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Why Game Movies Stink
Via Cathode Tan (who has some commentary of his own on the subject), a Guardian article attempting to ascertain who is at fault for crappy game movies. From the article: "Because, unlike cinema, computer gaming is a medium which requires the player to make things up for themselves. An individual game may be laden with 'plot points' but its narrative is always up for grabs. It is a format of scenarios rather than stories, elements which can be bolted together in differing orders with varying outcomes. Cinema, on the other hand, is designed for people who like to watch and listen, and who expect the film-maker to get their story straight before the movie reaches the theatres. Viewing a film based on a computer game is like hanging around in an amusement arcade, peering over the shoulders of other people playing video games. It has less to do with story-telling than conceptual shelf-stacking. And it is symptomatic of the painful death of the art of narrative cinema."
If they have Angelina Jolie or Milla Jovovich.
it's time to queue the Uwe Boll jokes.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Yeah, that and Uwe Boll.
I personally thought Silent Hill the movie was great.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a 1st person movie (similar to a 1st person shooter)? Meaning, for like Resident Evil, Doom, etc. all we see is the gun in hand, the shots fired, and the blood splattering? That would make a great movie!
Because:
most games stink
most movies stink
It's basic algebra/logic/common sense...
So, the movie will never be the same experince as playing the game. That's obvious.
It is still possible to write a good movie based on the plot points of a game. "Tomb Raider" comes to mind, as does "Mortal Kombat". Neither is all-time great cinema, but they are both perfectly good movies. They took the plot points of the video games and built a good story around them.
If you can't make a good movie from a video game that's a failing of the writers you are using, not of the concept itself. Given the quality of plots coming out of Hollywood in general, it should be obvious that good writing is in seriously short supply.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Because most games have very simplistic plots. Sure, they seem fairly intricate when you spend 20-40 hours running around performing tasks to get the next part of the story to be revealed. But when you sit back and look at it again afterwards, you can usually distill the story down to a one or two paragraph summary that still contains the more intricate plot points.
This guy's the limit!
The Wizard was a piece of theatrical mastery in every sense of the word.
Okay, walking into a movie theatre, sitting down on the couch with a DVD, or even catching a game at the bar, we all experience Television or Movies in the same way. We can't control anything. People who go to a movie go there to see a story unfold. They don't go there to make things happen. When people go to see a movie based on a video game, they expect the same level of excitment the videogame delivers. This can never happen.
Silent Hill was probably one of the best videogame movies I've seen. The game doesn't concentrate on combat, but on storey and making you piss your pants. The movie keeps your heart unsure whether or not it's worth each heart beat. Just like the game. The movie has very little combat. The game does not focus on combat. The game has a deep story that takes forever to discover and understand. The movie uses the time you're in the theatre to deliver enough story to understand what's going on. The only problem is that if you haven't played Silent Hill 1,2, and 3, you may not understand the movie's symbolism, and thereby, believe that it's just wonton violence.
Silent Hill was good. Not the best, but good. Compare it to any other video game movie, and we're darn near a 10, at least a 9. TFA goes on to campare it to Street Fighter and Mario Bros (THE worst video game movie EVER). Not really a fair analysis. Street Fighter the game doesn't really have a plot. And Mario Bros the movie didn't have a plot. Not really a fair comparison there.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
...but movie games are far worse.
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
No, the problem isn't the "painful death of the art of narrative cinema" its the "painful dearth of art in popular video games."
Let's face it, most video games have a very simple storyline (if any storyline at all). Most of that storyline concerns itself, not with introducing interesting and complex characters and plot points, but in setting up cheap excuses to get you into some predictible gaming sequence. The focus of "Doom 3" isn't charcter and plot, that's all just there to set up a fairly predictable FPS.
Decent movies; on the other hand; rely on good writing, plot, and character development pretty much EXCLUSIVELY. That often means that a video game adaptation movie either has to reduce itself to being just as mindless as the video game, without even the benefit of any interaction (what the article complains about) or make HUGE alterations and additions to the original videogame storyline just to "flesh out" some interesting characters and plot developments (something which makes the studio and fans howl).
I mean, ask yourself, how exactly would YOU make an interesting movie out of Halo, whose "star" is a faceless, anonymous, killing machine with virtually no backstory (and working under the studio requirement that he has to occupy most of the screen time, with a large number of pure mindless action scenes)?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Apparently his movies are gradually improving over time. At this rate, Duke Nukem Forever: The Movie will be the highest rated motion picture in the history of film.
I've always though game movies stunk because they either fall into two areas:
1) They are the same plot as the game. You already played the game, why do you want to watch the same thing in cinematic form?
2) They are too far away from the plot. The fans already know the plot line and you've thrown something completely different at them and they cry about how it's not true to the game.
I prefer the latter personally.
Oh wait...
3) Uwe Boll
One major reason why game movies suck is that some games have very simple plots, that cannot be expanded eaisly. Take something like Doom 3 - yes, there is a background story, but good 80% of the game is shooting stuff... walk somewhere while shooting, hit a button, walk back... now, that works for games, but is too monotonous for movies...
Game-based movies would be better if they were based on games with better plot. When you start out with a shootfest where your main hero doesn't even speak, you're gonna have a hard time making something out of it.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
No doubt about it, there is no other possible explanation, it just HAS to be piracy!
Franchise games suck for one simple reason: you can invest very little (i.e. make a crappy game) and get a huge return on your investment anyway because all the mindless fanboys will buy it anyway.
Unless there's some unusual reason like artistic integrity (ha!), why would you spend more money when you already know it will be a hit?
What a bunch of pretentious crap. Game movies have been bad because there is currently little to no incentive for the studios to do anything worthwhile with the license. Why go to all the trouble to make sure the script is solid and the directors vision is good, when you have this huge built-in audience who is going to see the movie regardless of any bad buzz or reviews?
So making a film based on a flawed attempt at making a film is two steps away from making a film. And that is a Bad Idea.
http://skeptobot.blogspot.com/ - A site for the Renaissance man and woman
Disagree 100%. I get the feeling that after watching these things that the scriptwriters and director(s) simply read the summary on the back of the box, maybe read the manual and pulled the rest from their nether regions. Thus, they don't understand the *feel* of the game. I firmly believe many games made into movies had something going for them, other than German tax breaks. Doom? Oddly, yes. Alien worked. Course, that deveated so far from the original it barely deserves the name. Tomb Raider? Indiana Jones worked. What'd they do wrong? Hmm, oh yea, made it NOT like IJ and more like one of the last two Bond films...(gag). They would manage to screw up Half-Life, and that one practically gives you the script as you play it. Still seems to me the best one made so far is Mortal Kombat. It didn't take itself seriously, at all. Decent action, music, enough of a plot to move along... and it was short.
I think it has more to do with: Games require interaction by the player to progress through the narrative, thus, by default, the game is "engaging" in that you, the player, have to make the decisions and invest yourself in the story. Movies of games, on the other hand, make you a passive spectator of the story, removing the player portion all together, and therefore they have to come up with some kind of narrative to move a slap-dash plot along to the inevitably disappointing climax/resolution. You can't really take a video game where it's player-controlled and make it into a movie where the players sit and watch.
Then Madonna must have starred in a shitload of video games.
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
Anyone remember the Super Mario Brother's Movie? Aside from those of us who've gone to the trouble of supressing the memory...
Simple thing is, Fans of the game want it to be just like the game and Joe Adverage wants it to be the next matrix. What's the saying "You can't please all the people all the time"?
Unless there's a movie about FF:VII with really good CG Eye candy... That get's a little better treatment for being so main stream already...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Game movies stink, because the story/plot in the games stink.
... a pile of crap, or will be fooled by Glade(tm) and get themselves all covered in crap in the process, just like you.
You can't take a pile of crap and turn it into roses by moving it from the backyard onto your kitchen table. Sure, you could try to mold it into flowery-looking things and spray some Glade(tm) rose-scented air freshener on it, but in the end, it'll still look like crap, and it will stink like rose-scented crap, and then your hands will all be covered in crap. Then you go tell your friends about your roses, and they think they'd like to see those roses, because roses smell nice. So, they go see your crappy roses on your now crap-covered kitchen table, and they will either see it for what it is
It's a viscious, neverending cycle, and the only ones who gain in the end, is Hollywood and the crappy game designers wth their crappy stories and plots.
Movie Studios do not respect Computer Games as a legitimate form of art, just a way of marketing a genre to an in built audience. It is the same situation with Comics and to a certain extent, Animation. Both of these artforms are considered to be just for kids and even now, are still not taken seriously by the vast majority of people. Computer Games differ from Animation and Comics in that both the aforementioned mediums have been around long enough for talented film makers to take them seriously. I believe this will also happen with Film properties based on Computer Games.
No, the problem isn't the "painful death of the art of narrative cinema" its the "painful dearth of art in popular video games."
I'll agree with you for the most part, but there have been some exceptions.
The Marathon Trilogy easily comes to mind. The original was a 2.5D first person shooter, but it had an interesting story, and if you were a thinking player, it made you face the question of just who or what your onscreen counterpart really is. Are/were you human? Are you the missing Mjolnir cyborg? That question was never fully resolved, I think deliberately, to let you ponder that question and to leave room for doubt.
There's also a great tie-in with Bungie's previous game, "Pathways into Darkness." Because a lot of the same concepts pop up in both, and the pre-story is much the same.
I'd go a step further and say that videogames are a different kind of art from cinema, and the one does not always translate well to the other. Just like making films from novels, some work and some don't.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
They just need to figure out why movie games suck.
It's because you don't make a game movie because you have a great story to tell. You make a game movie for cash. The story is an afterthought.
Movie games stink for the same reason. You don't have a great idea for a game. You have a set of characters and you need to find something for them to do.
Storytelling and fun are afterthoughts in these projects.
I would have thought that was obvious.
Twenty years ago, no one thought comic book movies were going to be any good. Then Batman came out. If any project is paired with a director who has a specific artistic vision and is familiar and passionate about the work, more often than not a good movie will result. My favorite movie of this year so far happens to be based on a graphic novel.
I don't see any interesting video game works in the horizon save for Halo: Fall of Reach which at least has been rumored to be attached to pretty good directors (Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro). Just give it time. It may take another two or three years for a good video game movie to be made, or longer, but it will eventually happen.
Now, if they could only get licensed games to be good...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I like to think of the problem as something attributed to GIGO
Two points:
1. You will theorise as to the reasons why it doesn't work *until* there comes a "game movie" that's truly great. And then you will revise your theories..
2. The gaming media and cinema are new art forms, especially compared to other arts like painting or literature or music. To write any one of them off is premature not to mention an attempted fusion of the two.
I think instead of blasting the combination of the two, the important question to ask is this:is the cinema making effort honest, or is it mainly dictated by a 'marketing extension of a brand'? Which is not to say, that a sincere film about a game need necessarily turn out to be bad...
When they only made bad games from average movies..
(Actually, I've seen the RE movies, and thought they were reasonably entertaining. It's all about the mindset - I wasn't expecting Kubrick or Herzog, and recieved neither. As for adhering to the plot of the game, it's a chick shooting zombies - close enough.)
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Is it just me, or are there games with masterful storytelling? A few games come to mind immediately:
Chrono Trigger
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Ok, so maybe Zelda doesn't have the greatest plot ever; I still think it's something I would have been happy to read in a book, even without the Zelda branding.
Chrono Trigger on the other hand is a beautiful piece of art in every way. The story is great (and has many key points that can be altered based on decisions), and the way the story unfolds is good too.
Knights has a huge story with a bunch of twists in it. There is a lot of character development (and character interaction/relationship stuff) and a lot of "makes you think" dialogue. Also a great game in every way... wait... the graphics sucked.
Most of the games (and movies based on games) have been shooters, so is it any surprise that few of these movies have plot? Shooters are not typically known for their plots, obviously. On the other hand, games like Final Fantasy are known for plots.
I'm sorry, but this whole thing gets on my nerves.
The reason videogame movies blow isn't because of the source material (usually). It's because the writers/directors/studio bigwigs/what-have-you take too many damn liberties with the mythos.
Okay, let's take Silent Hill for a start.
DISCLAIMER: I am a Silent Hill fanatic.
The makers of this film had an interesting, unique mythos to work with. They had interesting characters, bizarre environments, crazy monsters, excellent music, etc. So instead of using that as it was presented, they decided to pick and choose what they wanted and slapped it all together. Granted, they nailed the visual aspect of the game, but nothing else.
For a start, let's talk about Pyramid Head (er, sorry - the Red Pyramid). He shouldn't have been in this movie at all because he's totally pointless outside his original context. Pyramid Head was only relevant to Silent Hill 2 because he a manifestation of both James Sunderland's sexual frustrations and his guilt. Including him in the movie just smacked of "hey, this guy's a cool villain, let's use him!"
And don't even get me started on the whole plot/character deviation from the first game. You know, things like the lead character being Harry Mason and not this Rose person, his daughter being Cheryl and not Sharon, etc. Harry Mason's presence in the original Silent Hill game is very important, as it plays a rather significant part in Silent Hill 3, where it wraps up some of the first games loose ends.
I could go on and on, but I won't. The fact of the matter is that they take too many liberties with the games. Don't change things that don't need changing. For the parts that can only be experienced with a controller, use your head and try and think of a way to convey that experience to the audience. Play the game through and take note of your emotions/feelings as you play a particular part, then use that to transfer it to the big screen.
I think bad game movies are more a lack of effort and adherence to canon as opposed to having nothing to work with.
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
Viewing a film based on a computer game is like hanging around in an amusement arcade, peering over the shoulders of other people playing video games.
This line alone is an utter crock of shit. If a movie on based on a video game, it's like hanging around in an arcade? What the f**k is the person who penned this smoking and why isn't he sharing it with the rest of us, because that's some strong stuff!
The source material is completely irrelevant whether it's based on a true story, a classic piece of literature, or a vide game. There are writers who could take a very basic story and with enough creativity to create an entire arc that is still relevant to the core story.
There is a lot that could have done with, for example, Bloodrayne if they wanted to expand on the story behind her video game character. The background on her character - half-human, half-vampire - is great fodder for some interesting character development. Note that in most sci-fi shows, characters of mixed races are the ones that often get the most intersting character arcs. Look at Spock, Troi, and Seven of Nine in the Star Trek series and how they often ran into problems with being a mixed race, whether that's from biological issues, prejudice, or something else. (Okay, Seven wasn't quite a mixed race, but you get the idea.) Rayne could have had a very interesting character arc in the hands of a good writer, which Bloodrayne: The Movie did not have.
Bloodrayne's vengeance against those who murdered her mother certainly could have been expanded to involve some interesting twists and turns, particularly with the Nazi-era background of the original Bloodrayne. Exactly how did her mother die? Murder? Consequence of being raped by a vampire? How did Rayne find out who was responsible? Was her mother's murder really what triggered her rage against fellow dhampirs or is there some long-forgotten memory that is subconsciously driving her? Add a bit of "Indiana Jones"-style action and the Bloodrayne movie could have been very well done. Instead, we got a crappy movie with just about nothing of value except a babe of a lead actress and Ben Kingsley, not that he could have added any credibility to this shlock.
Why do movie games stink? Because there is no effort in developing any kind of plot or storyline that the audience would find intriguing. In fact, this describes the majority of movies nowadays. The fact that a movie's source might be a video game cannot possibly be more irrelevant.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I always just assumed that the lazy, talentless hacks who spend all of 15 minutes throwing together a script full of plot holes, boring dialog, nonsensical character motivations, no character development whatsoever and cliched plot elements that have to be grafted over the originally interesting game-storyline (to make the movie "marketable", of course), while blowing the entire budget on dime-a-dozen pure-CGI special effects that were only really believable ten years ago while ironically being less visually interesting than those in the actual game itself were the source of the problem...
Now I read, they are only a symptom?
No, the real problem is, quite simply, Hollywood can NOT make a movie where the story is already written for them and the market for that story is pre-built-in. They can't HELP but change it based on market testing, on director's "creative" whims and seniour executive's cocaine fueled brain farts... Only to discover after the fact that the original story that sold so well as a game was, in fact, quite good and was the primary reason why the franchise was so popular in the first place, and that changing it to make it more saleable actually made it less appealing to everyone.
"Viewing a film based on a computer game is like hanging around in an amusement arcade, peering over the shoulders of other people playing video games. It has less to do with story-telling than conceptual shelf-stacking."
What an asinine thing to say. This article is nothing but a worthless attempt at shifting the blame for crappy movies which are based on the same story that some video game was based on away from the people who deserve it. Just because a video game was made of a story does not mean a movie made of the same story can't be great.
Today it's virtually impossible to turn on the television without being told to 'press the red button for more options', or to phone an 0870 number and vote for your favourite contestant.
What the hell are you talking about?!!
What do you think?
I think you should put down the crack pipe.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
So, take the same vapid cadre of writers who produce the piles of drek and schlock out there and sick them on material that's already (in general) not good (game plots), and why is anybody shocked that they make crappy movies out of it?
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Personally, I don't think there is a particular dearth of ART in videogames. I completely agree with both yourself and Mark that there is a lack of narrative, but that's a different thing. The art of videogames is in the game; the subtle balance of risk and reward.
There's a distinct lack of narrative in most painting, too, but that doesn't make them Not Art.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Game movies do indeed stink, for the most part. The Doom III movie was gawd awful. But then so was the Electra movie, in spite of its huge budget and pre-existing comic book back story. So was the latest Star Wars movie, with the largest budget in movie history. It sucked more than Doom.
Doom could have been quite entertaining, if it had decent plotting and characters. As in, if the WRITING didn't suck. The Laura Croft movies were fun because of the writing. You don't think Angelina Jolie can make a bad movie, check out Gone In 60 Seconds. Yawner because of stupid story line and really pitiful dialogue. A series of nice car chases separated by boring shots of people talking.
This is a failing of Hollywood generally these days. They won't fund a script that doesn't look just like every other goddamn script they've seen in the last ten years. No noble themes allowed, no religion except as comic relief or as The Bad Guys, no Heros, just anti-heros or Average Man, blah blah blah.
Its crap, and their flood of red ink proves it. Pretty soon the dinosaurs will be out of business because they won't change with the times. Good riddance, brontosaurus.
These guys thinks too much. We've read it before, we've seen that before.... movies based on games are, more often than not, crappy.
:)
Not because the producer fails to grasp the concept of game or because it lacks the player involvement or any sense of reality.
Let me break the hard truth on you : budget.
There are 2 scenarios :
1. A small producer trying to get some movies under his name because it fits nice on a resume. Its like acculumating hours of flights for a pilot. He'll take a quick project, small budget movie just to get experience
2. Big producer accepting the project for a big budget movie, but he'll use only a fraction of that budget because people tend to except low quality anyway. He'll use the remaining budget to fund a big movie that will catter to a much bigger audience, rewarding him with more money.
Its all about the money really.
Well, anyway, that's my 2c
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
What makes a game good is gameplay. What makes a film good is plot. The two have nothing to do with one another. Hence running around hitting your head on blocks, avoiding turtles and eating magic mushrooms makes a very fun game, but a lousy film. Conversely, many films have been licensed to make bad games (such as ET on the Atari 2600).
I'd venture a guess and say that Halo's Master Chief is the Mjolnir cyborg from Marathon... post "Destiny". There's always the insinuation that you've been here before, you've done this a million times, you've been this hero and never anything else. And when you're not needed, you're kept on ice.
Bungie just keeps telling the same basic story (guy with gun saves the day and collects pieces of a puzzle) with a time jump between each game (PID + 500 years = Marathon + 17 years = M2, M:Infinity + "T-Minus 15.193792102158E+9 years until the universe closes!" + lots more time = Halo, H2, H3...
And for all you Bungie-lore freaks out there... Halo 3 will be the 7th game.
I agree completely.
Let's also face the hard facts - video games have stupid stories.
That's why I laugh when I read gamers saying silly things like "omg Metal Gear has teh awesome story!!"... no, it doesn't. It's stupid, just like 99% of all games. Half-Life? Stupid. Resident Evil? Stupid. Final Fantasy? Stupid. Pokemon? Stupid. Zelda? Stupid.
To understand why games have stupid stories, you have to understand game design and the relationship the design and the story have. You always start out with your outlines and your targets, but eventually things have to be tweaked. When the game design is tweaked, the story has to be changed, and vice-versa. Gameplay is about possibilities, stories are about linearity. There's not a lot of room for compatibility.
Most games offer, as has been said numerous times, rather shallow story and plot. Most writers simply take that and run with it. The net effect is a movie with a shallow story and plot.
Why does it matter in the movie while it doesn't in the game?
Because the player of a game is more involved than the watcher of a movie. He's part of the experience, he is "in" the game, not "looking at it".
Quite the same reason why Game-TV isn't really getting off the ground. Play a few hours of a shooter and then watch others do it. You'll understand the difference.
If they want to make GOOD movies based on games, they should take the general idea and write a plot around it. Not try to copy the "feel" of the game. Can you imagine what Indiana Jones and the last Cruisade would've been like if the game had been out before the movie? Can you envision the movie? And how bad it would've been? Just imagine the movie would have been watching Indy do what you make him do in the game...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Video-game based movies suck for the same reason that most fan fiction sucks.
Consider: If I have a great deal of creativity and imagination, I am going to write my own damn story!. I am not going to set my story in some video game I played, or some TV show I watched - I am going to make up my own world.
So almost by definition any screenwriter who is basing his story on a video game lacks imagination.
Now, if I am a director who is *good*, am I going to pick a screenplay by some hack who was inspired by some video game, or am I going to pick a good screenplay by somebody with imagination and creativity?
You are selecting from the bottom of the barrel, twice - and you are surprised that the movie sucks?
www.eFax.com are spammers
1: Size. Many of the games with the good plots, you know, the Bioware games, Starcraft, some of the Japanese RPG's, and such, are really long. REALLY long. Games can reach 40 hours of length and while not all of that is taken up by the main plot, it still makes things difficult as hell to translate to a script. So either this limits the games that can be used (action-heavy games like Doom) or the plots are cut up and shrunk down to be "faithful" but still not that good.
2: Genre choice. Only one RPG has gotten the adaptation treatment, and that film (Final Fantasy) didn't actually use any of the games' plots. The rest of them: Platformers, survival-horror, a few fighting games and a FPS. Not exactly the creme of the crop when it comes to narrative threads.
Beyond the Polygons : Because 50,000 polygo
Movies in general are 90% crap. Hell, 90% of everything is crap. It's just with game movies, they're 100% crap.
Video game movies are kinda like pr0n stories. They really only serve the purpose of transitioning one scene to the next, but the core of the experience is in the action of the scene itself. If you tried to make an awesome story for a pr0n movie, you would end up with very little pr0n because you spend so much time developing characters and plot that there is hardly any room left for anything else. Same scenario for games. You either have to make the movie 12 hours long, or you have to cut some things out.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
that you PLAY a game (an interactive activity) while you just WATCH a movie (a passive activity.)
As much as Hollywood might wish it other, people will ALWAYS think that watching a game made into a movie sucks BECAUSE IT DOES!!!
Without the interactivity, most games, from chess to Quake Arena, don't have enough plot to offer to make it worth watching.
By the same token a script good and tightly scripted enough to make into a movie would suck as a game.
There is NO WAY to reconcile these two modes. You CAN'T be active and passive at the same time.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I am usually a big fan of Mark Kermode, who wrote this piece. But this piece dismisses something he can't possibly know about - because it doesn't yet exist.
He says that most movies based on games have been rubbish, and that focus-grouping a movie threatens its integrity. True enough (though I wait with interest to see Peter Jackson's forthcoming film of "Halo"). However, he then makes an unwarranted leap from this to saying that "interactivity...has no place whatsoever...in the cinema", as if the first two statements prove the third - which they clearly do not.
The poor quality of movies based on games is a problem of translation from one medium to another. To imply that it proves that interactivity in a cinema won't work is like saying "movies based on musicals are rubbish; therefore movies must not have music".
The problem with focus-grouping movies is one of respecting the filmmaker's original vision; to blame it on interactivity is like saying "colourising Casablanca is an outrage; therefore movies must not be shot in colour". One implication here is the ancient idea that bringing interactivity into cinemas means "choose the ending" movies, which would obviously not work. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything useful in a cinema with interactivity - or with its more powerful sisters, customisation and randomisation.
Of course there are no great examples of interactivity in cinema yet, because the digital cinema technology that makes it possible is only just rolling out. But audiences have changed since Casablanca, and cinema must change too - to make movies which are less predictable, which are not one-size-fits-all, and which are part of the age of participatory culture - rather than a hold-out against it.
Like what? If you want me to put my money where my mouth is, in February I shot a short interactive film for digital cinema for the UK Film council, which was screened successfully at a conference at BAFTA, and by invitation at another conference in Hollywood. It's online at http://www.activecinema.com/bunny/ (which is just my own site, so if too many people try to watch it, it'll crash). It's a short, silly, no-budget movie - but it has successfully demonstrated a few basic principles of cinema interactivity which I hope to develop further. My own efforts are however irrelevant to the basic point, which is this...
Technical innovation is forcing change on all media - newspapers, TV and now cinema. It is not helpful for critics as smart and influential as Mark to try to rule out in advance one fundamental way that cinema could adapt in response to this change. By doing so, they only help doom cinema to increasing irrelevance, and to a further decline in quality of the sort that he deplores.
Or you could be playing "Dreamfall" which as far as I can tell is a new genre of "Movie Game". Or maybe "Pseudo Interactive Fiction".
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it made into a movie. It's the best story I've seen in a game since the prequel "The Longest Journey" from 1999.
Can't find a new story to tell? Retell the old stories; for our younger viewers, slap on the hackneyed motto "It's new to you!"
So now they're taking their cues from another industry, in this event the videogame industry. Hmmm . . . doesn't matter whether they make a movie about Donkey Kong or King Kong . . . either way, they're revisiting old ground (the reverse applies to game producers, BTW). Problem is, as humans we want to experience something new - at least, that's why I plunk down my hard-earned to see a movie or play a game. I want experiences that I haven't had before, not a rehash of rescuing Princess Toadstool or "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!".
I have high hopes for the upcoming Halo movie. I know I may be dissapointed, but in Halo I see a genuinely immersive storyline, not just with great plot elements, but decent personalities around which to build well rounded characters (of course in the games, we get little or no indication of MC's character, but that could be something the movie fills in).
Thats funny, I thought it was . . . TERRORISM!! oooga booga!
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
An action game tends to be all about the gameplay, with storyline being an afterthought. First person shooters are ALL about gameplay, with storyline being so far down on the list of priorities that many players skip the storyline reasons for what they do in the game.
You have roleplaying games which tend to be on the other end of the spectrum. You have a lot of story(not all of these are good), with graphics being the less important.
The games that make the most money are the action games, you end up with 15 clones or sequels, and the movie studios think that's where the money is, and fail miserably.
Now, you see the rare game that tries to deliver both, such as Tomb Raider-Legend. It's not a bad game, and you can see that there was a bit of effort put into the story. The gameplay itself seems to be made for the lowest common denominator, the consoles the game was planned to run on, and it's why the game feels a bit small and simple. The engine and graphics are decent, but it's just too small and the "levels" a bit too straight forward to fully revitalize the series, but it's a good start. They could just as easily have made the game a movie since the elements are there.
Baldur's Gate could be a decent movie(or series of movies) with some changes, because it's more about the story and less about special effects.
Games that start with a story, and then have the gameplay be developed to tell the story tend to fail because storytellers often have no clue what would be fun to play. But at the same time, if someone manages to pull it off, the GREAT games are the result. Movies have an easier time of it because they can stick to the story without needing to worry about gameplay.
..especially the last fight scene. ..What more could you expect. I love to see new blockbuster scifi movies no matter how much they suck ..because at least they spur my imagination.
I can empathize with people who want to see a good video game movie made. Most movies based on comic books have been embarrasingly bad. Comic book movies have less of an excuse because the plots for them have already been written. Comics actually have stories, right? They're almost like storyboards! Well, the same thing that happened to comic movies needs to happen to video game movies. You need some directors to stand up and give a damn. Sam Raimi is a huge Spider-man fan, and he's directed some great movies. Same thing with Bryan Singer and X-men and (hopefully good) Superman. In the past, it was always Judge Dread or Captain America or whatever other embarrassments they've thrown at us. Once X-men came in and told studios that 1) there's an audience, and 2) you need to respect the source material, that's when comic movies got better. Unfortunately, I agree that most video game movies will continue to be weak. You don't need a good story to sell a game. I'm excited about lots of games and don't even know or care what the plot is. How about a movie based on Battlefield 2? I just don't need a movie based on one of my games. They're as close to cinematic experiences as I want them to be.
The same has been said about movies from books. They are just simply different mediums. Different artforms.
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Next try making a sculpture into a video game and tell us that it did not work. Or use a oneliner an d turn that into a movie. Well, that last part happend with B-movies where they first came up with a title and then made a movie around it.
Now at the movies:
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This article is exactly right. I think the nail was hit squarely on the head.
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These people OBVIOUSLY never saw Doom! A cinematic masterpiece!
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
MOD PARENT UP - It's all Boll's fault.
My point was that the kind of plot that makes for an entertaining and engaging interactive environment is exactly the kind of plot that does not translate to a non-interactive environment.
Ok so rewrite the plot for the movie? Great idea... but the plot devices THEMSELVES are also problems.
Basically any movie thats going to be at all faithful to a video game is almost doomed from inception.
Let's assume that any movie that is not faithful (to some degree) to the video game it is created from is a failure from the point of view of creating a movie based on a video game, regardless of how good that movie may or may not be...
This gives us four basic categories of video game movies, and I'm being pretty generous with my examples here:
1. Movie that (somewhat) faithfully represents the original transcribed to the new format and is well done (???)
3. Movie that does not faithfully represent the original and is well done (Resident Evil, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within)
2. Movie that faithfully represents the original transcribed to the new format and is not well done (Silent Hill, Tomb Raider, Wing Commander)
4. Movie that does not faithfully represent the original and blows (Super Mario Bros, Doom, numerous others)
Now you can argue about what movie belongs in which place (like Final Fantasy where the games aren't direct-lineage sequels of each other so you could argue it belongs in the first category) but the point is, this is a convenient way to organize it all, and each category represents specific decisions made during filming. Each category probably has more films in it than the one above it, despite the fact that the most ideal situation is clearly the inverse.
So how would you attempt to make a good movie from a video game? Try to be faithful to the basic gameplay mechanics and plot devices - but otherwise run it like you're making any other movie. Concentrate on making a good movie foremost, then try to incorporate as much of the video game as possible.
And yes, I realize you can't just transcribe the plot. Thats ok - stop trying. Just come up with a plot I could believe happens before or after the game and that's good enough for me. Extend both the media of the game as well as the scope of its story in a canonical and consistent manner and I'll be one happy little coder. DO hire good actors DO continue throwing in gratuitous video game character cosplay scenes DO include humorous or iconic images and plot devices from the original. DO try to match the visual feel of the game.
DON'T try to make the plot match the game. DON'T just take the (many times very two dimensional) characters from the game and slap them in front of a camera. DON'T rely on CG too much - if we wanted that we'd be playing the game. DON'T treat the game as a virgin, inviolate and untouchable - if a non-iconic visual element doesn't work, don't use it.
And the biggest one - DO treat the game as a holy text. That's what'll make the fans happy. Go one better, consider your movie a sermon you're giving on the game. Take the important parts of the game and try to bring them out to your target audience, proseletyzing them to your entertainment brand. You'll make the fans proud, and you'll entertain the rest. And if you're lucky you'll even do some horizontal marketing...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Take the movie Doom for instance:
Game plot: Scientists on a Martian moon accidentally open a portal to Hell (or someplace like it), demons come out, people become possesed, etc., etc. Scary as hell, fun to play, full of adrenaline and "Holy s**t moments, etc.
Movie plot: Scientists on a Martian moon start messing around with DNA resquencing and create an army of zombies and mutants. It's Dawn of the Dead or Resident Evil - in SPACE!
The question I ask is WHY? What was wrong with the orignal plot? Besides maybe some abstrat religious connotations of Hell, there was no good reason IMHO to mess with the recipe.
IMHO, as I have alwasy been told, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." When Hollywood decides to make Coke inte New Coke, they shoot themselves in the foot, wondered why the movie wasn't a smashing success, forget the lesson they learned, and repeat the whole process over again.
There are some decent and even great game movies (Resident Evil is one I liked), but I find these few and far between the steaming piles such as Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter.
House of the Dead
Bad acting, bad special effects, mind numbing dialog, stupid plot, clips of the actual video game spliced into the movie. This wasn't even campy fun.
And apparently they've made a sequal.
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I don't know that I fully agree with your point of view. Granted, many videogame movies are completely terrible, it has to do with the fact of lack of backing/fundage. IMO, Tomb Raider was actually a pretty good film and my wife at the time which isn't even a gamer thought the film entertaining.
I also feel that although one would like to think games require the player to make things up this simply is not true. Too many games are one dimensional and require you to simply play the character as opposed to really become immersed in the game. Since Tomb Raider came up, let's continue on that line. Look at the new game that came out in the series, now while I have only played the demo there is no way I will buy the game, why because it's way to linear!
There is no way the games are to blame for a lack of creativity at the box office. As mentioned earlier first and foremost is the lack of funding, second is the fact that most of these "movies" are managed by people who apparently can't manage, seriously I could come up with a better plot for half these movies. If you make a movie about a video game, the first thing you need to realize is just that...it's a movie not a video game. The same thing happens with books, there have been many books made into movies which have flopped, just you don't hear about it as much and game movies are a newer phenomenon.
Another point, the gaming industry is taking over entertainment. Do you for a minute think movie companies are happy about this? Why would they even want to support a game's intellectual property on their "platform" by their rival group?
And frankly, I fail to see how the decline of the movie industry as a whole has anything to do with Gaming other then the fact they are losing money because people would rather play games then spend 10+$ a person to see some crappy second rate film no one put any time into. When filmmaker start doing their job and making some entertaining movies I might start watching again until then I'll just spend my time doing something productive or plop my fat ass down and enjoy some real entertainment in the immersive world of gaming.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
That would be a more interesting subject!
Movies in general stink because of the way they are made...
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"I mean, ask yourself, how exactly would YOU make an interesting movie out of Halo, whose "star" is a faceless, anonymous, killing machine with virtually no backstory..."
I would use the source material that includes the games and books written in the universe and create a work which expanded upon the that universe in a consistent but new direction.
The key is that it would not be a rehash of what has already been explored while at the same time it would be consistent with the universe the game's story has set up. "Final Fantasy: Advent Children" is an example of such work.
The Halo series actually has a fairly rich and well considered universe. If Halo movie coming out soon is of poor quality it is a failure of hollywood to realize that potential rather than a lacking of the Halo world, itself.
Spartan 117 does indeed have a history. As does Cortana and Sargent Johnson and many others. Spartan 117 also has a name. It is John.
Games are really vapid fair. I wouldn't even go so far as to say their are a series of scripted scenarios. Most games center around one singular plot point. Doom, go to mars and find out why everybody died. Tomb Raider, get a busty brunette spelunking through a cave with a couple of large caliber guns. Then your expected to make a movie out of? Even in a supposedly well scripted game like a D&D RPG, what are you ending up doing repeatedly? Find the object and give it to this person to get a the +1 Bobby Pin of Endurance. Go to this castle and kill the lord there, this is the reason why ( followed by 12 lines of trite D&D rhetoric ). Take all the unique plot elements of a typical RPG and you still only end up with about 2 pages of story.
The problem is that even a movie like Doom grosses over 20 million, and will double that from DVD sales and rentals. There will always be a market for teenage boys looking for some action flick that doesn't require their blood to rush to their brains for more then a few minutes.
What Hollywood needs to do is to take the premise of a game, write an actual plot that incorporates the style and characters that the game has created, and then make a movie as if it wasn't based on a game. But that is aparantly too hard for Hollywood. Instead they want to take the plot elements out of a game, and make a cookie cutter movie without putting much money or effort into it.
You also need to get away from the producers and directors that tend to fixate on making video game movies. I am sure Shyamalan, Speilberg or Jackson could make a video game movie work, but they are big high priced names in Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood finds the people that direct MTV videos and commercials to pilot these vapid movies, you know, those Gen-X'ers with a 5 minute attention span that feel an entire movie has to be filmed as a series of spastic steady cam sequences with loud explosions and scantily clad female characters with cheesy one liners.
But, as I have said, there is always a market for these movies. As long as these movies make money, whether its 1 million or 10 million, and become top rentals and DVD sellers, as well as ensure some form of syndication rights, Hollywood will always find ways of taking quick fad based concepts and turning them into quick, poorly thought up movies. The only thing wrong with this is people expecting these movies to actually be good, which is sad as they can't understand that Hollywood's goal is NOT to make a good video game movie, its to make money.
What people like Ebert have to realize is that Hollywood isn't an artform, its a way to make money, period. 90% of Hollywood movies made are specifically to make money, not for the love or art of telling a story. Video game movies are a perfect fit for Hollywood because they are cheap enough to make and almost guaranteed to make enough money for it to be worthwhile.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Uh, this article isn't even about why video game based movies are bad. Did anyone even read the article? It's about how video games have made all movies suck these days... Put the crack pipe down Zonk. :b
I saw silent hill.. I was pleasantly surprised. Everyone else seems to be complaining about it.. But to me.. it was very important to get the feel straight. The first time she walked into silent hill and night and heard the static i KNEW what that meant. I just didn't expect the creature that popped out to be so.. good.. They recreated the monsters from the game very very well.. Pyramid Head, for instance! Mean as ever.. could hear him comming but didnt know from where... I personally loved it.. I believe it to be the best game --> movie adaptation yet.
A few months ago I might have agreed with you, but to see a game that truly lives up to a movie and then supercedes it by light-years, play "The Warriors" by Rockstar. Best...Movie to Game....EVER!!!! Not only did the people who made that game live up to the movie, but they completely expanded on it, giving it a great backstory - and the game really has the feel of 1979.
I see a solution: a Planescape: Torment movie. That game had better writing, stronger plot and much more character development than the vast majority of movies nowadays. You only have to choose which parts to skip.
What's the consensus on games based on movies (Spider-Man, LOTR, etc)? I don't play video games personally, but I've seen people play them and it looks like they often just chop the movie plot into game levels and intersperse them with boring cut-scenes.
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I disagree. The script might rely on those things exclusively, but a good film is brought to life by a host of elements almost entirely divorced from the writing or plot. The language of film is primarily visual and great films find their voice through their cinemtography and direction as much as they do through their story.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
A big part of it is the fact that test audiences are now used. Most of the comments here miss that. A movie should be made by a director on its own merits, as opposed to being slapped together by committee and then scissored up after a bunch of random yahoos comment on what they liked and didn't like. Keep in mind that the MPAA takes the film under the door and it comes back X and they edit it and submit it (they don't find out why) comes back - X, so on and so forth, if they simply said "listen we object to these frames" then they wouldn't have to do so much guesswork and perhaps edit out stuff they wouldn't have to otherwise, re-editing the story to make it work.
The article said that if Casablanca were to be made today Bogie would have got on the plane. The ending of the Fisher King was deliberately tongue in cheek super happy happy world because the test audience and producers objected to the bleak ending (Robin Williams getting capped).
I dunno, the world we're in is screwed up. People can't behave in theatres so nobody goes. Instead of substance and narrative, we want cheap tricks and ADHD induced editing. The audience gets to edit the story, and so does the government.
Every now and then a movie like Brokeback Mountain comes out, which is good because it refused to kowtow to Hollywood suckage. No, they didn't make Ennis a woman, the cheated on wives weren't happy with it and found richer husbands, and it didn't end with them getting married in San Francisco, running a successful catering business at peace with their former families, gathering in the yard for a family picnic.
In short, we make movies for the thugged out brain dead yoofs who go to the theatre to hear big explosions and see big special effects. Period. What's that but a giant video game, anyway?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
They stink because Uwe Boll like to direct them! Honestly, he doesn't have a clue.
And a lot of the people I know, also.
Wether that story is transmitted over a movie, a book, a computer game, or a pen and paper roleplaying sessions is not that important in my opinion.
Well, I don't agree with this, the two Resident Evil movies are two of my favorite movies. I've never played the game(s), though. If I had, I might have been disappointed. I also liked the two Tomb Raider movies, although I thought they were just ok, but not great. Again, never played any Tomb Raider Games.
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The Terminator perhaps?
Certainly, I derived a lot of enjoyment from the cut-scenes in Halo (since that was the only time the Master Chief ever interacted). Actually, there were quite few games that relied on the cinematic cut-scene to reward the player for completion (from Ms. Pac-Man to Final Fantasy VII), but with the pursuit of realistic imagery, the most crucial elements get left behind: story.
Adaptive storytelling in games is a hard problem. Most games bank on a fairly linear story with a few branches that end up at the same leaf, providing the illusion of 'choice', when it was just a means to get to the same end to prevent excessive branching of plot. David Freeman's idea is that screenwriters should learn "emotioneering" to better script games and come up with good story. Personally, I think that's just a band-aid, or using a hammer in place of a laser scalpel. Ok, I'm getting off on a tangent. Big summary: game makers look for fun and player engagement; movie makers look for entertaining, thoughtful and passive engagement (in theory). One does not translate into the other.
Cross-medium differences play a role, to be sure, but the real problem is that only rarely is the talent hired up to the task of making such a conversion. Rather, the usual sentiment seems to be, "A lot of people will see it/play it because of the name. Making it stand on its own would be expensive, and there's always the risk that we won't be able to carry it off. So let's make up all the money that we spent on the license by going with cheap-ass production."
they suck because they were directed by Ewe Boll. How the hell is this guy still making movies? No wonder hollywood is losing money...
There are a number of reasons why it typically doesn't work. For a start, games are normally a hell of a lot longer than a film. Yes, Advent Children is damn good, but I'd wager that anyone that played the game was left feeling the film was over far too quickly. You just can squeeze that amount of information into a mere one and a half hours. Point the second, everyone plays games as themselves. My JC Denton from Deus Ex would be different from everyone elses. I play Master Chief as a sniper, you might play him as a rocket wielding tank. Point three, the writers are trying to sell MOVIES, not games. I think fans of a game get a little miffed when the films deviate from the games universe, was it a virus or diease instead of hell in doom the movie for example? I think films need to be truer to the games, and definitely add nods to the gameplay. Like the ring tone gag in Advent Children.
*cough* Halo has 3 novels-worth of backstory, and tons more if you count all the backstory Bungie's previous game Marathon had, since the two games may take place in the same fictional universe. Halo has as much story telling in it as Half-Life, and HL was declared a masterpiece of game plots.
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pirates of the caribean was based of an amusment park ride, that movie was awsome
As an american High School student, I'd like to officially apologize for my generation.
The resident evil movies. IMHO they are a couple of the best modern action movies around. The tomb raider movies were fair as well. I admit that many of the early game moves were very poor but they have been getting better as film producers realize that they can't just rely on people watching the film because they played the game they need to add at least a bit of story.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
"I mean, ask yourself, how exactly would YOU make an interesting movie out of Halo, whose "star" is a faceless, anonymous, killing machine with virtually no backstory (and working under the studio requirement that he has to occupy most of the screen time, with a large number of pure mindless action scenes)?"
Why, base the screenplay off the fleshed out novelization of the detailed backstory, and you're good to go.
It's not that games don't have complex backstory or details in the Universe, it's that they give these screenplay projects to turkeys who have no clue.
--
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Unfortunately a majority of these movies do not do the original works justice and really just piss the fans off. But there are some that the stories were so good that the fans want to see it on the big screen. Lord of the Rings is an excellent example, but if you tried to make that into a movie during the time the book was written well it would not have been as visually appealing as it was.
Its unfortunate that today's technology makes it too easy to take the risk at producing movies based off video games. And I fear they will keep producing these works of crap as long as there is a market for it. Now I would suggest to them to not make a movie that mirrors the game, but make the movie off of a concept. Take a genre like Warcraft or even Starcraft, so much lore in either game and any of it can be turned into a decent movie with the proper writing team, hell look at all the machinima stuff!
I think that is all I have to say, I wrote this in pieces while at work so the thought was broken in some places. With the high costs of going to the movie theaters to see these movies which just seem to run longer and longer, many people are just going to wait for the DVD release, which is out another 6 months.
Dewser - all around techy "In the immortal words of Socrates - 'I drank what?'"
The REAL reason game movies stink is because they are imitations of an imitation. Games already borrow so much from movies -- Raiders of the Lost Ark : Tomb Raider, Aliens : Doom, Starcraft, countless others, Night of the Living Dead : Resident Evil, etc, etc. So by the time you make a movie from a videogame, you're making a watered-down copy of a watered-down copy that is originally already based on a classic, well-loved movie. Of *course* it is going to suck!
I rarely buy games based on movies or see movies based on games or pretty much any other entertainment product based on anything but a book. Movies based on games don't have to stand on their own. They have a built in audience so there's less pressure to make them actually good.
Bungie have said that the Halo movie is going to be produced by Peter Jackson... so let's wait for the release.
Let's get a show of hands from all the people that went to a game movie and were suprised that it sucked.
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I have yet to watch a "game movie" that stuck to the original story line.
Example: Doom. Doom is about killing zombies and hellspawn. And then along comes the movie and what do you know? The demons aren't really demons, they are scientists mutated by some gene. There aren't millions of them, there are only 6! In fact everyone is just genetically altered... Doom went from being a fight hell with a shotgun, to Resident evil *without* Milla. In fact every zombie movie out nowadays is either a virus or a "human enhancement project"
I shutter to think that there should ever be a live action Starcraft or Warcraft movie. That would just be sad.
It's all about investment and perceived ROI. A movie's value consists of many distinct elements: popular director, actors, special effects (lots of explosions and aliens and stuff!), franchise popularity, script quality etc.
The problem is, that when you put a famous franchise (comic, game, movie remake like King Kong for ex.) and famous actors, Hollywood studio execs believe that's sufficient enough for a "good movie". They're often wrong.
Movies that can't rely on a franchise need to rely on rest of the equation.
Or in just a few words: franchises make Hollywood lazy.
The bitching and whining commences. Apparenly no movie is good enough unless it's touchy feely crap like Brokeback Mountain or Driving Miss Daisy these days. The bulk of the film audience has either become incredibly lame or always was. Therefore almost no action, comedy, or horror movie can ever be good. Too make a "good" movie, you add two parts crying, three parts hugging, four parts pity for some tragedy case and a dash of romance. Boom! Academy Award winner.
That, of course, only applies to those people who aren't so incredibly childish as to say all movies suck, failing to realize that they've had it so good for so long that nothing will ever be good enough for them again. They are clones of Dudley Dursley hollering that 36 presents this year isn't enough because they had 37 presents last year. And still too lazy or inept to try their own hand at filmmaking. They'd rather just bitch and whine just like Dudley.
I'd throw it at Jerry Bruckheimer and let him direct. Even if someone in Hollywood managed to eke out a plot, we'd end up with exactly what you just described as an end product regardless.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The real reason why video game movies usually suck is the same reason why movie video games usually suck. The creators/developers/whatever see a license and yell "Squee! Instant popularity!" and then stop actually trying to make something good. It doesn't have anything to do with the formats - it has to do with laziness in translating between them, not to mention a certain director's habit of picking games that would make terrible movies. I mean, come on. Dungeon Siege?
As noted many times in this thread, most games today are glorified shoot-em-ups. You can't get a whole lot of story out of that. It is tough to find something that would have a compelling enough story to hold someone's attention for a couple of hours, but Silent Hill apparently has quite a following here on /.
The only game that I can think of that has the potential to be a great movie IMO, is Deus Ex. Fantastic, plot driven story line. A noir feel conspiracy/spy movie with some serous sci-fi thrown in could do very well. Of course conspiracy themes don't play well with our current administration, but that is another topic entirely.
Bottom line, you have to get away from RTS or your typical FPS to get something substantial enough to make a good movie.
When a gamer wants to see a game made into a movie (or at least this gamer), the thing I want out of the movie is to relive the experience of the game, and perhaps have it extended a bit. That's all.
Most games are alike in terms of the game aspect. You need to collect X object to achieve Y goal, or surmount A obstacle to get to point B. That's the essence of games. Surrounding that in great games are interesting stories and settings. Doom's gameplay was somewhat revolutionary, but part of what made it attractive was the mix of occult and sci-fi motifs. The art was interesting, the "space marine" character with little Sam Raimi-inspired quirks was interesting...
A proper Doom movie would have used the occult/sci-fi setting as it was in the game, perhaps aping some of the original art but on a proper big-screen scale, and it should have been directed by Sam Raimi, or someone who could do that style credit.
Unfortunately, id Software changed the general idea of Doom for Doom III, and the movie went even further, so you're stuck with a stinker.
The same thing has happened for pretty much all other bad game movies. Tinker with plot to annoy fans, change the setting and style enough that it isn't like it was in the game, and you've suddenly created your own movie, something similar to the original, but not good enough to please fans, and not enough of a separate, well-thought-out movie to please regular moviegoers.
I shudder to think what they would do with Half Life, Grim Fandango, or hell, even Tux Racer! Let's make Half Life about a whistleblower fighting government-grown mutants (almost close enough) - Let's make Grim Fandango a live action film and get rid of half the characters - Let's take that lovable Tux and make a wacky comedy a la Cannonball Run... Hollywood will ruin games as movies until games companies start making their own movies with the original plot and style of the games.
Only good part was seeing the thief pick locks and trigger traps around the hidden treasure.
Most AD&D games I've played had pretty poor "plots", if that's all you are looking at, but that's now why I play. It's the thrill of figuring out a puzzle, or getting through a maze, or developing a character. Personally, I like sitting around in a room with a hex grid and a couple of miniatures because it makes me use my imagination, unlike certain on-line "games", which are nothing more than ways to squander huge amounts of time in what amounts to a glorified FPS.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
A god plot, thats all
Imagine a trilogy based on Legacy of Kain
Ian Mc Kelan, Moebius the mage
Russel Crowe, Raziel
Director, Ridley Scott
Legay of Kain is a plot heavy game that could make a good transfer to the movie, but only if it is well done, pity, it will never happen.
"truly, if theres evil in this world it resides in the heart of mankind"
Edward. D. Morrison...
Tales of Phantasya...
I think a huge problem is that most video game plots suck. Look at Half-life. Everyone is it seems is just short of begging for a film adapation. I ask "TO WHAT!?" the plot of Half-Life can be told in its entirety as:
1)"Just a normal day at work, this experiment should be interesting."
2)"Aughhh the horror!"
3)"Mosters everywhere I don't understand."
4)"Freeman you must get to the other building and beam out of here!"
5)"Ok."
6)"Hey look there is some guy in a suit. Weird."
7)"Hey don't shoot at me I'm on your side... fine then."
8)"Wheeeee bouncy bouncy fun fun fun alien world."
9)"Quit yo mumblin' alien mastermind."
10)"I don't care about your masters, give them my number they know where to find me."
11)"WTF is this shit... fine, I choose not to get wasted by hordes of aliens."
Do you REALLY want to see that movie? That is a bad video game movie. Video game movies suck (including Mortal Kombat) because usually they choose incredibly lame game plots like Mortal Kombat. Mario the movie could have been better, but it would have taken a great deal of creativity on the part of the writers, creativity which went a little too far in the film version.
From Outpost Nine (SFW)
...unlike cinema, computer gaming is a medium which requires the player to make things up for themselves. An individual game may be laden with 'plot points' but its narrative is always up for grabs. It is a format of scenarios rather than stories, elements which can be bolted together in differing orders with varying outcomes.
Obviously the author never played Final Fantasy...
Mostly EA and Vivendi.
**Meanwhile, at a 30-year-old's console wearing closed-view headmounted 3D LCD goggles, in his parent's apartment, there is an experience with John Holmes in the dark, without a reading light (what is a manual, doodz?):
The only difference between the above two scenarios, is the one that has no plot will be played for 100 hours, perhaps in an orgy of multi-use in a networked environment of data "sharing"; while the other movie with the crap plot will be used for less than 5 hours a month to "Kill the President."
without prejudice
Finding a good marketer is like finding an honest lawyer or honest attorney; they can save their ass with cheap-shots, or they can advertise an honest work where Tetris may look like this!! Eat that Russia, with love!
To quote from the Slashdot prefatory article in the topic discussion,
Cinema, on the other hand, is designed for people who like to watch and listen, and who expect the film-maker to get their story straight before the movie reaches the theatres.
To quote that WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP movie,
"You may be listening to Jimmi Hendrix, but you're not hearing Jimmi Hendrix."
To summary that Movie, It's a street-basketball theme; we don't hear that title quoted until 2/3 through the record, after a competitive basketball game, when the cocky "white" man bets his share of the kitty against the "black" man that says "white men can't jump"; he gets three attempts in the bet, and can't "slam dunk". Despite all this, that "white" man has good "lay ups" and superior ranged scoring. He loses the bet, and loses his wife (If I remember correctly) for some lame aspect of his character being exploited, that wasn't an issue at the beginning of the movie as evidenced by his response to someone saying his mom is an astronaugt ("my mom is too drunk to be an astronaught").
Now you may ask, what does WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP have to do with any of this?
HA HA: they made a game after it, street-basketball (2 vs 2), is equally racist as the Movie, and fails to do anything than carry that movie's title to a no-merit game... I think marketing is more involved with adapting one feature to another market. Somewhere, a CEO is contriving "Maybe if we can hype the game in this other market... just enough, where people will buy it quicker than it'll be criticized and discontinued, and we'll make a quick 3 million USD i-Dollars?"
Double Dragon was the same...great game, bad movie. I look at some Movies adapted FROM a game (think Mortal Kombat), and I think they were aiming lower than where they thought the movie theatre would score them, and instead got a great hit (it was just some good acting and cheap CGI and ropes).
Two words: Uwe Boll
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
If you want a series of explosions linked by car chases, maybe you can hire... THE A TEAM!
I think that the movie being too close or too far from the game is a non issue. The average Joe who watched Mario Bros couldn't care less. The average Joe just knows a good movie from a bad movie.
Freelancer had a great story. It's like playing a movie, with great freedom of movement. I think you could make a decent movie out of the Grand Theft Auto games as well. Although it wouldn't be as much fun as actually beaning the old lady with a baseball bat on your own.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Dark Passage (1947) with Humphrey Bogart voicing the unseen character until about an hour into the film. It's about a man who escapes from San Quinten into 1940's San Francisco in an attempt to prove his innocense.
-- QED
...is that who ever is making the movie is choosing the wrong video-games to be inspired by!
Doom?! Come on! How about Baldur's Gate?
Super Mario Bros?! (though I admit to liking this one)? How about Star Control 2?
Mortal Kombat?! How about X-COM: Enemy Unknown?
Street Fighter?! How about Final Fantasy VII?
A game based on Baldur's Gate would ROCK.
Game movies always try to be "serious" movies at their own right. They try to create worlds that make perfect sense. However, they're based on something that has its whole own set of rules, often completely out of line with physics, human nature, geography, scale, etc.
If a game movie were to embrace the fact that it is, in fact, based on a game, rather than "this is the real world that the game is a gross bastardization of," I think the movies would be far more entertaining.
I'm talking about a Super Mario Bros. movie where Mario can jump 8 feet and kills things by squashing them, a Final Fantasy movie where the characters have random nonsensical battles in which everyone takes turns, or a Doom movie done entirely in first person where characters randomly pull grotesquely-large weapons out of practically nowhere.
Unfortunately, movies that stray from the "we watch persons do things in a world that largely parallels things we're familiar with" paradigm are extremely rare.
This is why I find anime fun to watch... they do oddball things like this more often.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
It has nothing to do with interactive games vs. noninteractive movies. It has with movies based on games being simply attempts to monopolize on a brand and make money on it. It's exactly the same reason that most movies based on games tend to be bad. And, for that matter, the same reason that most movie sequels suck, as well, or even cookie-cutter copies of movies that follow common trends (like the flurry of buddy cop movies, or disaster movies, or Mars movies, etc.). The studios are trying to invoke name recognition, and so they're guaranteed to make at least a fair amount of money with little risk. You're guaranteed that fans of Doom are likely to see the movie made for it, for instance -- and in fact many are likely to see if it even if they heard it was terrible, because they want to experience it for themselves and compare and contrast.
"Because, unlike cinema, computer gaming is a medium which requires the player to make things up for themselves. An individual game may be laden with 'plot points' but its narrative is always up for grabs."
... obviously he's never played half the Final Fantasy collection.
I think the reason game movies stink is because they don't show the familiar things you see in the game. You've got this world in your mind created from your interactions and what you've seen and done. The movie always strays vastly from this world. The character does too many things you wouldn't do, and things just don't look and feel the same. They spend too much time on bullshit dialogue and less time on the action and the points of the game that make it so much fun.
I think if you're going to make a movie on a game, you should be researching what people do in the game that appeals so greatly and then model the movie on that. People might think it's like watching a replay of their glory games, but who wouldn't want to see a live action movie about that time in counter strike when you were the last guy alive and took on 6 guys with a usp and they all had aks and sniper rifles... I sure as hell would!
You're nothing; like me.
... Nnnn-no, I disagree with that. HL was a masterpiece of storytelling through the FPS medium, but the story itself was fairly mundane.
You want a good game movie? Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. The best CGI EVER. The best straight to DVD movie EVER> Oh and did I mention awesome?!
...they are made by Uwe Boll
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The point is not if there have been bad movies before.
The point is that movies based on computer games engross that shameful tradition (to do cheap things, exploiting the bad taste of the populace is shameful, no matter how you try to paint it).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As much as I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings trilogy movies, I despised what they changed and what was left out. I was grateful that someone brought a version of Tolkien's world to life, but resentful at how they felt they had the right to interpret it. (Arwen rescues Frodo. pshaw...)
Likewise with the games. True as some said here, the filmakers don't really know the game. If they played it at all, it was probably only 15 minutes or so. They interpret what they see and what they are told. You end up with a mishmosh on the screen.
A big piece of this I think all gamers can agree on is the lack of control. In the game you make the best possible choices: strategy, equipment, combat, money, etc. In the movie they seem to follow the path of an incompetent player. "Oooh, a dark room. I should stumble blindly into it instead of finding a torch."
You also lose something in the translation if you haven't experienced both media. Since I haven't played any Silent Hill game, I doubt I'll get much out of the movie. I did read the LotR series repeatedly, so I know how much is altered and missing in the movies.
I once had an idea to write a series of books based on the Ultima series. Basically how my persona came to the world of Sosaria, set off on adventures related to that game installment and was returned to Earth as if nothing happened hoping to return to that world again in the future. I realized this would never work because it would be traversing the game from my viewpoint and the way that I played it. Not too many people would enjoy shoulder-surfing while I played Ultima. Besides, how much dialog can be generated when all the main character keeps saying is "Name," "Job" and "Join." ;-)
...and hollywood is too unimagintive to think of something original.
So the games provide all the bits needed for some muppet of a screenwriter (that never plays the game or would ever want to) to create a story from.
Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.
With something like Tomb Raider (which has no real plot, or real character interaction) it was entirely up to the writers to make a story. the good/bad result cannot be be attributed to the game.
With Doom they were just chicken, they had a great oppertunity to take the Hell on Earth aspect (I want my bunny on a stake!), but made some aimless genentic accident movie (which Resident Evil had already done better).
The same could be said of Comic Book adaptions, but there its a lot lot worse when the movie screws it up, as it means they completely failed to properly read the damn books in the first place.
X-Men is the obvious success here, and Singer did the right thing took from the (massive and complex) universe and created a new one based upon parts of it. I don't think it could have been done well any other way.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person