I was right when I said that video games don’t make good source material for films. I was wrong when I said ALL video games are poor source material. In order to further my point, I’m going to show you four things, two video game movies that WORKED and two that should have and didn’t.. First, the ones that worked:
Silent Hill: If you played the games, you know that this was a very, very faithful adaptation. The movie changed how the town functions a little but mostly stayed true to what the games were, and the ideas Silent Hill is based on. Admittedly, this movie gave the writer and the director a little more freedom because the games as a series have never been about the characters and the choices they make, but the town and what it does to the hapless people that find them selves at its mercy. A little research will show you that most of the crappy parts (the husband subplot for one), were forced into the movie by Hollywood execs (the bastards).
Postal: First things first, Ewe Boll makes crap. 99% of all the movies he ever makes will be crap. But postal is a shining example of video game movies done RIGHT. This is mostly due to Running with Scissors, the development team behind all the postal games. Ewe Boll just wanted to cash in on another video game fan base (a small one at that) but ended up finding a team of people who stand by their product. RWS (Running with Scissors) wrote a screenplay for the film, were consultants all the way through, and the creator of Postal; Vince Desi even has a cameo in the movie. I highly recommend this movie to anyone with a pitch black sense of humor.
Fun Fact #1: If you get the special two-disc version of the movie, the second disc is a copy of postal 2, a game easily worth the $20 or less you’re going to spend on the film.
Fun Fact #2: For you Boll haters out there, there’s a scene where he gets shot in the groin, and proclaims “I Hate Videogames”, I’m still on the fence as to whether or not he actually LIKES video games, but I know that being hated has given the man a crap-ton of free press.
And the failures:
Max Payne: All you need to do is play the first Max Payne to know what I’m talking about here. Most people seem to agree that it was an atrocious film, but the biggest travesty here is the fact that it COULD have been so, so great. The games had a good story filled with fantastic characters. (I can still hear Jack Lupino’s crazy rants about demons and devils before screaming I AM THE WOLF!, and Max’s sometimes ridiculous but always fantastic inner monologue) But to really see where the movie screwed the pooch lets cover the basic plot elements shall we?
Max’s wife and kid are murdered by drug addicts (Movie: Check)
Now with nothing to lose he goes deep undercover (Movie: I’d rather have him do cold case files because it’s more…deep?)
His only contact gets killed and he is suspected (because now the police just think he's some street thug), so he kills his way up the mafia ladder to get to the bottom of it. All while trying to stay one step ahead of the police. (Movie: No, no, that’s far too exciting, let’s have him do a bunch of boring leg work instead)
That’s just the first act of the game, on top of that they completely removed the Slo-mo John woo style gunfights. (and I don’t count the one scene where he uses the shotgun, the pump shotgun was the most useless weapon in the game so it stands to reason that Max would use one for 90% of the film) *sigh*
Resident Evil: First I want to ask a question; when does an adaptation stop being an adaptation? This came to me after reading that a lot of you out there liked the Resident Evil films. To hammer my point home, think about a Metal Gear Solid film. Is it still a MGS movie if Solid Snake is replaced? How many members of Fox-hound can I cut from the plot before I just should stop calling it MGS: the movie? I think most gamers can agree that you can still tell the tale of Metal Gear Solid without psycho mantis (Why would you though?). But what if I changed the location to a desert, replaced the metal gear with a nuke, and changed the character of Solid Snake to Mongoose Jack (Jack has a totally different back story by the way)? At that point aren’t I just ripping off MGS basic premise, not making a movie about it? That’s how I feel about resident evil. Now, RE is not a bad movie, it’s a bad adaptation, I’ll be the fist to admit I don’t want to see a movie where the main characters hunt for gems in statues, to find a note sheet, to play on a piano, etc, etc, to open a locked door. But were Chris and Jill so bad that they had to be cut from the movie entirely? Or how about the fact that RE was a survival horror game? You know the kind, low resources, deadly enemies, etc. I did not want a gun-shooting kill fest for a Resident Evil movie. Great game, good movie, terrible, horrible adaptation.
The next question that crosses my mind (and maybe yours) is how could they screw that up? Well my thinking is Paul W.S. Anderson (of RE fame), just wanted to make his own movie and sell it to an existing fan base, the jerk (this is just my opinion but it makes a lot of sense to me.).
As for Max Payne, that movie needed 2 films to do the game’s story justice, and I doubt any movie studio is going to finance a two-part video game movie where each part has to have the budget of a blockbuster action flick. That is of course assuming that anyone involved in production of that movie ever played or gave a crap about the game.
If you actually read all that, hats off to ya. And a final note to anyone considering making a video game movie: For jeebus sakes man! Play the dang game, there’s a reason this game is popular, those reasons might translate to film pretty well.
P.S. I’m skeptically eager for Prince of Persia, Those games’ plot are just complex enough to fit a 90 minute film, but I don’t think all the acrobatics and time slowing are going to make the cut.