Comic books have slowly worked their way up over the years
to become the dominant goldmine for Hollywood to plunder. Yet in the last few
months, the studios seem to have pillaged a new source to craft their cinematic
outings. Hardcore Henry. Ratchet and Clank.
The Angry Birds Movie. Warcraft. This winter’s Assassin’s Creed. Video game movies may have been a “thing” since
the ‘90s, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen this many video game movies
come out this rapidly.
And they’re not slowing down anytime soon. The Resident Evil films are still going, a Tomb Raider reboot with Alicia Vikander
is in the works and Steven Spielberg is all set to adapt the gaming-heavy novel
Ready Player One. Lest we forget
Hollywood is still gestating over big budget films based on Halo, Uncharted, Bioshock, The Last of Us,
Shadow of the Colossus and many more. There’s just one small glitch in the
system: don’t all video game movies suck?
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: Adapt This
It’s true that films based on games don’t exactly have the
best track record. The Super Mario Bros.,
Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter films
of the ‘90s all failed spectacularly. Fast forward to the 2000s and we have a
few financial successes with Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider and the original Resident
Evil. Too bad they both didn’t do so well critically, and their follow-ups
even less so, even if Resident Evil is
still chugging along. We’ve had Prince of
Persia, a decent adaptation yet a boring film, and other minor films like Doom, Max Payne and Hitman that
came and went silently.
Hollywood keeps trying to make “surefire hits” out of
popular games, yet none of them connect with critics or audiences. Most recently, Warcraft became the highest grossing video game movie worldwide, largely thanks to a huge opening in China. But a CG-heavy fantasy action flick was bound to open big there anyway (never forget Transformers 4.) The film still tanked with critics, and while franchise fans are enjoying the faithfulness to the lore, the consensus seems to be that it just doesn't work as a satisfying, standalone film. In other words, it's just another bad video game movie.
Given how the flops keep coming, why then is Hollywood still trying to (pardon the pun) get back
in the game? Are studios desperate to make the first “good” video game movie,
sparking the next big Hollywood trend? There’s no question that the potential
is there. No one can say whether or not Assassin’s
Creed will be the new Iron Man,
and give other studios the blueprint for how to make a game movie “work.” What
can be said is that the cinematic potential of video games will always be
appealing, and it’s not hard to see why.
Films have always had an interesting relationship with both
comic books and video games. All three are visual mediums, using images as
their primary mode of storytelling. Yet all three are so distinct in the way
that they tell their stories that adapting one medium to the other is harder
than it looks. Comics at least have character growth, rising tension, and
various storytelling structures that can be mined for a 2 hour film. It’s hard
to condense decades of history into said film, yes, but it can be done. For
video games, it’s an entirely different story.
Perhaps the Only Solution is Not to Play
Video games come in a variety of forms, but the one thing
they all have in common is that they’re very active in their storytelling
approach. Unlike films, TV, books and comics, which are all passive, video
games involve the audience actually participating in the on-screen adventures.
Players take control of the game’s characters and lead them through a series of
puzzles and challenges in order to reach a stated goal. Yes, we all know this.
But trying to adapt what’s supposed to be an active experience into a passive
one is actually extremely difficult. You know how boring it is to watch someone
else play Halo or Call of Duty, while you just sit at the
sidelines? Imagine that experience in a movie theater.
The reason Super Mario
Bros. didn’t work was because the simple narrative of the game, coupled
with the lack of well-defined characters, made the translation to film
extremely difficult. What do we know from the games about Mario and Luigi?
They’re…..plumbers? And……brothers? Um, the green one’s taller than the red one?
They’re Italian? You see the point. Trying to craft a cinematic tale around
them isn’t exactly a walk through the Mushroom Kingdom, if you get the drift.
This applies to pretty much every other game adaptation out
there, even though as time marches on and games grow more sophisticated, so do
the games’ stories. Lara Croft is a well-rounded person, as are the Resident Evil characters, along with the
complicated lore of Azeroth from the Warcraft
games. On paper, they would make for good films. It’s one of the reasons why
the Assassin’s Creed film looks
promising, since it’s a fantastic cinematic premise that has literally all of
history to draw from. Then you look at how games like Uncharted and The Last of Us have
such amazing stories that they’re essentially playable films, and it seems like
a no-brainer to make movies out of them.
First Person Means No Person
But despite all this potential, video game movies are still
flopping. And it doesn’t have anything to do with how well a filmmaker
translates the game’s aesthetics into a movie (like Warcraft or, hell, the original Mortal
Kombat). It has everything to do with filmmakers failing to take an active
experience and turn it into a passive one. An experience that a film going
audience can get invested in. If the story is too simple or the characters too
flat, the film has to find a way to make you care for them.
The problem here is twofold. One, most video game stories
are designed to be simple so it’s easy for players to follow the narrative as
they go from one checkpoint to the next. Two, most gaming characters are
cardboard cutouts by design, so the players can project whatever personality
they want onto them to make them relatable. We see whatever we want to see in
Mario, Link or the Master Chief because they come to us as blank slates, so we
can easily identify with them as we play them. They’re surrogates for us, in
other words.
Even in games like Skyrim
or Fallout that come with their
own built in lore, the players basically design and custom fit their own
characters to fit their needs. Now try and take your customized Vault Dweller
from Fallout, cast Kit Harrington to
play him, and set him loose in a big budget movie. Even if Harrington played
him to perfection, he would be given personality traits that contradict what
players have already projected onto him.
It’s like when a movie fails to adapt a book properly
because the readers have already worked up the perfect version in their minds,
only a thousand times greater. Another thing to consider: we all love Halo’s Master Chief because he never
takes his helmet off. We can imagine thousands of different looks for him under
that mask. The minute you put a flesh and blood actor underneath that iconic
helmet, then have him remove it in a film to give the A-list actor face time,
you’ve just alienated your entire core fanbase.
Wreck-It Ralph vs. Hardcore Henry
Now some of you may be thinking, “If that’s really the
problem, why can’t video game movies just adapt a film that replicates the
experience of gameplay?” The response would be “have you seen Hardcore Henry?” While not an adaptation
of any existing game, per say, this recent film attempted to mimic how it feels
to play a Call of Duty-esque First
Person Shooter game. It was shot with a Go-Pro, entirely in first person, with
Henry’s backstory and personality conveyed through the people he meets.
Now that doesn’t mean that this narrative format doesn’t
work. It obviously works great in the game world, as the billions made
overnight on the latest Call of Duty can
attest to. But that does not work for
film. Both mediums are visual, yes, and they both turn to inherently
cinematic storytelling tropes. But different mediums they remain, and as such they
play by different rules. If you want to make a game into a movie, you have to
preserve the essence of the game while making sure the story works as a film.
One of the only good video game movies in recent memory was Wreck-It Ralph. Yes, like Henry it’s not based on a specific game,
although it cribs from Donkey Kong, Mario
Kart, and Doom/Halo. That movie
succeeded because it fused certain video game mechanics (evil boss fights,
perfect heroes, racing games, shooting games, arcade games, glitches, hordes of
enemies, trophies, etc.) into an original story that made for a compelling,
passive viewing experience. In other words, it took what it needed to from
games and used them to make a great movie. So really, Wreck-It Ralph has already laid out the blueprint for how to make a
“good” video game movie. The answer, Hollywood, is to use select gaming
elements in a way that makes for a great film.
Conclusion: Level Up, Hollywood
This is why Assassin’s
Creed and Ready Player One still
seem promising. Creed is taking the
lore of the games and applying it to an original story, one tailored to be inherently cinematic and thus, make for an entertaining film
without betraying the game’s essence. Ready
Player One is a somewhat different story, since it’s based on a novel, but
one that nevertheless is set almost entirely in a virtual game world and relies
on many gaming tropes to tell its story. But because it’s already used those
gaming elements in one medium (literature) to great success, translating it to
film should be relatively simple. Still, since the novel takes gaming elements
and puts them into a new story that works with a different medium, it helps the
case.
So after Hollywood mines every last comic book and looks for
the next big thing to adapt, video games could very well be it. Judging by this
year, an argument could be made that Hollywood already looks at games as “the
next big thing.” But as long as the game movies continue bombing, it won’t
really spark a trend like Hollywood wants. Like comic books, Hollywood needs
time to learn how to meld the essence of the source with the medium of film. In
the end, it’ll be about quality over quantity. Hollywood simply needs to
remember that they’re making movies,
regardless of what they’re adapting. Once they do that, we could very well
reach the next level in film making. And that’s a game everyone wants to play.
