Hollywood’s struggle with video game adaptations is a baffling, cyclical ordeal
Why can’t studios crack the puzzle?
Elizabeth: See? Not stars, they’re doors.
Booker: Doors to?
Elizabeth: To everywhere. All that’s left is the choosing.
The above exchange is from the final level of the video game, Bioshock: Infinite, as Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth discover the lighthouses, the million million worlds, and the revelations of who both of them truly are. Below is the entire video of that final sequence that’s worth checking out.
Bioshock: Infinite features one of the deepest and thought provoking narratives in all of gaming. A multilayered rumination of loss, regret, power, the rise and fall of utopia, class struggle, and the nature of chance and fate. There’s so much to unpack, so many levels of interpretation to mine and elucidate upon. The story plays with time and alternative realities in a way that deepens the theme and the narrative instead of simply being used as a gimmick. It’s a story that wouldn’t be out of place on film or television, and yet because of the unique immersion that video games allow the power of the story is amplified because in a sense, it is you, the player uncovering the secrets of your past. It becomes more engrossing and enthralling, and emotionally more involving.
It’s a story that would most likely lose so much in translation to film. The nuance, the robust exploration of it’s themes that are so essential to the overall experience instead of a rudimentary add-on, the intelligence and willingness to challenge the player and/or viewer.
There have been rumblings of a Bioshock movie for years — though at the moment it seems dead in the water. Development has also occurred for games like Splinter Cell, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, The Last of Us, Call of Duty, Minecraft, Watch Dogs, and a slew of others. Most look like they won’t see the light of day, to the relief of most fans.
A lot of that has to do with the perception, or most likely fact, that Hollywood at large hasn’t figured out how to crack the code when it comes to video game adaptations — both critically and commercially. Every few years they take a stab at, and every time they come up embarrassingly short. The past littered with failures like Prince of Persia, Assassins Creed, Need for Speed, Warcraft, Doom, Hitman, Max Payne and Super Mario Bros. On Rotten Tomatoes, it’s an absolute bloodbath, the most well reviewed of the bunch being this year’s reboot of Tomb Raider…at 49%.
The box office side is barely any better.
Not pretty. It’s littered with DOA franchise starters (apart from the cockroach that is the Resident Evil series), A-list productions masquerading as schlock B-movies, ghastly misfires, and a tonne of direct-to-DVD/streaming movies that are basically made for tax incentives. There hasn’t been one film that’s put the…I suppose we can call it a genre, on the map. It hasn’t had it’s Tim Burton Batman or Richard Donner Superman moment where you believed a man could fly, or a man dressed as a bat takes on a crazy clown criminal. Or acquired the legitimacy like X-Men, Spider-Man or Batman Begins did for the superhero/comic book film.
More often than not, video game adaptations crumple due to a myriad of factors. The makers can’t figure out the tone, or they disregard most of, if not all of what made the source material work so well, or get the wrong people on the job, studio interference, being terribly risk-averse. That being said, these issues aren’t unique to video game films, but somehow no one has been able to make something that takes it to the next level of appreciation and popularity.
As it looks like Hollywood has come back to the top of the order, we’ve had over the last year or so a number of somewhat serious attempts at injecting the genre with a semblance of respectability. 2016’s Assassin’s Creed was a complete trainwreck — overwrought, self-serious while being utterly ridiculous that was almost ambitious in its craziness, zombie-like performances and a convoluted plot that had not one bit of self-awareness. It bombed in every sense of the word. There was Duncan Jone’s colossal disappointment, Warcraft, which is ostensibly the the highest grossing video game adaptation ever (thanks China) but cratered everywhere else. The surprisingly passable, stupid and relatively successful Resident Evil franchise — that has little to know connective story tissue to any of the games, had its final film released last year. And this year has revealed to us the aforementioned Tomb Raider reboot, which is at least encouragingly coherent — something that most video game films fail at achieving.
In spurts, Tomb Raider is a fun movie, at times it’s becomes viscerally compelling and intense, with Alicia Vikander as a winning Lara Croft, a tremendously physical performance that is heavily indebted to the recent video game iteration of the character. Scaling back the overt sexualisation of her previous, cartoonish versions, creating a stronger backstory and a more relatable compulsion. She’s not a cliched wet dream but finally, more human.
But each frame feels ultimately irrelevant with it’s passing and the story is mired in plenty of flat, open spaces where it has no idea where to go. A lightness of touch is missing from it. As much as it might have lingered in its shadow, taking more than a few pages from any Indiana Jones film would have given it even more spark. As it is, there’s hints of a much better movie hidden in the margins of it, helped along by Vikander’s committed performance that would have possibly caressed memorable status if it wasn’t stuck in stoically mediocre film. It’s made barely a blip on the box office radar, it’s been mostly a collective shrug when it comes to audience and critical reaction. It’s still infected with whatever debilitating disease waylay every video game film.
Many blockbuster video games rehash and recycle elements from blockbuster films. Sequences, plot lines, spectacle, characters, music, dialogue. It’s a mishmash of tropes and fireworks that can often feel devoid of stakes, at best sending you a rush of giddy thrills before dropping off a cliff of relevancy. On the others side, a lot of blockbuster films of recent vintage fall into the trap of being a flood of CGI that wouldn’t look out of place as videogame cutscenes, the line becoming increasingly blurry. The new Pacific Rim: Uprising is practically an arcade game writ large — giant robots fighting giant monsters with a forgettable plot and characters intruding every now and then to remind us that there is some kind of narrative arc required to get from one skyscraper beatdown sequence to the next.
Video games give you the feeling that you’re inside an event. The hero, the god like figure. The crux of the universe. Every decision you make influences and directs the story. No matter how great a film is, it cannot achieve that sort of thing, it’s not designed to. So to simply transfer the semblance of a video game to film is already being crushed by the 8-ball. Experiencing and witnessing are completely different things. The audience has already played a much more engrossing version of the movie in the comfort of their own home, you’re going to need more than a half-hearted effort of an adaptation to get them to be interested.
Where success for arrives come in the form of movies that play up the unique aspects of video games, because it gives the filmmakers a chance to experiment and harness the power of imagination and inventiveness to create something that’s refreshing and entertaining, that’s not beholden to the source material. A film like Edge of Tomorrow ingeniously uses the respawn element that is fused into the DNA of gaming as a way to advance and develop the story — as well as creating fantastic, fun sequences of Tom Cruise repeatedly dying, working on so many different levels. It also helps that both Cruise and Emily Blunt are absolutely compelling characters to follow throughout.
Or the kinda-sequel and/or reboot, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle that had no right to be as enjoyable and endearing as it was, but since it starred Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (along with Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black playing against type in one way or another) it was duty bound to be humongously successful. A pure distillation of form, star power and the right and respectable of nostalgia, with an encouraging message of acceptance and learning to be a better person. It’s smart and stupid, but the stupid parts are played smartly, poking fun at video game tropes like — character strengths/weaknesses, NPC’s, scripted sequences, hero moments and boss battles.
Tron, it’s sequel Tron: Legacy and Wreck-It Ralph flaunt and embrace differing aspects of games, games design and history, along with a hell of an injection of nostalgia, and while they’re by no means perfect, they once more achieved relative levels of success. The knowledge that they’re in a game, or part of a game, adds to the films, and creates a playground for filmmakers to explore. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is essentially a bright, loud love letter to arcade video games, weaving those elements into the narrative and character arc.
So maybe it’s not about making movies based on specific video games, but making movies that play on how people experience video games. Utilising those aspects that make video games unique in ways that can’t be replicated on film. For some reason, studios and creators strip down what makes a video game great — narratively or otherwise — and grab the stupidest parts of it, further keeping the genre from obtaining any sort of legitimacy. Take a risk, be bold and respectful to the source material, but don’t be afraid to strike out in a refreshing tone. If such a powerful story can be told in Bioshock: Infinite, there’s no reason why a story at that level, based on a video game, can be transported, successfully, to the movies.
