Why Video Game Movies Are Awful — 3 Possibilities
The video-game-based movie Rampage has been in theaters for nearly a month and the verdict is in — video game movies are still terrible.
They’re terrible, just, truly, unabashedly bad movies. A toxic subgenre of failure and despair.
To give a little perspective on things, here’s a table:
Only one video game movie, Rampage, has broken 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and Warcraft takes the lead on IMDB with 6.9.
This group’s Rotten Tomatoes average is 19.1 percent, and IMDB is infinitely more generous giving these video game movies an average of 5 out of 10.
Also known as an F.
Of course, numbers never properly reflect real horrors. Here are a few choice quotes from critics over the years:
Maybe the only people who can explain this flick’s nonsensical plotline are those who squandered their youth mastering the Atari video game on which it’s based.
Chuck Wilson, L.A. Weekly
Alone in the Dark
Dwayne Johnson takes on jumbo, aggressive, mutated creatures in an epic cheesefest featuring a silverback gorilla named George who flips the bird at The Rock. Wrong target, George. It’s the movie that deserves the finger.
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Rampage
A baby hatches out of an egg? I apparently missed that entire part when I played a Mario game.
Andre Meadows, Black Nerd Comedy
Super Mario Bros.
But video game movies are just as mysterious as they are terrible.
Why do studios still make them? And why do actors abuse their reputations by appearing in them?
Hollywood has successfully adapted stage-plays, books, even theme park rides into movies — so why are video games so hard?
Possibility #1: Video Games just have bad stories
Video games entrall people with gameplay. We like the characters because we’re playing them, and we like the settings because we’re in them. The story isn’t designed to captivate by itself, it’s there to support the gameplay — and so it isn’t good enough to stand on its own.
Breakdown the first Super Mario Bros game for the NES into its storytelling components. We should, even though that’s more effort than the Super Mario Bros movie creators ever made.
Characters: There’s an Italian plumber, who wears red, and his twin brother in green. There’s a villain, a turtle/dinosaur/dragon thing that spits fireballs. And there’s a princess to save, and a host of hard-to-identify comical monsters.
Setting: You’ve got some pipes and castles, an upper world and an underground world. And there are always vast chasms to fall into, and a fiery castle in the end.
Conflict: I think that turtle/dinosaur/dragon is going to eats the princess? In any case, she’s in trouble and needs saving.
Plot Devices: Mushrooms make you big, flowers make you spit fireballs.
That leaves a lot of holes for the writers and director to fill in, and they do, but the game itself quickly becomes a burden.
They’re telling the story, but they also have to check the boxes to make sure it’s still Super Mario Bros. They have to include mushrooms, and dinosaurs, and a princess while matching the nostalgia and feelings of a game mostly about jumping on things.
It becomes too much of a restraint, and the game never gives the most important components of a story.
We never know why Mario has to save that princess and massacre those weird mushroom/penis monsters. His motives are a mystery, as are the motives of all other game characters.
Because, really, the motive is just to beat the game. As a result, even games with developed stories and characters are fundamentally flawed and psychologically superficial.
Why did I kill that man?
To get more experience and points.
…But…
Video games do have good stories, even great stories.
There’s nothing psychologically shallow about the characters in Final Fantasy games, and their motivations are well understood. Likewise, the Grim Fandango features a beautiful story spanning a 4-year journey through a complex depiction of the land of the dead.
Sometimes, the story comes first, and gameplay second — like Life is Strange.
Maybe it’s really that filmmakers are failing to choose the right games, rather than an inherent lack of story.
Remember, the original Rampage has no story at all, just three monsters having a good time. And if you play the NES version with two players, you can always continue and never die.
Terrible psychological stakes for a movie.
Possibility #2: It’s all Germany’s fault
One man is responsible for a large chunk of the video game movie subgenre, Uwe Boll.
The German filmmaker is notorious for his video game movies, which critics almost universally hate. Many of the worst-rated features in the list above of Boll’s films (Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, Postal, Farcry). He’s also made many sequels to video game movies that aren’t really worth mentioning on the table.
But it’s not just Uwe Boll to blame, it’s Germany in general.
Boll’s films are special, not just for being terrible, but also for being very unprofitable, so unprofitable that even studios would have to notice.
Uwe claims that he self-financed his films,with Nazi gold, but other reports like this, and this, and this say Boll was using German loopholes to turn his movies into tax shelters. That way, even if they didn’t make money, investors would still avoid enough tax to make money for themselves.
Germans designed the tax breaks to bolster German film and German culture against Hollywood, but instead they cemented a bad filmmaker in a genre that will never recover.
Uwe’s movies were so bad, for so long, that they have come to represent the video game movie genre in general, poisoning it, and setting a tone of failure from which video game movies will never recover.
…But…
Uwe Boll was hardly the first filmmaker to take on a video game adaptation. The Super Mario Bros movie came out in 1993, a decade before Boll’s first video game film, House of the Dead.
And if we’re really talking about setting a low bar, 1994’s Double Dragon is as effortlessly terrible as anything Boll ever made.
And those German tax laws were adjusted, saving the country’s reputation as a place where bad things never ever happen.
Shortly thereafter, Uwe Boll stopped making movies, I’m sure for totally unrelated reasons.
But now, roughly a decade after Boll’s last film, and studios are still making bad video game movies.
Is it a homage?
In truth, one man, no matter how prolific in one genre, cannot be held responsible.
Possibility #3: The right people are not stepping up
Did Dwayne Johnson really play the original NES Rampage in preparation for his role as some guy who hangs out with giant monsters? Did he grab the naked woman in the shower? Did he complete all 50 states to arrive at a cripplingly disappointing “congratulations” screen?
And if he did all that stuff, did he really get it?
To make a good movie from a game, you need to be passionate about games. And movie people are movie people, not game people.
The same is true for the writers and directors. How can you recreate the feelings gamers had when playing the game, if you never felt that yourself?
I’m not saying that the directors, writers and actors creating these movies weren’t talented. In fact, some of Hollywood’s greatest players have appeared throughout the video game movie genre including Angelina Jolie (Tomb Raider), Jake Gyllenhaal (Prince of Persia), Dennis Hopper (Super Mario Bros.), Michael Clarke Duncan (Street Fighter: The Story of Chun-Li), and, of course, Dwayne Johnson (Doom, Rampage).
Tara Reid (Alone in the Dark), Freddie Prince Jr. (Wing Commander), and Christian Slater (Alone in the Dark) did video game movies too.
But I strongly suspect that the filmmakers are not avid gamers, and so the process is working backwards.
Good films are made when talented folks have a great story to tell, and so they write a script and try to make it.
Video game movies start with an executive who sees an established fanbase ripe for exploitation. They see the commercial potential, and so they recruit writers to tell a story that no one is thrilled about.
It doesn’t need to be good. People will simply remember that they liked playing Super Mario Bros or Doom and they’ll go to the theaters to see it. And once their butts are in the chairs, it’s too late.
That’s why despite being panned by critics, the movies listed in that table made roughly $2.165 billion in profits (domestic box office minus budgets) over the last 25 years. That’s $2.221 billion if you remove Uwe Boll’s movies.
That’s also why they often choose games without compelling stories — because they just don’t care, they don’t have to.
The last possibility makes the most sense to me, but I don’t despair in the face of a commercial movie industry.
Instead, I have hope, because it’s just a matter of time before a video game movie messiah comes to save audiences from mediocrity. Or maybe they’ve already arrived.
J.J. Abrams has hinted at the possiblity of a Portal 2 and/or Half-Life film.
Yes, we’ve been waiting on a big announcement from Abrams for over 2 years now.
And yes, just because it’s Abrams doesn’t mean it’ll be good.
Afterall, Portal has a huge, exploitable fanbase. Far more than Rampage. And they will buy tickets no matter what.
Yet, my faith remains, overpowering my reasoning and the painful memories of video game movies past.
A great video game movie will come in time.
It must.
And until then, we can endless marvel at an even greater mystery — the boardgame-based movie genre. Because no one will ever be able to explain the movie Battleship, nor its $300 million box office.
- Note: This article is about movies that have been adapted from video games, not movies like Wreck-it-Ralph or Ready Player One, which are about video games nor movies that serve as sequels to video games like Final Fantasy Advent Children.
