Well after my last post went on about Uwe Boll I thought I would be a good idea to go back to discussing game-to-film adaptations, and to keep this post interesting I'm going to do my best to avoid discussing Uwe Boll and his films, as that would quite frankly be to easy. I only have two things I have to say about Uwe Boll, the first being that I now very much hate online petitions. While the petition for Uwe Boll to stop directing is still gathering signature, a reasonable number of the signatures have been submitted by people posing under false names and using the petition as some form of rubbish comment system. Boll has seen this apparently and I wouldn't be surprised if he decides to dismiss the petition because of this. Well it's probably his plan dismiss the petition anyway, it does raise a question of how anyone could take these sort of online petitions seriously if they're going to have people filling them with rubbish.
At the same time though Uwe Boll is continuing to live up to my view of him being a Ed Wood like director with a wild testosterone problem. In a recent video on YouTube Uwe Boll decided to send one of his boxing challenges to director Michael Bay after Bay, in response to Boll's previous video, said he didn't really care about Boll and his movies. Now when Boll every so often talks about people who hate his films he does bring good point of asking why should these people about his films? They can quite easily just ignore his films, but instead they have to make huge complaints about his films on various website. A point that I do feel is quite valid. But for some reason when Michael Bay says he doesn't care about Uwe Boll and his films, it's some how different to a Uwe Boll hater deciding he won't care about his films. Uwe Boll, you are clearly one crazy delusional bastard.
But when you think about it a bit, and stop focusing only on Uwe Boll as being what's wrong with game-to-film adaptations. Ignore Uwe Boll's film for a while and you'll notice that all other game-to-film adaptations haven't faired that well ever. Just look at Resident Evil, a film I regard as the closes we've got to a good game-to-film adaptations and it only gets a 33% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. So lets get back to discussing what it is that is wrong with game-to-film adaptations.
Rather than pointing the finger straight away at the studios I thought spend a bit of time thinking about game story. Just think for a moment of how many games you've played that have good, decent stories to them. When you think about it you'll probably discover their actually isn't that much in good game stories. Now spend a bit more time thinking and try to work out how many of those games would make good films. What you should be left with now, if anything is a small handful of games. You see while games stories have been getting better over the years, the most important element of any game is still playability. If story was to be more important than playability then online games like World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress would be duds, but seeing as heap of people play them and they don't have any form of fixed storyline to them, I think it's fair to say that story really doesn't matter.
Then when you do have a game that has a good storyline, you have another problem as usually when you have a game with a good storyline, that story is usually built to work with the game environment. Take for example the Half-Life series. One of the most popular things about this series is it's story, as you play Gordon Freeman, a scientist from a secret research facility known as Black Mesa. While working on an experiment at the facility Gordon manages to open an inter-dimensional rift that sees earth become part of a large dimensional battle (well that's the best I can abbreviate it down to). The series involves what could be considered as sort of interactive cut scene in that you don't get taken away from controlling you're character and that games first person perspective during the scenes where the other characters go through discussing what's going on what you need to do.
This works well for the game but would not be good for a film, especially since Gordon is silent during most of this and doesn't have much choice in what to do. So really all how would do in the film is just run around with a crowbar, taking orders from various people and pick up Alyx Vance via the power of stare. All of a sudden a character that people have come to love a action scientist version of them, has become some form of creepy silent freak who actually manages to pull a hotter chick via the creepiest manner possible. Does that sound like a potentially successful film to you.
Though there is some suggestion that the original game story probably won't get that much attention during the production process anyway. Sometime back id Software decided to redo their Doom idea and produce Doom 3 (the game is titled as a sequel but is more of a reboot). Doom 3 gave the doom franchise a better look with better scares and a better storyline, about a lone space marine who must fight his way through zombies and demons that have taken over a science base on Mars via a mysterious teleportation technology being developed and tested on the base. This new Doom became so popular it got the attention of Hollywood.
Sometime later a film is released based on the game and while it did bare the name Doom and some of the look of the game along with some of the demons, and a similar Mars base setting, the similarities end there. Instead of being about a lone marine, the film followed a Marine squad who have to fight through a base full demons from not a teleportation experiment but rather a DNA based experiment. But the biggest the film makes is the fact that it is more of a action film than a horror film. One of the major things about Doom 3 is that it manages to be more of a horror based than it's predecessors. But for some reason the makes of the Doom movie felt a more action approach would be better. Now I'm not saying Doom 3's storyline is one of the best ever, but it still would have been good for a reasonable film. But no matter how good a story maybe it's still likely to get ignored by the filmmakers anyway.
Which brings me to Max Payne. For ages now I've thought that Max Payne would be the best game to base a film on, with it's story of an undercover detective who has lost everything and now finds himself being framed for the murder of his partner, so now in one night he decides to try and find who is responsible for pretty much everything wrong in his life. For a while now Fox Studios have had the right to this game and now they are actually producing it with Mark Wahlberg playing the role of Max Payne. Sounds good, doesn't it. But then I decided to do a bit more digging and I discovered that for the role of Mona Sax, a female assassin who actually appeared rather briefly in the first game, they've hired Mila Kunis from That 70's Show and Family Guy where she does the voice of Meg. And then for the role of Deputy Police Chief Jim Bravura, it is rumoured they have selected rapper Ludacris. Add to this the fact that the plot outline to this film on IMDb seems to suggest to me a that the Mona Sax character will have a more prominent role in this film than she did in the game, and you got what sounds like a potentially bad game-to-film adaptation.
So if Max Payne is now likely to become another addition to the pile of lower grade adaptations, is their any hope for game-to-film adaptation? I would like to imagine so, but I'm not holding my breath. What this area needs is less people coming in only interested in current following and sales figures of the games out their and the potential audience their film could get from that. What we need more of are directors and produces you decide to pick up a game-to-film adaptation project because they are actually interested in the story, characters, and setting, and are capable of working out what really would be best to base a movie on. but that dream may be a long way away.
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