EX LUDUS: MOVIES BORN OF GAMES
Anybody remember that golden age (as recent as a mere 10 or so years ago, by some reckonings) when the phrase “media convergence” hadn't yet acquired an outdated, laughable creakiness, rather like the depiction of bricklike 'mobile' phones in 80s-era motion pictures? [I'm riding the information superhighway! ~Ed] Today, you're practically begging for reserved seating on the Special Bus if your creative endeavor doesn't bleed across multiple incarnative lines (The Simpsons Live Action 'The Slashening' Twitter-Feed Video Game by EA Mobile, The Radio Drama ™ –The Musical!).
These days, many gamers feel a special twinge—something hovering between electric, free-floating sexual excitement and a looming sense of impending, protracted projectile-diarrhea—when they learn that a beloved or forthcoming movie franchise is going to become a video game. But there seems to be an added element of risk when the pipes start flowing the other way; when movies are born from video games, the gamer's inner child starts nervously clenching his glutes, thinking: “Now you're touching my DREAMS, buddy.” The obvious question is: Good touch, or bad touch?
It would be pointless (and ultimately, rather depressing) to attempt to slog through a comprehensive list of all the videogame-related movies, great and small, released to date; the truly interested can skip ahead to just such a list—including an even longer one of game-movies in the works—here. There are, however, those notable handfuls of standout movies born from video games, at all levels of quality, that bear mentioning and in some rare cases viewing—the exceptional, the mainstream and entertaining (or at least, mostly harmless) and, of course, the downright miserable. Let's take a peek.
(NOTE: Just imagine, gentle reader, this writer's soul-crushing disappointment upon learning—halfway into the writing of this article—that the title “The Good, the Bad and the Boll” had already been used by another author earlier this year. Just imagine.)
S-RANK CAMPAIGNS: SAVING THE PRINCESS (OR AT LEAST MOST OF HER)
The good news is that, sometimes, the silver-screen universe is a basically decent, happy place, where good things do occasionally happen. Despite some truly valiant early efforts on the part of Hollywood to ruin the practice of translating games to films (see “E-Rank Faceplants,” below), gamers have been bestowed major motion pictures that had their hearts—if not necessarily their special effects or overall thespianism—in the right place:
Mortal Kombat, even with its cinematic pimples and quirks, holds a special place in the hearts of numerous gamers (it's a little like the bespectacled, mousy outsider dork-chick who loses the Coke-bottle glasses, teases her hair out and, in the vernacular, “cleans up nicely” in the third act of an 80s teen comedy). The cinematic MK featured a handful of notable B-list faces, a charming, stubborn inclination to fan-service, and decent (if ironically blood-free) fighting sequences. Plus, it undid—or at least, strived to undo—the disfiguring damage that had already been dealt to the whole games-to-movies thing by the mid-90s, so it deserves a slot in our nominal “best” category. Its 1997 sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, however…
Like it or jam it in a thigh-holster, you can thank the original Lara Croft: Tomb Raider for kicking videogame-centric films squarely into the spotlight of mainstream respectability and—alas, this is a base but unavoidably-important element—box-office success. As Lara Croft, Angelina Jolie certainly nailed the haughty (and hottie), sexy, sophisticated stare-and-slink of the famed, well-toned videogame Indiana Jonesette; even the iffier parts of the movie were incontrovertibly easy on the eyes. As an added post-credits bonus, Tomb Raider meant that a guy could drag his girlfriend to a videogame-centric movie and exit the theater with the reasonably certainty that said GF's next Halloween costume was going to be relatively cheap, marginally functional…and awesome.
Of course, the upper-tier videogame movies to date haven't all been about obvious, broad-appeal action—some films were ready to take some chances and aim a little higher than the boobs-and-guns approach (not that there's anything wrong with that). 2006 saw the long-awaited movie adaptation of Silent Hill—a natural move to celluloid for the already-cinematic game series that redefined so-called 'survival horror, and certainly among the most polished and unorthodox (if also rather murky) of movies born of games. The production values, general acting quality, freaky visuals and fan-service levels were admirably high, and the creators weren't afraid to go for the enigmatic ending (really, could a proper Silent Hill movie have any other kind?) While a fair majority of game-movies often lack a certain critical something (budget, acting, scriptwriting, relevance to subject matter), what flaws there were in Silent Hill were minor by comparison. Indeed, save a smattering of minor missteps—mostly actress Radha Mitchell's bellowing of “Sharon!” seemingly every two minutes, and one or two really unfortunate instances of mood-breaking, unintentional humor—Silent Hill was a great video-game-to-film translation (there's already a second movie on the way, of course; here's hoping that number two isn't, y'know, Number Two).
C- RANK EFFORTS: BUNGLING THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE, FUMBLING THROUGH THE SIDE-QUEST
Greater in number are the borderline cases, the great swathe of also-rans: These are the movies that might not necessarily win the Talent or Swimsuit competitions, but could still sneak in a little Miss Congeniality victory. If there is such a thing as cinematic comfort-food for gamers, these might be some of the dishes of the day.
While the Resident Evil live-action movies went terribly awry in the second and third installments by most accounts, movie-going gamers seem to agree that the first film came closest to the mark: Behind-the-scenes at Umbrella Corp., a nasty female super-computer called The Red Queen that goes all HAL on our asses, a scantily-though-not-nearly-scantily-enough-clad Milla Jovovich, and a death-by-laser sequence that might make the next Cube movie. Resident Evil wobbled from its game-plot roots, but still delivered beer-and-bullets popcorn cinema. (For our hastily-printed GR dollars, we'd still like to see the original Raccoon City mansion fiasco, as depicted in the first Resident Evil game—you know, the one where the franchise was still, um, scary?)
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is still a pretty amazing game-to-movie endeavor to watch. Even if neither you nor the characters on screen seem to have the slightest coherent clue what's going on. Throughout most of the movie. The CGI is jaw-dropping, the endless babbling about Sephiroth and “geostigma” is drool-inducing gibberish to any but the most hardcore Final Fanboys, and it's hard not to continually think of the violent reaming that Mother Physics is taking throughout the pseudo-deep Mayhem With Fights and Motorcycle Chases unfolding onscreen.
Skilled animators and computer render-farms are still a better use of money than a number of so-called A-list celebrities, however—and as we lurch ever closer to the day when we won't need actual flawed, bossy, erratic, egocentric flesh-and-bone likenesses of celebrities anymore (we'll still need their voices…for a while…) it stands to reason that we'll see more exponentially more such fan-service, computer-animation extravaganzas. What serious game-fan doesn't want to drill down to such excesses of game-world environmental detail, given the option?
Films like Advent Children and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within could be (and have been) called little more than 'CGI porn,' which is fair enough (that's coming in force too, by the way, and please keep the pun as our little gift to you, oh reader—but it's also another article, on another site entirely). Some game-worlds are so thoroughly eccentric and downright strange that the cinematic comfort-food of the completely computer-generated motion picture is the only viable way to go. To put it another way: Do you really want to see an old-fashioned, live-action, makeup-and-prosthetics stab at, say, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee? 'Cause I sure as hell don't.
NEXT UP The real stinkers, and games that should be movies. >>
E-RANK FACEPLANTS: HELL HAS A GOOGLEPLEX (AND HERE'S WHAT ON THE MARQUEE)
In case you didn't know this was coming: The lower-quality, missed-opportunity and just flat-out bad movies are, in fact, the largest wedge of the games-to-movie pie graph. It's just the way things are. Let's steel ourselves and gaze into the abyss of some of the more notably-unfortunate outings:
Not even the most ardent breakdancer or Patrick Nagel collector loves everything about the 80s…and with good reason. In another splinter-universe frighteningly close to our own, the 1993 theatrical release of Super Mario Bros. might well have ended it all for would-be viewers of videogame movies—by setting such a disastrous creative and box-office precedent, despite the involvement of some inarguably talented actors. Even Bob “Eddie Valiant” Hoskins and Dennis “Don't You Fuckin' Look at Me” Hopper couldn't begin to save this action-dreckfest, which utterly failed to understand the marvelous, magical, mushroom-intensive world of Mario.
Another significant, unfortunate, eye-crossing kick squaw in the rocks to gamer-filmgoer society—if you accept the general consensus—was 1995's Street Fighter, which at least attempted to give fans of the game their beloved band of brawlers, injected with a little B-list star power. Jean Claude Van Damme as American badass Guile (with a suspiciously Belgian accent) was supposed to be a selling point…which should give the uninitiated their first indication of things going off the rails (the charming Ming-Na as Chun-Li almost made up for some of that…but alas, Street Fighter also represented Raul Julia's last major starring role, a fact that leaves the entire lackluster adaptation with rather an oily-pall stigma). Further, this movie about fighters and fighting, offers (even by mid-90s standards) some of the weakest fighting sequences imaginable. To borrow another handily-effective phrase: It's Just Wrong.
But wrongness—like passionate otaku crushes on carefully-marketed Japanese high-school 'idol-singers' who don't, technically, exist—comes in degrees… and degrees at least imply the existence of some of bordering absolutes. For the games-to-movies endeavor as an industry to go really wrong—we're talking truly, epically, Kathy-Griffin-as-phone-sex-worker wrong—you need more than just a mediocre movie or two. You need more than just a hack writer, or a tasteless producer, or an execreble director (any single one of which does not presuppose a terrible movie); no, you need a myth-figure of cinematic failure, a poster-boy for video-gamer disappointment…and, to surf an accepted Hollywood trope, there can be only one: Enter German director Uwe Boll.
Happily (for our purposes here at least), easily four of the absolute most barrel-bottom, most universally-panned video game movies of all time fall, clumped together, under Uwe Boll's single, convenient aegis. His directorial badness is so legendary at this point that the reader might be tempted to cry out “Oh come on, GR, try a little harder—he's such an obvious, easy target!” Clearer-minded thinkers will, of course, see the denuded forest for the tree-stumps: He's an obvious, easy target precisely because of his legendary directorial badness.
And he just happens to have a 'thing' for movies born of video games. So deal.
The videogamer hive-mind howls in much-documented internet outrage at such Uwe Boll productions as House of the Dead, BloodRayne and Postal, but the greatest blow to game-based movies was certainly Alone in the Dark (which has been labeled on Rotten Tomatoes as “scary for all the wrong reasons,” “bad in original ways,” and “inept on almost every level.”). The eerie polygon-fest PC game that spearheaded the 'survival horror' genre was not only emphatically cinematic, atmospheric and at points genuinely frightening, blocky visuals and all—it was also decidedly Lovecraftian in its tone and subject matter. In terms of movie-fodder, how could it fail?
By the evidence, Uwe Boll found a way—firstly by defenestrating the mannered-and-moody Lovecraftian aspects entirely, secondly by 'crafting' the production as an uninspired dumb-and-gun flick, and thirdly via the unlikely, erratic, casting-triangle of Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff. Widely, tragically adrift from its source material's story and intentions, Alone in the Dark is nevertheless notable as one of gaming cinema's Big Fish that got away.
FANTASY TRACKS: YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES
You show me a video gamer who hasn't used his/her idle mental-time (in line at the DMV, performing a humdrum routine coronary bypass, etc.) conjuring up the game-to-movie projects of their dreams, and I'll show you a liar, and possibly a pervert. Between runs to the liquor store and brainstorming sessions on new and interesting ways to break my laptop and other portable electronics while they're still under warranty, I admit it: I've drifted off into the land of Video Game Movies That Should Be more than a few thousand times, often right while I'm playing the games in question—it's practically a reflex at this point. This is a subject that could easily, easily turn into an article that dwarfs the one you're currently reading..but I'll just leave you with a few choice tidbits.
See you at the movies.
VIDEO GAMES THAT SHOULD BE MOVIES (NOTE: Not limited to franchises and directors still living. Some configurations may conflict with movies previously released or canceled in your local Ur. All Local Paradox Laws apply, and violators may be prosecuted to the fullest extent of existing and/or potential laws. All things serve the Tower.)
FATAL FRAME: Produced, written and directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi, the man who directed Kairo/”Pulse”—the original movie, not that beshitted Hollywood remake). Ghosts, cameras, scared sailor-suited Tokyo girls—and every screwed-up, hackle-raising bit of visual wrongness that modern Japanese survival-horror can serve up.
LEISURE SUIT LARRY: Directed and produced by Todd Phillips. Casting is key, of course, the soundtrack is Vegassed to Harrah's and back, cheesecake cameos run rampant…and if Larry actually manages to get laid in the film, it comes back to haunt him a hundredfold: This one time..? At band camp…?
ALONE IN THE DARK: Starring Ralph Fiennes as Carnby. Lovecraftian arcana required. No shitty heavy-metal music. Directed by Anybody But Uwe. I want my game-movie franchise back, dammit.
FLASHBACK: Yeah, yeah, I know—it's already a movie. Eat me.
ODDWORLD: ABE'S ODDYSEE: No live-action, please.
GRAND THEFT AUTO: Directed by Quentin Tarantino. All the radio stations from the game—I don't care what you have to do, just work 'em in there. Starring, in no particular order, Christian Bale, Samuel Jackson, John Travolta, Benicio Del Toro, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Russell Crowe, Chiaki Kuriyama, Joe Pantoliano, Lawrence Fishburne, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, Peter Stormare, Steve Buscemi, and Daniel Craig.
SILENT HILL 2: As in, the actual plot of the Silent Hill 2 game. In fact, go ahead and make the various 'alternate endings' just like in the game—even the goofy dog and UFO endings–and just randomly seed 'em out to various theaters all around the country—that should mess some people up.
RED ALERT: It'll be Red Dawn done right, overblown nationalistic stereotypes on all sides, outrageous anachronistic war machines, and maybe a few results-of-time-travel snags that would make 12 Monkeys look like a fairly straightforward episode of Clifford the Big Red Dog. Harry Turtledove as alternate-history consultant—if we're going to mess with the timeline, let's get serious.
NEXT UP Just a boring, comprehensive list of all game-based movies ever >>
Released films as of 7/21/2009
The following is a list of films released theatrically at the time of introduction. Some may not have been given worldwide theatrical release:
Super Mario Bros.: Peach-Hime Kyushutsu Dai Sakusen! (July 20, 1986)
Super Mario Bros. (May 28, 1993)
Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture (July 16, 1994)
Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (August 6, 1994)
Double Dragon (November 4, 1994)
Street Fighter (December 23, 1994)
Mortal Kombat (August 18, 1995)
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (November 21, 1997)
Pokémon: The First Movie – Mewtwo Strikes Back (July 18, 1998)
Wing Commander (March 12, 1999)
Pokémon: The Movie 2000 – The Power of One (July 17, 1999)
Pokémon 3: The Movie – Spell of the Unown (July 8, 2000)
Shenmue: The Movie (January 20, 2001)
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (June 15, 2001)
Pokémon 4Ever – Celebi, Voice of the Forest (July 7, 2001)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (July 21, 2001)
Resident Evil (March 15, 2002)
Pokémon Heroes (July 13, 2002)
Pokémon: Jirachi Wishmaker (July 19, 2003)
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (July 25, 2003)
House of the Dead (October 10, 2003)
Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys (July 22, 2004)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (September 10, 2004)
Alone in the Dark (January 28, 2005)
Air (February 5, 2005)
Pokémon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew (July 16, 2005)
Final Fantasy VII Advent Children (September 14, 2005)
Doom (October 21, 2005)
BloodRayne (January 6, 2006)
Forbidden Siren (February 9, 2006)
Silent Hill (April 21, 2006)
Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea (July 15, 2006)
Dead or Alive (September 15, 2006)
DÅbutsu no Mori (Animal Crossing) (December 16, 2006)
Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai (July 14, 2007)
Clannad (September 15, 2007)
BloodRayne II: Deliverance (September 18, 2007)
Resident Evil: Extinction (September 21, 2007)
Hitman (November 21, 2007)
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (January 11, 2008)
OneChanbara (April 26, 2008)
Postal (May 23, 2008)
Pokémon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior (July 19, 2008)
Far Cry (October 2, 2008)
Max Payne (October 16, 2008)
Resident Evil: Degeneration (December 17, 2008)
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (February 27, 2009)
Upcoming releases
Pokémon Diamond & Pearl Platinum the Movie: To the Conquering of Space-Time (July 18, 2009)
Tekken (August 7, 2009)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (May 28, 2010)
The Legend of Spyro 3D (2010)
The King of Fighters (2010)
BloodRayne III: Warhammer (2010)
Clock Tower (2010)
Mortal Kombat: Devastation (2010)
Films in production, pre-production, or TBA
The following alphabetical list consists of titles that are currently in production with no set release date, licensed and canceled, or of unknown status. Some titles may be on-hold for the time being and will resume progression at a later date.
Army of Two
American McGee’s Alice
Area 51
BioShock
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
Citizen Siege
City of Heroes
Dante's Inferno
Dead Space (Live Action Film)
Deus Ex
Devil May Cry
Drift City
Doom 2
Driver
Duke Nukem
Dragon's Lair
Earthworm Jim
EverQuest
Fear Effect
Gears of War
God of War
Halo
Hitman 2
Hunter: The Reckoning
Kane & Lynch
Killzone
Lost Planet
Mass Effect
MechWarrior
Metal Gear Solid
Metroid
Medievil
The Neverhood
Nightmare Creatures
Onimusha
Pac-Man
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Resistance: Fall of Man
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Shadow of the Colossus
Silent Hill 2
Soul Calibur
Spy Hunter
The Elder Scrolls
The Sims
The Suffering
Tomb Raider 3
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
The Unforgettable
World of Warcraft
