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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."
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.
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
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.
"A touching film of humanity at its best when all the cards are down..."
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
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.
In a world where the deck is stacked against him. One man chooses to deal himself a new hand of cards...
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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.