Halo Movie Scribe Talks Game Faithfulness

simoniker writes "Author DB Weiss has confirmed that he's currently writing a Halo movie screenplay for producers that include LOTR/King Kong's Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. When asked whether he was concerned about criticism from the long-time fans of any of his movie adaptations, Weiss commented: 'There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.' In fact, Weiss suggests of this particular issue: 'If you did do a 100% faithful version, 999 times out of 1000 it would be a mess, and even the 5%-ers would recognize as much.'"

Comments

Different Mediums Require Different Elements

[conigs]

I still maintain that movies based off anything need to make changes from the original source material, especially when adapted from a video game. Films, books, video games and TV shows are all different mediums and should be treated as such.

A video game is an interactive experience. The audience (player) is involved in what direction and pace the story goes. That doesn't translate well into a passive experience like a movie. Just take the nuts and bolts of the game (characters & scenerios) and place them into a storyline related to, but not a carbon copy of the video game.

Though Halo (and the earlier Marathon series for Mac) does have a pretty good basis for a movie, I don't want to sit down and basically watch filmmakers play the game in real life.

Games and Books are a little different...

[Andrew Nagy]

Making adaptations to games is a lot different than doing it with books. The reason both usually fail is because they are adaptations. Successful books require a level in depth and detail that is virtually impossible to achieve on screen. Games are targeted toward interaction, which is impossible on the big screen as well.

I read LOTR every year (yes, I'm one of those geeks), and yes, I was sincerely disappointed with the movies. Well, the second two. While I understand that changes need to be made for a book to go to a screen, those changes don't generally include major plot alterations and character distortion as was the case with Faramir, for example, or Theoden.

Now, back on topic. With games, you'd think it'd be a lot easier to transfer the ideas since it's one electronic, viewable media format to another. However, how often have you seen terrible adaptations of games? Wait, shorter answer... how often have you seen good ones? I think the reason there is because the makers are looking too much into how we like games. They think, "games don't offer much plot, depth, or detail (usually), so we shouldn't try to do too much in the movie." IMHO, this is completely backwards. We watch movies for visual plot, depth, and detail. A movie adaptation from a game without those things is like an FPS you can't play, but just watch. Not fun.

So basically, to adapt books, you have to pay way more attention to format than games.

our preoccupation with crap

[earache]

I think the subject says it all.

The rate at which we are recycling our own culture is increasing at a dramatic pace. I often wonder if this has some deeper meaning as it seems that human culture to this point has only really recycled nostalgia, typically recycling an era 20 years prior, but now we're really starting to eat and recycle our own waste in increasingly shorter periods of time.

At some point, we're going to need to inject depth and meaning into our popular culture, because you can only recycle McDonald's so many times. If you catch my meaning.

Re:All I care about.

[Drachemorder]

Of course you have to make changes when you adapt a story to the big screen. The problem, though, is that the powers-that-be tend to make fundamental changes to the nature of the story, or to the personalities of the characters, for reasons that most fans would consider unjustified. For example: the changes to Faramir's character in Lord of the Rings didn't really serve any constructive purpose. They're explained away as increasing the dramatic tension of the movie by leaving Faramir's motives ambiguous until near the end of the second movie. Most fans consider that a fundamental change to the way Tolkien originally wrote the character, which is something not to be done frivolously. On the other hand, the decision to remove Tom Bombadil and otherwise streamline the first part of the Fellowship movie has very real justification, in that you have a limited amount of time in which to tell the story. You simply cannot include everything; therefore things that don't contribute directly to the Main Quest are legitimate candidates for deletion. (Tom Bombadil, it's argued, serves an important purpose in the book, but it's not one that contributes very much to the downfall of Sauron).

So, to my way of thinking, if you're adapting a book or a game to the movies, you need to try to preserve the fundamental character of the story as much as possible and not make changes that frivolously undermine it. Nearly all adaptations I've seen have failed in this to one degree or another. Sometimes the end result can overcome these flaws (as in LOTR, which was a very good set of movies in its own right), but sometimes the failure is pretty much absolute (a vast array of movies I could name).