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Doom Takes A Shot At Gamers
The Washington Post has a piece discussing the suck that is a movie based on a videogame. From the article: "At the heart of this competitive marriage is this question: How do you successfully turn an interactive experience (playing an Xbox game) into a passive one (watching a movie version of an Xbox game)? For whatever reasons, the recent crop of video game movies -- including 2003's 'House of the Dead' and this year's 'Alone in the Dark,' both helmed by the German director Uwe Boll -- have consistently disappointed gamers. Someone even started a Web site called Uwebollsucks.com. Is it for real? A joke? No one is sure."
The same way you successfully make any other movie: by focusing on the story.
Yeah, everyone gets hung up on the fact that Uwe Boll makes crap movies about games, rather than just that he makes crap movies, period. He would fail at any genre he tried. He just chose videogames because, as Tycho of PA posits, he hates them.
Bite the hand.
The upcoming Silent Hill Movie doesn't have a single hair of Boll on it, and that's got me hoping.
It's actually got some pretty strong talent behind it. The script's been refined by Roger Avary (who co-wrote Pulp Fiction, True Romance and Reservoir Dogs among others). It's being directed by Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf), who can create pretty amazing atmospheres. And the original Silent Hill sound designer/composer Akira Yamaoka is doing the music. Not to mention starring Sean Bean (Boromir in LotR) and Radha Mitchell (Mary Barrie in Finding Neverland).
Apparently Avary and Gans spent hours playing the game together while coming up with the visuals and finer plot points, and even the special effects guys are saying it's like nothing they've worked on before.
So yeah, enough of my rampant fanboyism. This one has all the marks of breaking this horrible cycle.
vk.
The first Resident Evil movie should get lots of props. It took the RE world, but altered the plot dramatically. It put characters in difficult, complex situations. A woman wakes up in a house full of guns, and is smuggled down into an underground laboratory she didn't know existed trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Characters make mistakes that other characters have to pay for. They choose between killing one of their own or facing death together.
Most of the actors were pretty good. And let's face it, some of the moments, like the laser dicer machine, were pretty cool.
The problem seemed to be that a few of the actors were distractingly bad, and the CGI monster was ATROCIOUS. Laughably bad. It looked like something out of a cheap CGI fan hentai. Really, if there was a moderately competent sense of dread that the director managed to get out of the great scenario writing, it was killed every time that giant plastic tongue came on screen. Sure, the dogs covered in prosciutto were distractingly bad too and should have been cut from the script. But at least they weren't recurring characters.
RE: Apocalypse didn't have as strong a scenario, writing, or anything else really. But it did drive the characters forward and did succeed in making RE: 3 the Movie look really, really appealing. At this point, it would make a great serial drama for the sci-fi channel.
I wish someone would go back and re-do RE:1 with the love and skill it deserved. It was definitely a problem of one or two weak links in an otherwise strong chain.
The ______ Agenda
Face it, even having a strong fan base, gamers will NOT make up most of the market going to see a movie.
Look at Serenity and its loyal fanbase. While the movie was made as a thank you by Joss Whedon for the support his fan's game him for Firefly, the movie barely did 30 million at the box office. The movie was unapoligectially made for the fans of Firefly, and having spoken to a few non-browncoats, few could follow the movie or even enjoy it because they didn't have any Firefly background (there loss of course). As a fan, I loved it, but obviously there was only about 3 million of us that was interested in seeing the movie.
So, trying to make a movie appeal to gamers is the reason why a movie will fail as it will only appeal to a small segment of the viewing public.
The real reason why video game movies suck is because they are generally produced and written by the ADD riddled MTV generation "it" crowd of Hollywood, putting more emphasis on flash and action and no skilled story telling at all, having skipped that lesson back in art school. Yes, basing a movie on the vapid basis of a game really doesn't offer great material for the general movie going public.
Most games have a good backstory, that is, a story that explains why you are suddenly playing the game and why things are trying to kill you and you have to kill them first. After that back story, the game play plot is usually so devoid of content it isn't funny. It's because your adrenaline is pumping and heart pounding and nerves strained to the max that you derive any fun out of the game. But without those stimuli, if you were just to listen to the music soundtrack and the dialogue you would realize how very little story content is found in the game and just how badly it sucks.
People making video game movies try to duplicate that effect, produce a movie that will get your adreniline pumping and heart pounding, so that by the time your jacked up on sugar and caffiene and blown away by the special effects and explosions, you might overlook how there is about 10 minutes of actual dialogue and story stretched painfully into a loud obnoxious 90 minute movie. You will end up appleaing to a small number of customers and end up with low box office receipts.
So I think they have it all wrong. The success of a video game movie ISN'T to duplicate the gaming experience, that is where they have been failing all along. Get a good story, some decent actors, and balance action and energy with something that can fill in 90 minutes of cinema and that will appeal to a more general audience.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The Washington post is supposed to be a reputable newspaper with a reputation for reliable informaiton. So why was this article not basic fact checked by anybody?
That is, anybody before us.
Come 'on everybody! Let's all pile on to poor Jose Antonio Vargas and point out everything he just plain got wrong.
I'll take the obvious ones.
1. Tron was not a videogame-turned-into-a-movie. It was an original movie about games in general. The videogame followed.
2. Doom cannot be categorized as an Xbox game. Doom has seen basically all of it's sales on the PC for about a dozen years, with the occasional port.
3. Console gaming and movies don't "crave" the 13 - 25 year old male audience. According to the Entertainmetn Software Association the average gamer age is 30, and 43% are female. This skewes a little lower on consoles, but the numbers are far better than the shallow stereotype Vargas passes as journalism. And hasn't box office gold been Date Movies?
Arguable points
1. Doom is not the Granddaddy of FPS games. Wolfenstein 3D is. Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom. There were other FPS games before Wolfie, but it was the first to see real commercial success.
2. Half-Life was based more on classic adventure games than Doom. It certainly didn't "follow the Doom model."
3. He points to Spielberg signing a deal to create 3 franchisable games for EA as a sign that the industry is at a crossroads. However, Spielberg has worked on games many times before, though his LucasArts and Dreamworks Interactive studios. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see him spend more time trying to alter the craft, but it's still nothing he hasn't done before.
As a side note: Movies are about why you do something. Games are about how you do something. Movies about "how" are hollow, and games about "why" are boring.
The ______ Agenda
I had fairly low expectations, and there were even some plans in palce to guide me away from any press after the premier if I didn't like the movie, so I wouldn't say something "unproductive", but I was pleasantly surprised.
No, it isn't an oscar movie, but it definitely isn't Super Mario Brothers / Street Fighter / Double Dragon.
I do wish they had kept the true satanic / hellish theme, but I think they did a credible job with their alternate direction.
John Carmack