The "Warcraft" movie just came out and it's pretty lousy. Not that the nation was shocked by this revelation. The fact of the matter is that it's going to take a lot of time before films learn how to interpret video games into movies. It took comic books nearly a century before their film adaptations got any good, video games aren't any difference. Films are a story-telling medium first and foremost, unlike video games which use story to add context to interaction. So most stories in video games are really shallow and since films aren't very interactive they can only really capitalize on the shallow aspects of games instead of what makes them enjoyable. Watching a fat guy rescue a useless princess from a turtle isn't nearly as absorbing as taking control the fat guy yourself.
So if you've followed any sort of gaming news in the past year, the video game series Fallout has become insanely popular. Which is good because I freaking love Fallout. I've played all the games, even the lackluster spinoff titles. There'll never be a time in my life where I'm not up for grabbing a rifle and exploring the ruins of a once proud nation. I love Fallout so much that I took a hammer to the face for a Fallout fan series. There are many fan-created movies and web series dedicated to Fallout and with its recent mainstream success it seems like a prime candidate for a really bad film adaptation to be made and released. The head of Bethesda, Todd Howard, says it's possible but has wisely stayed away from offers to make Fallout the movie.
Especially since one was in pre-production in the late '90s. Back in 1998, the company that made and owned Fallout (Interplay Entertainment) came together to create Interplay Films in an attempt to create films based on their own franchises. Franchises like "Redneck Rampage." Thankfully, Interplay Films was smothered in its crib before it could release any films but the only thing to ever come out of it was a film treatment for a Fallout movie. A film treatment is like a pre-script, it summarizes the entirety of the film without the fine details and dialogue found inside a script. What we have here is a bare-bones summary of what could have possibly been a Fallout movie.
The treatment was written by Brent V. Friedman, who was the visionary mastermind behind this beautiful gem. But since the whole thing is merely a treatment instead of a full script we have can only really imagine how awful the final thing would have been. It's full of the things that you would expect in a Fallout movie; super mutants, vaults, and pipboys. But it was written before Fallout 2, so there's no Enclave and strangely no Brotherhood of Steel. If you're not at all familiar with the series, the summary I'm about to give won't make much sense. Not that it'll make much sense even if you have.
The plot follows a guy referred to only as “Hero” and he's described as a “20-something, handsome, restless.” Like a few of the protagonists in the Fallout series, he's spent his life in an underground vault. This vault is an imitation of pre-apocalypse LA, but he's tired of living underground because he wants to go fishing, damn it! Eventually, the Overseer of the vault kicks him, a female cop (tellingly only referred to as “Female”) a technician, and a scholar out of the vault so they can go try to find something to fix their water purifier. Completely under prepared for post nuclear war USA, the technician is killed and the remaining three get mixed up with super mutants and a Mad Max inspired character simply referred to as Max. Max and the (token) Female have an uncomfortable sex scene in which Max describes his early childhood as a slave as foreplay- no really this is written in the document. Eventually, the Master (mutant leader and final boss of the first game) shows up and hell breaks loose. Eventually Hero and Female both learn that there's nothing wrong with the vault's water supply and they were kicked out because they're a bunch of whiny malcontents who might cause a revolt. Also, the Overseer is revealed to be the cause for the apocalypse because he's just so darn cooky. Also, Hero's dad dies in his arms in would have been the most cliche'd scene since Avatar. The scholar is turned into a mutant, Max dies, Female and Hero predictably get together because Hero is just so manly, and they create a new world with a macguffin device and go fishing.
Yeah, it wasn't going to be good. There were other rough drafts but this is the only one to surface onto the internet. The script was never written. It's better this way, I'm not sure Fallout makes for a property that would make a good film adaptation. The only way Fallout would ever make it as a film would be if it was Tarintino'd together from all the post-apocalypse movies that inspired the franchise to begin with. I'd rather beat Fallout 3 again for the seventeenth time.
