection of the movie. I had played one or two of the FF games, and I remember thinking during the cut scenes in FFVII that this really needs to be made into a movie. I got really excited when it was announced that such a thing was to happen.
I finally got to see it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I found the plot quite FFish, and it seemed to assume a familiarity with the FF style. A friend who came with me didn't quite understand what was going on. I ended up going through the whole FFVII plot with him, and everything seemed to make sense after that.
The main difference is in how the two genres relate to a plot line. In a movie the audience's attention needs to be focussed solely on the story. You can move fairly quickly, develop some complex characters and have two or three subplots moving together. Even if you don't quite understand it, or you miss something, a well made movie should still be understandable.
In a game (RPG at least) you're more concerned with moving the character yourself--designing him or her to be the character best suited to beating up the bad guy at the end while still being able to get through the earlier stages. You have to guess where the story's going to go so you can plan ahead.
You also have to choose whether or not to go on the subquests (if you can find them). Spending a day and a half breeding a golden chocobo would not go down well in a movie!
In a game, forgetting the slightest detail can leave you stranded. I remember spending two whole days flying my airship around the wrong part of the world because I missed a single word in an instruction (again in FFVII). And I wouldn't have got that chocobo if I hadn't got myself a nice walk through off the internet.
These things will have a dramatic effect on the development of the plot and the sorts of things they can do. The fact that the Final Fantasy series use different characters all the time gives more leeway in a movie. Peronally, I think the best way would be to develop the two in tandem, a la the Matrix. I haven't yet played the game so I don't know how well it worked there, but I suspect they were on to something.
I guess the whole experience taught me it's a poor effort if you need to go outside the movie (as my friend found) or the game (that walkthrough was the only thing that kept me in it) to be able to get your money's worth.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Among other things, Call of Duty was pretty heavily influenced by the fantastic HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (rent it or buy it! You won't be sorry!). Hell, the first of the three campaigns in the game puts you in the shoes (or rather, the chute) of a member of the 101st Airborne as he and a bunch of other paratroopers drop over Normandy the night before D-Day; Band of Brothers follows the 101st from training to Normandy through the European theater of operations. Several of the missions from the war covered in the show are modeled in Call of Duty. Particularly impressive is the similarity between BoB and CoD's interpretations of the Battle at Brecourt, an assault on German artillery emplacements connected by a system of trenches. Damn cool stuff. :)
No plot at all, unless you count things like the t-mode messages. Goldmine for a movie, better as one of the oldest multiplayer games in existance!
...Angelina Jolie made sure that movie had at least two distinct advantages. Now disasters like Wing Commander don't have any extenuating circumstances.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... or would it be too much like Austin Powers?
the metroid movie might be decent..
would be cool if they had the game music done by the guy who did the metroid prime music. that would fucking own.
especially the ridley theme.
dude, I wanna see ridley. and he better have his theme.
Who never played the monkey island games?
Those were probably the best adventure games ever made, filled with humor everywhere, probably the only game where it's not boring to talk with the other characters
If they could bring up a movie with a good plot, related to monkey island, and with the same kind of humor! (which will be very hard i think), it would be a great great movie.
Now making a movie of an action game is something pretty stupid, couldn't even watch more than 15 minutes of tomb raider 1, and some years later i even saw they made a second opus? what a disapointement
we all want monkey island! monkeys everywhere, with some scenes filmed in 320*240 pixels & 16 colors (must be great on a cinema screen) =)
and the music of monkey, of course
Let's think of blade runner, i played the game, which i enjoyed a lot, before seeing the movie, the game was great, the movie disapointed me
let's think of dune, played both games, those were amazing! then i saw the movie, again, i was deceived...
The connection between game and movie is hard to do, i don't know if it's even possible, they are too different.
But the only movie about game that would attract me is that monkey island. Which isn't planned, and probably never will be.
I'd suggest: Deus Ex
The original storyline provides a -lot- of world material to work with. Of course, it would have to be done by a good scifi/action director, or it'd be hosed.
I'd say that there's simply a lacking of good movies in general; it's not exclusively endemic of game => movie adaptations. Hollywood excels at cranking out shit. The Hulk, anyone? There are dozens of forgetable movies every year.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Star Trek Original Series Star Trek 25th aniversery and Judgement rites. Two excellent adventures.
It can work but it needs really carefull work. X-wing worked because it really only used the setting of star wars. You weren't Luke Skywalker or Han Solo but rather one of the many nameless pilots that got killed in the movies.
The star trek adventures are perhaps the most perfect adoption. They played EXACTLY like a tv episode. The only minor point was some extremely pointless space combat shooter element that was thrown in for god knows what reason. The adventure part worked, the space combat bit didn't.
And that really is the lesson. Focus on ONE gametype and realise that certain things just can't be done in games. So far we have had numerous attempts at games that put you on the bridge of the Enterprise in combat and they just don't work.
Will a good movie ever be made based on a game? Well tron is a nice movie. But then it was based on fantasie games, the games in the movie only coming AFTER the movie.
Frankly most games just don't have a universe rich enough to make a game. It is easy to make a shooter out of story but a lot harder to make a story out of shooter. Can anyone really imagine what the plot would be for an ID game?
So I agree with you why it is difficult but it has been done in one direction at least. so movies -> games at least can work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Most books make crappy movies, why would video games be any better?
Addendum: Hollywood may be in a serious rut with relatively few new ideas, but it is absolutely revolutionary compared to the game industry.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
I never played any of the games, so I had no bias going in to see it. The entire presentation was captivating, with the only minor flaws being the black-haired(?) one-liner chick, and the poor quality of the laser grid defense thingy. Everything else made sense, and kept me on the edge of my seat. I even bought the soundtrack CD for the movie. It was one of my favorite movies of the year.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
My only exposure to the movies-from-vidgames genre so far has been to watch 'Final Fantasy.' While the animation and CGI work was decent enough, the story was weak at best, certainly not enough to earn the movie a permanent spot in our collection.
I've always held the belief that it's good, solid STORYWRITING that makes a movie or video game succeed, not how many FX you can cram into X number of minutes. Look at 'Field of Dreams' for example. Minimal FX, but a terrific story, and well-told to boot.
What I would REALLY like to see is some of the older 'classic' SF novels turned into movies that FOLLOW THE BOOK with a high degree of accuracy. These days, adapting something like Heinlein's "Have Space Suit, Will Travel," or perhaps the original "Red Planet" would, I think, make for a heck of a blockbuster.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
It is not that video games make bad movies, it is just that those who make the games often have no idea what it takes to make a good movie.
The people who are involved in making the game often have no idea how Hollywood works and those in Hollywood are often so inbred in the industry they don't want to stray to far from the original game or the tried and true formulas of the industry. Demographics tell them that the game was popular so lets not mess with the formula and make a film just like the game.
There is no reason, other than talent on both sides, that stops anyone from making both a great game and a great movie. Right now both camps could use a fresh influx of new ideas and talent.
Funny that I should see this posted today. I just finished The Longest Journey this afternoon, and let me just say that it's a hell of an adventure. The way the writers gave even the most minor characters interesting dialogue is nothing short of amazing. And the main character is completely believable.
This could get made into a movie with a minimum of modification. But, of course, it'll never happen. Guess I'll just have to content myself with the sequel...next year...sigh...
I wrote a short story in fifth grade based on Adventure, which I'd played on the TTY at a friend's house. That would've been in 1980, I think, and my friend's dad was a professor at the University of Michigan. My teacher thought it was pretty good (or maybe he just said that about every assignment we turned in).
-Rich
i think prequels may be a good model for movie adoptions of video games. any decent game has a plot and a setting. it would sense to make a movie to "set up the story".
.sig business long ago.
just waiting for pacman the movie with michael madson as pacman explaing why he is so afraid of these monsters.
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i left the
I've always maintained a movie based on the story of the first two games in the Myth series would make GREAT movies. Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter. Heck, some fans of the game even did a fan-fiction movie of it using iMovie.... with no budget mind you. Avon's Hope: A Myth Movie
Before I saw Event Horizon, I always thought that the original DOOM would make a GREAT movie. In the right hands, all of the basic concepts for a pretty interesting action adventure movie were there. Granted, DOOM is a mindless and purely action-oriented FPS, but if someone had gotten on the ball and made a movie before the whole "survival horror"/zombie vs. modern technology fad caught on in both video games and movies, I'd always felt a carefully planned DOOM movie would have been great. The problem now is that many of the traits that were first pioneered by DOOM have already been done, and poorly at that, so anything in a DOOM movie made now would probably just seem too cliche and corny.
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Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
Tomb Raider wasn't that bad of a game to base a movie off of, being essentially based off of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones character. Instead of a globetrotting American professor you have a globetrotting British society woman, but the settings and potential plots are not significantly different. Certainly Lara Croft's mysteriously backstory could have led to a gripping script, and her John Woo action stylings could have let to a much grittier and more intense movie than Spielberg's fist fights ever could.
What sets the two apart is that Jones was written, directed, and acted by people at the top of their field. Harrison Ford injected character into Indiana Jones in a way that Jolie is still trying to come to grips with, and Spielberg ensured that there were plenty of "moments" in the movie where the audience would really feel for the characters.
The amount of skill required to pull off a great movie, like a great game, is tremendous. While these movies are handled by second-string directors they will continue to be terrible. There is nothing inherently wrong in basing a movie off of a game, any more than basing it off of a book or a song, but it will always take a skilled cast and crew to make a movie good no matter what it is based off of.
The ______ Agenda
Now, hear me out. In the game, all you did was look at her boobs while you wandered around the boring game. At the movie, you just look at her boobs while she wanders around the boring movie.
Sounds like a 100% adaptation, to me.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Those help messages are in the game because there's always new players, and because many items (like the Hookshot) are not immediately obvious. Bottles are actually rather tricky for new players -- without that help message, most would never guess that you could do things like bottle fairies. It'd be nice if they could be turned off, but on the other hand, since there's not really a huge number of special items in Zelda relative to the length of the game, I think the description and music fanfare (Dum-duh-dah-DAAA!) lend a sense of ceremony to whenever you get a new goodie.
But I don't see how a good Zelda movie could be made. Ignoring the fact that Hollywood only makes movie-games when it's looking to make a quick buck and never when they want to produce something of artistic merit, Zelda's just too far outside their definition of "cool." If they made a Zelda game, you can bet they'd get someone really annoying to play Link.
Remember: three of Nintendo's big four heroes, Mario, Link and Samus either never or hardly ever get dialogue in their games. (The fourth is Kirby, who also never gets dialogue, but neither does anyone else in his games.) I think it'd wreck the characters to give them dialogue. Just like Sonic, and thus the Sonic Adventure games, seem a lot lamer when he's got a speaking part.
People have spoken that a movie and a game to both work well need a good plot and good action. Homeworld was both. The action in the game was great, you had the plot of the story and the characters where there developing as it went along and you really felt a part of the story versus just watching and have you head slump over in bordom.
Life is to be experienced, not frowned upon. -Uknown
Have you ever seen the cartoon series? I made the mistake of downloading the first episode once, and it was absolutely terrible. Link had the ridiculous catchphrase, "Well excuuuuuse me, Princess!" that he said nearly every other line. In order for a Zelda movie to work, they'd have to find someone that would kind of be a cross between Frodo and Pippin from the Lord of the Rings movies, and avoid anyone with annoying cuteness.
Unfortunately, most of the focus of Zelda games is acquiring new stones or trinkets or other items so you can eventually have a showdown with Ganon, so I'm not sure how well this would translate into a movie. Watching the main character work by himself (or with a fairy or a talking boat) to collect various items would definitely not work. Any writer would have to be able to draw on what has made the Zelda series so successful - empathy for Link, the loss of innocence and childhood, the desire to help and be heroic, and the obvious implied attraction between Link and Zelda - and create a fresh new story from that.
I think it would be easier to accomplish that than making a Metroid movie with more than one character (unlike the game), but I'm not a screenwriter.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
Wing Commander the game series, particularly III and IV, were actually great sci-fi cinema. The cutscenes themselves could be cobbled together with no changes (well, not all the branches, but one path through them) and played on a computer screen, into a camera, on the Sci-Fi channel and would probably get great ratings and sell DVD sets.
The *games were better movies than the movie* by a long way, and had bigger stars (Jason Bernard, Malcolm MacDowell, Mark Hamill, Biff from back to the future I wish I could remember his name, John Rhys-Davies, and John Spencer from West Wing).
Those games were full-on big-budget movies, certainly better than any sci-fi movie available at the time (the mid '90s being something of an abhorable drought as far as science-fiction cinema went). Wing Commander IV was actually a *great* movie.
I'm repeating myself here.