“10 Terrible Movies Adapted From Video Games”
Per Techland:
The thing about the worst movies adapted from video game source material is the insidious way they reinforce the most ignorant criticisms of the medium. “What do you expect?” elitists sniff about dross such as Far Cry. “It was made from a video game.” Yes, it was… by opportunistic producers, hack directors and actors looking for an easy paycheck. Pulling off the jump from console to cinema can be hard enough, but, when the film-making’s bad on top of it all, there’s hardly any point. To illustrate this point, here’s a few cautionary tales from the games-to-movies hall of shame.
Three examples:
Alone in the Dark
German director Uwe Boll has many crimes he needs to answer for and this film is one of his worst. The dialogue is terrible, the acting listless and worst of all, AiTD isn’t scary in the least. That’s the biggest sin of an adaptation of a title that helped prove video games could deliver satisfying frights in their own right. All AitD really has in common with the game are main characters share the same names as their game counterparts. Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff don’t move the excitement needle at all and Christian Slater must have lost a bet to have signed up for this. The movie opens with a long, painful text scroll (which is also narrated, in case you, uh, can’t read). Those words should’ve been an apology.
Max Payne
On the face of it, Max Payne initially looked like it would avoid the trash pile. Good casting–Mark Wahlberg and Olga Kurylenko–and a hard-boiled visual aesthetic seemed like the movie would be faithful to Remedy’s bullet-time shooter. The stylized action and a designer drug at the core of the plot also mirrored the game, too. But, in games, there’s less emphasis on the story needing to make sense; it’s the action that needs to make sense. The Max Payne movie falls down on the latter part with flat, unimaginative gunfights. The script added in a stupid military subplot and the whole affair’s further hampered by characters you don’t give a rat’s ass about. The film noir pillars that Max Payne games used so well–like sardonic humor and first-person narration–are nowhere to be found in the film. The whole horrible thing feels like it’s happening in slo-mo and the audience is the one getting shot in the head.
Dead or Alive
There’s a reason why a trainwreck like DOA even exists: Somehow, tripe like the first Street Fighter movie from the early 1990s actually made money. Not the case for this laughable martial arts tournament movie. The adaptation of Tecmo’s sexy fighting series arrived on screens in 2006 and quickly tanked. A cast of C-listers mime their way through terrible brawl scenes, including Kane Kosugi. He’s the son of awesome actor/fight choreographer Sho Kosugi (best known for Enter the Ninja in the 80s) and let’s just say he brings shame upon his father’s house for even being in this flick. Devon Aoki, Natassia Malthe, and Jaime Pressly all don skimpy outfits to channel the pervy “she kicks high” vibe that always accompanied the games. The wire-fu choreography just feels rote and DOA never even manages to be one of those so-bad-its-good affairs. Dead or Alive = dead on arrival.
Seven more stinkers per Techland here.
Any to add to the list?
UPDATE: H/T to Judith for recommending the WSJ book review of “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.” Some excerpts:
Tom Bissell has purchased four Xbox 360 videogame consoles in the past five years. And he has given away three. In an attempt to kick his videogame habit, Mr. Bissell would bestow each recently acquired console on a friend or family member, only to run out and buy another one a short time later. No doubt Microsoft is gratified. We should just be glad that Mr. Bissell was able to drag himself away from playing “Grand Theft Auto” and “Fallout” long enough to write “Extra Lives,” his exploration of, as the subtitle has it, “Why Video Games Matter.”
Unusually for the videogame book genre, Mr. Bissell brings to his subject not only a handy way with a game controller but also a deft literary style and a journalist’s eye. He writes for Harper’s magazine and The New Yorker and is the author of the short-story collection “God Lives in St. Petersburg” (2005). “Extra Lives” is mostly a travelogue recounting Mr. Bissell’s journey, over the course of several years, through a series of immense, immersive videogames, such as “Far Cry 2.” It’s much less tedious than it sounds.
Of particular note to writers:
Running through “Extra Lives” is a thread of seriousness. Mr. Bissell wonders why, despite their technical sophistication, videogames are so bad at telling stories. It’s a more complex question than you might think.
The best narrative art forms are necessarily authoritarian. In books, film or theater, the creator tells his story with near total control. In a certain way, the audience might as well not even exist. Videogames are participatory. And the fact of participation creates all sorts of problems for narrative authority.
Yet many videogame producers do aspire to tell meaningful stories. The game “BioShock,” for instance, attempts to explore the philosophical tensions within Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and to meditate on the costs of individual freedom — but with plenty of genetic mutants to splatter. The script for the game “Mass Effect” — that is, the on-screen characters’ dialogue, not the computer code — is 300,000 words. But to little avail. The stories just aren’t much as stories. Videogames seem “designed by geniuses and written by Ed Wood Jr.,” Mr. Bissell laments.
We’ve been down this road before a few times:
“Upping the Craft: Susan O’Connor on Games Writing”
Robert McKee Interview, Part 7 wherein McKee states:
In the past I have gone up to Microsoft and Sierra Online and given my story lecture to people who are create video games. They have ambition to create far more complex, content-rich video games, but they always hit the wall. It is not possible because they are not art, they are games. When you have interaction between the work and the audience, you ask the audience to make decisions of their own. When it becomes interactive it stops being art; it is a game. Games, by their nature, cannot be rich, subjective, and have all the other qualities of art. The problem with games is that they have to find wonderful new variations of the same very rigid story model. I am afraid that they are stuck there.
Both movies and video games offer a participatory experience on the part of the consumer, but clearly it seems the latter offers a much more immersive experience than movies. And I would think that most if not all video game players would assert that video games in some way create a story world.
Maybe that’s a key distinction: Movie tell a story. Video games create a story (in the sense that the user participates in the revelation of the story world).
Thoughts?
H/T to Judy for that great link!
UPDATE #2: More from the book review:
The most interesting person Mr. Bissell crosses paths with is Jonathan Blow, a videogame designer and a sort of philosopher of the medium. Mr. Blow has spent a good deal of his life thinking about storytelling and the “dynamical meaning” of simply getting through a game. He believes that the central problem with storytelling in videogames is that the actual mechanics of playing a game — moving your character to jump over a barrel, or eat a power pellet, or punch an enemy — are divorced from the stories that videogame makers are trying to tell [emphasis added].
Like all games, videogames are constructed around rules. You can shoot this. You can’t shoot that. This hamburger restores your health. That sword gives you extra power. And so on. “Games have rules, rules have meaning, and game-play is the process by which those rules are tested and explored,” Mr. Bissell explains. And as Mr. Blow notes, if those rules are fake, unimportant or arbitrary, audiences sense it. And, let’s face it, assigning power to a hamburger is a little arbitrary. No matter how impressive a game is, in its rules-ridden immersiveness it will not be able to tell a coherent, meaningful story. The very nature of the medium, Mr. Blow believes, “prevents the stories from being good.” [emphasis added].
More thoughts?