In addition to being a super-geek, I’m also a gamer.
The thing I love most about video games is that you get to be your own protagonist of the story. Whether you’re a superhero, solider, or some weird animal thing, you are the one controlling the action. It’s like you’re in your own action movie! That being said, why is it so hard to create a movie based on a video game? For the longest time, there has been something of a curse on Hollywood productions based on video games. They’ve all been terrible. Well, most of them anyway. Why is this? For the most part, many of these adaptations came out in the 90’s, and 90’s actions films had a tendency to be overly cheesy with actions and dialogue. In addition, these films strayed too far from the source material that it was unrecognizable as the same games we loved to play.
Case in point, the first adaptation made was “Super Mario Bros.” and it’s probably one of the worst films made. I’m not even sure the creators ever played the actual game. Two brothers, who are not only 20 years apart but are also different ethnicities entirely, somehow cross into another dimension where reptiles rule the Mushroom Kingdom, depicted as a dystopian city. The villains also looked super weird and it barely had anything to do with the source material. Seriously, go look up pictures from the movie and tell me that’s what you expected to see.
You’d think that after entering the new millennia, we’d have gotten better at making video game adaptations. Not really. The same problems continued for some odd reason. Miscasting characters, cheesy dialogue, and plots that went too far away from the source material make it very hard to believe that any future game movies will be successful. Video games have amazing plots and characters in them already, why can’t we just take what the original creators made?
In truth, I can understand why it’s so hard. When you go to see a movie, you don’t want predictability. You want surprises and thrills at every turn and it’s hard to do that when you know the whole story. Video games themselves have even been designed to look like a movie. Take, for example, a classic video game like “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”. Amazing story, fun action scenes, witty dialogue, all it’s missing is voice acting and you’ve got an animated feature! The point is that more and more games take on the movie image to make you feel more immersed in the entertainment. They even show opening and ending credits in creative ways. Due to this, it’s no wonder why the film industry has trouble competing with the original creators.
However, this is no excuse. There have been countless adaptations from books, which I’m sure many people have read, and they stayed close to the source material so why can’t video game movies do that as well? It may just be that they were in the hands of the wrong people. We did have a few movies that were pretty good like the first “Mortal Kombat” and “Resident Evil” movies.
It also turns out that the curse may even be on the verge of breaking. I saw the new animated movie that came out over the summer “Ratchet & Clank”, based on the hit game by Naughty Dog and Sony, and it was actually pretty good. Its story was based on the original with only a few minor tweaks here and there, but it was relatively the same. It even had the same voice actors for the main characters and the same type of fun comedy the original game had. It might have even done better if Sony didn’t rush out a game based on the movie right away, making it seem like an hour and a half advertisement, but it was still good.
What’s even better is that the director, Kevin Munroe, purposefully did this so that it would stick to the source material and is in the works for future game adaptations. I never played the game, but what also received good reviews was the movie “Warcraft” obviously based on “World of Warcraft”. There is a future for video game based films, we just need the right people behind the project. So for those of you in doubt about the upcoming “Assassin’s Creed” movie starring Michael Fassbender, there may be hope, so fingers crossed!
