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Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Need New Respect
An anonymous reader writes "Hollywood has yet to find any video game property it is willing to treat with the same respect as J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K.Rowling, arguably still following the principles that led to the appalling Super Mario Bros. movie in 1992: 'A game lacks the complexity that a movie requires.' Yet a modern gaming masterpiece such as Mass Effect has the depth and breadth to deserve better treatment in the proposed trilogy. Is Hollywood again going to disrespect fans who, in this case, have as much right to see a good plot respected as the readers of Lord Of The Rings? This article discusses why and how Hollywood should grow up regarding these adaptations."
Where was Hollywood respect when they were talking about dwarf tossing?
Hollywood only cares about making money so they can throw some ewoks into a movie to sell some extra toys to kids they will.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
If you want someone to make a movie the way you want to see it, become a director.
It seems there is a heavy feeling of entitlement as far as media and the arts go here.
Like people often say here, ideas are a dime a dozen. The implementation is the hard part.
The first Mass Effect was the business, story wise. Deeply thought out, self consistent world, interesting characters, a shadowy nemesis and a basically solid beginning, middle and end. Everything Hollywood needs to make a great movie.
But Mass Effect 2, though technically speaking a better game, definitely fared worse on the plot. The plot in ME2 suffered heavily from being wrapped around a fairly trivial design doc and didn't really have any beginning as such. Basically: hero dies, is rescued by an enigmatic terrorist leader with access to incredible resources, who tells him to recruit the most badass characters in the galaxy to fight an alien menace. 90% of the game involves this "recruitment". It's a race against the clock but nobody demonstrates any sense of urgency at all. There's never a "well, he'll do, let's get going!" to be heard. Once you have some arbitrary number of characters you jump through a wormhole, fight some baddies and blow up a space station. Fin.
There's some other stuff in there that advances the plot of the trilogy as a whole, but it's pretty weak.
Basically, if the author of TFA is hoping that Mass Effect will become a successful video game/movie crossover franchise, he'd better hope they only try and do it to the first game.
the movie
If so, it had a good budget, effects and commercial success.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
How about we just stop letting Uwe Boll direct videogame inspired movies.
Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like". This is when marketing execs see golden opportunity. Not only will you get most of the fans of the game to see it at least once, you'll probably get the people who wouldn't have touched a game with a barge poll.
In my mind respect is only one part of the equation worth exploring. Understanding of the game becomes another. Mass Effect may have been about shooting Geth, driving the Mako and using biotics but there was an underlying theme of good versus evil within the character. Perhaps not even versus, both Paragon and Renegade are a part of Shepard, problem is you can't introduce choice into a film and therefore can't communicate it as well as you can in a game. Another issue is whether you have Shepard as a man or a woman. Jennifer Hale was by far the better voice actor and I would find a real female lead a far more interesting story than another bland bloke. The fact that she was a woman wasn't exploited for sexual purposes in ME, it just so happened she was a woman. But you know that wouldn't be how hollywood would do it.
The article says that judging by the IMDB page, its set during the first contact war, so they wouldn't be having to ruin everyones Shepard on them if they did make the film.
Incidently the website linked to was down for me so here is a link to a google cache of it
There is no -1 disagree
Uncharted is the perfect candidate for a popcorn movie, but from all the revelations/rumours it sounds like the movie studio is determined to dump everything that is good about the character and plot while adding unnecessary father/son (and Uncle???) dynamics.
At which point you have to ask: "Why bother?"
Oh yes, it's the money you can scalp from disappointed fans. Great.
Respect that respected Science Fiction authors get when their thought provoking stories are turned into action flicks with rappers?
Respect Tolkien got when Elves appeared at Helms Deep?
Hollywood knows about respect, it is what is underneath their boots.
And what do you expect when they serve an audience that thinks Mass Effect has depth? What depth? Evil monster with no motivation appears and gets blown up by equally unmotivated guy/gal. Great literature this does NOT make. Granted it has depth if you grew up on superman comics but then Hollywood got you well covered.
Games to movies rarely will work because most games are simply NOT about story. Tomb Raider? It is about solving the puzzles and making the jumps. As much as I would like to see a well proportioned woman spending an hour and half flexing her body on the silver screen, it would have any depth. Except maybe her cleavage.
Tomb Raider, Doom, Mario Brothers: These are games, you play them for the game. NOT the story. Trying to bolt a story on top that becomes 90% of the content instead of 10% is going to require addition of stuff the player simply does not want. Case in point: Lara Croft in the original is a rather bland character with no boyfriend or past. In the movie she suddenly gets a love interest. HELLO! She was supposed to be MY fantasy, not some other guy.
But in a game, this doesn't matter. The little we know about the game Lara Croft is plenty, but jumped up movie directors think they GOT to tell a story. That is were Hollywood keeps going wrong, they still don't get that what they could produce is eye-candy porn. Take Transforms (please). Remove the humans and just gives us 1.5 hours of robots fighting. Zero attempt at story and even less at badly acted out emotions. I liked revenge of the fallen, just fastforward when a human shows up.
Tomb Raider the Story does not work. Tomb Raider the action-adventure does, but focus on action, not bolted on "depth". Give me a mindless 2D movie where I can park my brain at the door and just enjoy myself.
Hollywood isn't ruining game movies by not adding enough depth, but by adding to much. Pure 100% action, that is why I play games, add this to game movies and you are golden.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The vast majority of games out there don't have enough plot to fill a matchbox. How exactly are they worthy of extra respect versus any random short-story?
Really, Super Mario Bros. the movie was very close to the spirit of the games (light entertainment) and had more plot that all the games put together.
Just because some games have a bunch of fanboys out there doesn't mean that they or their game are worthy of special respect.
Might as well complain that movies about popular sports like football (the American one and the Rest Of The World one) don't show enough respect for the game - at least there are more fans for any of of those sports than there are for any specific computer game.
Any game that has a story good enough to be told well in a movie should have been a movie in the first place.
I play games for the gameplay, not some damn story that interrupts gameplay (you know, the reason we play games in the first place?) every ten seconds.
We need a gaming crash like we had in the US in the mid-80s again. Sadly this won't happen because modern gamers would actually *like* E.T. and give it "Game of the Year."
there was an underlying theme of good versus evil within the character.
Ah, good versus evil, how profound. Did they by any chance choose the motif of broken mirrors to show the protagonist's fragmented self?
sic transit gloria mundi
Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore". No one is talking about making a film out of Wii Sports or Farmville or any of the other games which are well and truly casual gaming. We're talking about Mass Effect, we're talking about Resident Evil, we're talking about House of Dead we're talking about the other million and one games which a majority of people in the world simply will not play.
There is no -1 disagree
I hate the Lord of the Rings movies. Hate. They're visually stunning, I'll give them that. Though, thats as far as I go. I read the books years before the movies came out, and to put it mildly, together they are a literary masterpiece. A literary masterpiece that Peter Jackson completely fucked up and shat upon within the first five minutes of HIS Fellowship of The Ring movie (by explaining who and what Sauron was and why the one ring was so important). Oh, and in The Two Towers, please show me where the fuck it is mentioned that the Enemy had access to gun powder for a fucking bomb. Horse Shit! But these movies are paraded around as the "best ever" simply because they were based of something much greater, paying almost no attention to the actual quality of the movies. I wonder how many "fans" ( by which i mean fan-boys, or posers, or both ) of LOTR out there haven't even glanced at the books? If you have read the books, you would find the movies a very nice visual component to what you already know as LOTR, that is all. To claim these movies as anything more than that is a travesty, and a racial fucking slur against Tolkien's own work. Fuck Peter Jackson. Fuck his movies. My point is, the author of this post is assuming that Hollywood cares anything about the content off which they're basing ANY of their movies. Nine times out of ten, the only thing Hollywood cares about is making a movie that will make them money, as cheaply as possible. Movies based off anything, a book, a real event... a video game, all they offer Hollywood is an existing fan base that might automatically buy a ticket. Consider the Watchmen movie; horrid. They raped Hell Blazer like a Chinese finger trap, calling it "Constintine". Fight Club is the only movie i can think of that was better than the book ( yes, fuck the book is what I said ). SO, why in the HELL would you think Hollywood would treat video game based movies any differently? The most I think they would ever do is prevent Uwe Boll from directing them.
Next will be Tic-Tac-Tow
Well, they took a few liberties with the game, but there's already been a movie about it.
Both Mass Effect games are available for PC. Most people who are interested in games or at least are open to the concept of games will either have a PC or one console which will play 90% of games out there. Those who are unwilling to invest 30+ hours which a game requires usually don't make the same excuse to not watch a TV series which by the end of 2 seasons has usually clocked up more hours than it takes to complete a game.
Your third point I accept, there maybe those who simply can't play computer games, but by the same token there are films which have story lines which are too complex for some people but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be made. However I would be very surprised if you couldn't adapt to even the easiest setting on the game.
There is no -1 disagree
Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck. Some books don't make good movies, and many movies would suck in book form. Likewise, while a few games make good movies and vice versa, the usual case is that they don't, so why try?
A movie is first and foremost about storytelling, in a carefully set up series of scenes, with a dramatic curve and a specific ending that everything in the movie is subtly linked to so that near the end you get the feeling of everything falling together like the pieces of a puzzle. Well, good movies anyway. It's about changing perspective, it can tell the story from various angles, leave storylines hanging for a while then return to them - there is a lot in the way how the story is told, in pacing and in letting the viewer know more than the protagonists on the screen.
Games are about decisions, reactions, about finding out clues and hints and about consequences. You are the protagonist, so even if they include cinematics of the evil guy planning his next move, the protagonist then knows about it. The pacing depends on you more than on the story. There are usually multiple routes and endings. It is a lot more about your character than about the story. And one of the challenges is that even the most meaningless random encounter could kill you, while in the movies we all know the hero never gets hurt except by the bad guy himself or one of his leutenants. All the nameless "random encounter" guys are just there as targets.
A good movie and a good game are not made following the same recipe. A good movie about a game, or a good game about a movie, will have little in common except the setting. Example: The Aliens and the Predator movies, and the AvP games (don't get me started about the AvP movies, they were crap). Great movies, great games, exactly because the games did not try to copy the movies but created their own world within the movie setting.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Movies will *be* video games, so who cares?
Readers generally dislike movie adaptations of the book such as a lot of the LOTR fans from the original trilogy didn't like the movie because it was better played in their mind. Gamers tend to have that higher standard as well, and they will always expect more from something that adapts from what they are used to. A game isn't built like a movie and when it is, it's called Final Fantasy 13... hah. Though, anyone seen the IGN april fools movie trailer of the legend of zelda? That looked like it had amazing potential and I would be stoked if peter jackson did a movie like that, but I'm sure he's pre-occupied with the hobbit 1 and 2.
In the end, it's not that they can't make movies into games or games into movies properly, it's just that they don't pick the right ones to adapt. I don't think a Halo movie would be that great but Parasite Eve? That might be just as decent as Resident Evil if you're a fan of the movies. Then again, Resident Evil is originally a novel, no? So there's a great example on how a novel has a decent movie trilogy and pretty fun games.
I think it's great and I firmly believe the next step is turning architecture into cinematic classics. Who needs original content?
(Come to think of it, Helvetica the movie was quite excellent. I can't wait for the adaptation of Comic Sans, let's hire Uwe Boll for that.)
Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore". No one is talking about making a film out of Wii Sports or Farmville or any of the other games which are well and truly casual gaming. We're talking about Mass Effect, we're talking about Resident Evil, we're talking about House of Dead we're talking about the other million and one games which a majority of people in the world simply will not play.
Arguably a Zelda movie or a Warcraft movie would have a target audience that is an order of magnitude larger than any of these... And first person shooters rarely translate well into movies - I didn't expect the Doom movie to be any good, but even Max Payne (which is an FPS that is as narrative-driven as they come) was pretty rubbish as a movie.
The unusual thing with Mass Effect compared with every film which has explored the same theme, is that you make the choice, you can then see the effects of your actions and if that way inclined you can see what would have happened had you done something different.
I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.
sic transit gloria mundi
If you reduce it to an oversimplified strawman, of course nothing is profound. The Odyssey is just about some guy dicking around the sea instead of going home. LORD of the ring is a old-timey==good vs industrialism-and-change==bad story. War And Peace is about war and identity crisis. Crime And Punishment is just about the simple moral dilemma of whether you can justify evil means for a good purpose, so basically good vs evil again. (Since you already reduced similar themes in ME2 to just simple good vs evil, or to seeing the same basic trope in a choose-your-adventure book.) Etc. Not very profound when put that way, is it?
In fact, I your message was trolling, because otherwise it's so stupid it's depressing. What makes something profound or not isn't just having theme X or theme Y in it, but you do with it and what you explore from there. You can take any theme in the world and turn it into a shallow exercise, or do something thought-provoking with. You just need to look at the likes of Lewis Caroll who managed to turn something as dry as hating the new mathematics and especially topology, into a classic, or L. Frank Baum who took a political alegory so far that most people don't even figure it out and again managed to turn it into something both popular and for many people thought-provoking.
So, really, troll or just stupid?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore"
Its simpler than that. Its framing the question by careful selection of description to get the answer you want. It has little relationship with reality of course.
Real gaming, also known hardcore gaming, is just endless remakes of Wolfenstein3D from 1992. I thought it was fun for a couple years (decades?) but now its pretty boring. "I've got a good idea, lets fight WWII again, err, uh, I mean lets do it again in higher res"
Not real gaming, also known as "casual" or "for noobs" is merely the entire human experience of technologically aided recreation with the sole exclusion of first person shooters.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What's the point of making a video game into a movie? You already have the story, the actors, the dialog, the setpieces, etc.
Apart from the actors, so does a book. The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry potter movies show that you can make half decent movies when you already have story, dialogue etc. in place; it's just another medium for telling the same story*, some people like video games, others like movies, others prefer books. Many like a mix - I don't like FPS games, but if they released a good movie of one, I'd watch it happily.
*The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy was released for radio, TV, as books, as a computer game, as a film, and last but not least, it was also released as a towel. None of these versions are consistent with each other so this does not always entirely hold...
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Video games don't need movie adaptations. We've progressed past that point. Hollywood can suck it.
I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.
Right. It's a similar literary mechanic, but for grown ups.
As a kid I remember having an Indiana Jones choose your own adventure. The difference is that with Indy I had to choose whether to flee from the Nazis out the front door or climb the window to the roof. In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
Can we define it by what it isn't? Dwarf tossing & surfboarding elves for starters.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I know you didn't just call out the Wii for not being "hardcore" compared to... wait for it... House of the Dead? WTF, dude? House of the Dead is about as casual as you can get. It's an arcade shooter that's designed to get people to stick a few quarters in for a few minutes of play. More to the point, THE FUCKING GAME IS AVAILABLE ON THE WII. Stop buying into marketing bullshit and start evaluating games and consoles for what they are. There's no logical definition that makes Metroid: Other M or Super Mario Galaxy any less "hardcore" than Mass Effect.
Ninja's have captured the President...are you a bad enough dude to get him back?
Haunted by the ghosts of his past, lost in a maze of madness, a man turns to pills...
In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
And that difference is? In both cases you get to make artificial choices forced on you by the game designer; you don't get to make arbitrary choices like you do in real life, and none of them really matter.
BTW, I remember even Dr Who having to decide whether or not to commit genocide to eliminate the Daleks in the 1970s, _on a kids' SF show_. So claiming this is somehow 'adult' seems pretty funny.
Gaming went seriously downhill once designers decided 'oh, we've got to have a _story_'. That meant forcing the player onto rails they can't escape from other than a few pointless and arbitrary 'choices' of tihs kind, and adding numerous cut-scenes where their character does things the player would never do themselves, because the character must do those things to keep the player on the rails of the 'story'... Most modern game designers seem to be frustrated movie directors and from the cliched 'stories' they try to force onto the player and the sub-B-movie cut-scenes you can see exactly why the're just frustrated movie directors and not real ones.
Of course "Chess -- the Motion Picture!" was actually called "Searching for Bobby Fischer".
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
At the risk of repeating myself, it's stupid to try to argue something down just based on an over-simplified summary of a trope.
Yes, believe it or not, there's only a handful of tropes around. You can find the same tropes in kids shows, or in elaborate alegories for adults. Until someone invents a new trope, yes, of course, you'll find examples of each in both lightweight kids' stuff and in profound stuff and anything in between.
Dismissing something just because some trope was also done in a kid's show, without any consideration of the context or how well it was done, is just freaking stupid.
Not the least because it's a textbook example of the association fallacy.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.