The Column of the Movie of the Game.

 You can’t blame people for not predicting the future accurately. For every correct insight, there’s a “Space: 1999” and Harold Camping assuring us of the apocalypse.
 Still, I doubt anybody 20 years ago would have guessed that, in the year 2012, we STILL haven’t had a decent videogame movie.
 It’s gone past the point of conversation and into the realms of parody. It’s accepted wisdom, far and wide - films based on video games are shit, and so are games based on films.* It’s the drunk Irishman of the digital era; a lazy, accepted stereotype that hacky internet writers can fall back on.**
 Although it’s contentious, most people seem to agree that the best video game adaptation so far was “Mortal Kombat.” Which was shite. Although in fairness, the makers of “Mortal Kombat” offered a role to Jean Claude Van Damme, and he turned it down to go and make “Street Fighter: The Movie”, which was painfully, infinitely worse.
 We’ve grown so numb to the phenomenon that nobody is actually thinking to question it anymore.
 Movie studios don‘t care because, depressingly, they’re still making money. Whilst it might be true that the average studio head is a fat, aging white man who doesn’t understand any part of modern culture in anything other than a rudimentary sense, he still knows he can green light “Resident Evil: Tedium” and see a return on it.
 The fact that the public still goes to see awful game movies doesn’t address the fundamental question of why they’re so awful, though.
 Luckily, there are sites like this to answer that question.
 The biggest problem, as has always been the case with gamers, is to get things taken seriously. It’s been a long, uphill struggle, but it’s fair to say that these days, anyone under 40 knows that gamers aren’t desperate, lonely virgins huddled in a cave somewhere. Movie studios, however, aren’t known for their down-with-the-kids attitude, or even for a passing awareness of the modern world. Every time Hollywood attempts to jump on a technological bandwagon, they miss and fall face-first into the dusty manure that the cutting-edge horses of the zeitgeist have left behind.
 “You’ve Got Mail” earns points for making a movie about e-mail at around the same time that most households were becoming familiar with the medium - and also being the last time everybody didn’t hate Meg Ryan - but it still took film studios nearly a decade after that to find out about MSN messenger. When they did, they cast Halle Berry and Bruce Willis in a movie about people so stupid they read their IM conversations out loud as they happened. (Y’know. Like we all do.)
 So it’s fair to say that Hollywood isn’t up to speed on it’s tech, and it’s only dimly aware of video games as “those things that keep stealing our profits.”
 We can count studios out of the race to find someone who can make a decent game movie.
 But what about the creative side of things? Surely, there are writers, directors and actors who appreciate gaming enough to come together on a collaborative effort and adapt a beloved property into something worthwhile?
 This is the other end of the problem: gamers know nothing about making movies.
 The people who make movies are aware of what it takes, and the majority of non-movie people only think they know what would make for a good film.
 Take the most obvious, slam-dunk example in history: Resident Evil. A game that sold huge numbers, had better reviews than Scarlett Johanson’s buttocks and had an entire, movie-like plot BUILT INTO THE GAME. How could they possibly screw that adaptation up?
 Well, they scrapped the plot from the game and gave Milla Jovovich everything she asked for - a valuable lesson about the benefits of giving a director unlimited access to your vagina.
 Fans were outraged. Jovovich’s character, Alice, was a wearying bit-part player in the original game, and in the movie she’s the star? The mansion of horrors now has an evil, HAL-like robot controlling it? No other characters from the game are even mentioned?! Why?!
 Here’s why: The original Resident Evil didn’t have a good enough plot to sustain a movie. And neither does any other game, before or since.
 It’s a hard truth to face, but think about it: How much of what you remember being Resident Evil’s plot (the mansion, the trapped rescue team, the zombies) is dealt with in the first ten minutes of gameplay?
 And how much of the rest of Resident Evil was spent wandering the same few hallways, looking for keys?
 I’m not knocking the game; it was revolutionary in its time, but the point is that video game plots FEEL a lot more coherent than they are because we mentally edit out all the plodding, in-between bits. A lot of what people think are plot points in games aren’t even really plot points; they’re set-pieces, designed to stick in the mind. From a script perspective, when your most important story arc is “explosions”, you’re on shaky ground.
 Even modern, open-world games wouldn’t necessarily make for good movies. “Red Dead Redemption”, for example, had a long, sprawling plot that could in theory be adapted for the screen, except that without the slow-burn effect that riding a horse for ten hours of side quests has, it would feel rushed and disjointed. Cowboy gets shot, Cowboy recovers, Cowboy goes to Mexico for some reason and wins the revolution, Cowboy comes home, Cowboy accomplishes his original goal, Cowboy gets shot again. It doesn’t exactly flow.
 Even with some tinkering, the bare bones of the story - the former outlaw forced to hunt his old gang, the death of the old west, the indelibility of sin, the value of loyalty - have all been done to death in other western movies that the game itself was based on.
 All of this, incidentally, ignores the fact that the games being cited are the best examples; the ones most easily filmed. A lot of games are deliberately light on plot so that we can just pick them up and play them. Can anyone picture an accurate screen version of, say, Tekken? And don’t flood the comments section with rants abut the backstory of the characters, because most people only play those games for the face-punching, the way god and programmers intended.
 (Also: Please don’t flood the comments section with “OMG dey flimed Tekken LOL!” because I know about that movie, and try very very hard to pretend I don’t.)
 Games that are fun don’t need deep plots. I’ve played all the way through “Lost Planet 2” and at no point did I have any idea what was going on, except that I had a machine gun and there were lots of aliens attacking me. That was enough to keep me entertained for hours.
 As for the awful subgenre of "games based on movies," everybody already knows the story. The game is released as a tie-in with the film, and is cobbled together as fast as possible by the lowest bidder. This is the same as it's been for thirty fucking years.
 Every so often, the planets align and someone brings out a game that is both fun AND well written, well acted and emotionally engaging. These games give us hope that one day, someone will succeed in the not-impossible task of making a really good movie based on a really good game.
 The simple fact remains, however, that games and film are two very different mediums - one of them is based on the passive enjoyment of other peoples’ work, and the other takes audience participation as it’s lifeblood. The point of a game is playing, and the point of a film is watching.
 So, at least for now, if you want to see a good film, go and watch one, and if you want to play a good game, make sure it’s not based on a film.



*Mostly. “Wolverine: Origins” was a much better game than the film it was based on.

**And how!