Woodsey said:
I would like to see the person who directs the actors for the games continue to do so, and fucking leave it at that.
IT WILL BE FUCKING SHIT. THEY ALWAYS ARE.
I don't get what it is with people where you can have a 12-hour game, and yet you're all gagging for a 2 hour film that will piss you off in some way or another and is practically guaranteed to be shitty.
First off, not all of them have been. I liked Silent Hill and the first Resident Evil was alright. I'm trying to think of others but I'm drawing a blank on live action.
Thaius said:
More than that, though, I hope another writer comes on who actually has an iota of respect for the source material. That has been the scourge of video game movies for so long; the writers always come on and say, "Yeah, you have your money-making little project there, good job! *pat on the game designer's head* Now we're going to take your fun little game and make something real out of it!" It's patronizing, it's insulting, and it's always, always, led to disappointment. Can we please just have an adaptation of Drake's Fortune now? Of course it won't be as good as the game, because the game is wonderfully interactive in all the ways an action game should be, but it could still be good if we just take the namesake seriously instead of throwing it away like it was made by a little kindergardener with big imagination and no practicality. Just respect the material, guys, and you'll already be a huge step ahead of the other game-based movies.
Second, Uwe Boll once said after he did Bloodrayne that, in all the video game movies that he has made, not once has anyone from the game studios EVER come down to discuss the film. No discussions on characters. No discussion on settings. Nothing. He just gets a brief summary on what the game was about and that was it.
Yes, it would be nice to have a film director research the game. However, if the game studio that owns the property can't be arsed to get involved, then you can't really blame the director if he doesn't really treat the game's story with respect.
Third, sometimes having the game studio doesn't work either. Chris Roberts created the Wing Commander Universe yet, when it came to making a Wing Commander movie......urrgh. Hell, Other M, the first story-heavy game in the Metroid universe, couldn't even get Samus right. If Nintendo can't get one of their flagship characters done right, why would we expect unaffiliated directors who get no cooperation from the game studios and are working with a non-interactive medium to do so?
Fourth, a lot of it is on us as well. I mentioned Silent Hill up above. When Silent Hill was announced and Radha Mitchell was tapped to play the lead (which, for her, is actually kinda slumming it), Silent Hill fans went nuts. You would think that having the lead switch from male to female was the Apocalypse coming. I have long said that game fans are the absolute WORST people to see a movie because they will nitpick EVERY... LITTLE.... thing.
Is the actor's hair parted a different way from the game lead? There's gonna be topics about it.
Did the game lead use a different color key to open a door than was in the movie? There's gonna be topics about it.
Every miniscule detail is gonna be analyzed to a degree that puts Trekkies to shame and, if it doesn't match up, then it's off to the message boards to discuss how an off-green shoulder patch ruined the entire movie.
This leads me to number 5. *Activates flame shield* Y'know what? A lot of the games that have been made into movies don't have a good story in the first place. I'm gonna pick on Doom. I didn't see the movie but I've heard how it was panned. However, I've played the original Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 and the story is non-existent. There is a paper-thin story that says "Hell invades Mars and it's up to you to shoot the demons in the face." If I had to sit through a movie with Doom's plot, I would end up gnawing my own leg off to survive.
Even some of our story heavy games are crap when you analyze them closely. If you look at my collection, you will see that I have many Resident Evil games. But, if I had to watch an accurately portrayed movie on Resident Evil, I would be non-stop bitching about how Umbrella Corporation is portrayed as a cartoonishly dumb and stupidly evil organization. If you read the journal entries that you find in the Umbrella Corporation labs, you will find page after page about people writing about how some of their friends got killed by the giant snake roaming the halls or the CEO just randomly picking people and feeding them to mutant leeches. However, it never occurs to any of these people that, maybe, this is a good reason not to come to work anymore. This is the type of thing that makes me internally hemmorage when I see it in a movie but, in the game, I just kind of shrug it off.
Final point and why I think Advent Children/Resident Evil: Degeneration did it right.
What gamers forget is that a movie that is only accessable to the fanbase will fail. Studios in the U.S. only receive 55% of the gross ticket sales. The rest goes to the theaters and other costs of distribution. (Foreign markets are even worse with most only giving a 5-15% return and many countries not giving a return at all.) That 55% has to recoup all of the expenses of the movie and, depending on the star power attached to the film, may even have to compensate the theaters if it bombs. Even a big franchise like Final Fantasy or Resident Evil does not have the fanbase to make a theatrical release a success. Films released in theaters have to be able to attract people outside the fanbase to succeed. To do that, they have to make the films accessible to people who do not have the slightest clue what the T-virus is.
Enter Advent Children. Advent Children bypassed the massive costs of actors and distribution by making it CGI and putting it direct to DVD. This allowed them to make an FF7 film that directly targeted FF7 fans and didn't have to water anything down or to take up film time explaining who Sephiroth was.
To me, this is the best approach that the game movie industry can take. Bypass the theaters and target the fans directly with a straight to Blu-Ray release. CGI (for game movies) is generally the superior choice because, frankly, we're used to seeing these people in CGI anyway plus certain things like carrying a sword the size of an airplane wing look silly in Live Action anyway. That's why I bought Degeneration. I saw it beforehand and thought it to be meh but I want to support the industry moving in that direction instead of taking a traditional direction that just isn't suited for making movies about games.
