A video game movie that doesn't suck

[Inyarear]

First, I would like to point to an actual novelization of Doom as an example of how one might conceivably make a story out of a video game:

http://lib.ru/INOFANT/DOOM/doom1_knee_deep_in_the_dead-engl.txt

It's not exactly Shakespeare, but you've got to give the author credit for one thing: it's definitely not Uwe Boll!

Concerning the complaint that a video game movie would be just like watching someone else play a video game, I probably should mention that movie critic Ebert had the very same complaint about the Doom movie; he said it was as if someone else had taken the controller away, and wouldn't let you play!

First-person shooters do indeed borrow liberally from horror movies someone has already done, especially zombie movies. That's part of why I suggested getting away from first-person shooters. Doom is potentially interesting only because it isn't strictly a story about zombies, even if it does have some, and it's not just another Alien rip-off, even if it does bear some similarities. The main possibilities that make it a potentially adaptable story are the theological mystery and suspense (as in "Why are they doing this to us?") and the character development that was necessarily absent from the game. Again, see the Doom novel: it gives the lonely space marine Fly a personality, a history, and an ambiguous relationship with a lady marine, played out in flashbacks whenever he finds time to rest from the grisly business of mowing down former comrades. A possible reason why so many video game movies fail is because they don't bother expanding on these things that games' storylines necessarily short-change in order to keep the action going.

Concerning little nods to the gamers such as the discovery of secret passages, the main trick there is to keep them short and sweet. Instead of having the characters (who probably wouldn't even be aware that there are secret passages to be found) go hunting for a secret panel, have a setup in which the lone shooter gets trapped at a dead end right near some famous secret panel, he's running out of ammo--and then suddenly he stumbles against the secret panel, and the wall slides back... The non-gamers in the audience, if you do this right, get to see a fellow in real trouble and feel the suspense of wondering how he's going to get out of this mess. The gamers, meanwhile, get the suspense of going "Come on, Fly, it's right there next to you! Just push that panel!"

Apart from that, occasional winking references to the source material are acceptable, as long as they're not overdone. Remember that scene in the first Spider-man movie where Peter Parker tries to figure out how to get his webs to shoot? "Go Web! Shazam!" That might have gotten pretty tiresome if they'd kept on doing it, but I think that worked in that scene. Likewise, in the X-men, "Well, what should we wear? Yellow spandex?" and "What do they call you? 'Wheels?'" worked pretty well. Referring alternatively to the "Bio-Force Gun" and the "Big F***ing Gun" in Doom is actually one of the things done right there.

Freeper's question about what talented person could be bothered to do such an adaptation is worth asking, but I do notice that Peter Jackson is mentioned as having signed on for making an adaptation of Halo. (I wouldn't try that one, but then I didn't expect his King Kong movie to do so well, so maybe he's got something there.) Furthermore, as mentioned before, comic book companies used to have trouble finding anyone with real talent to adapt their stories into movies too. Someone smarter than the current crop of hack directors is likely to turn up eventually.

Name recognition may sell the movie somewhat, but more than a few gamers are, quite justifiably, taking Freeper's attitude. Why should we continue to feed Uwe Boll and other hacks who give gaming a bad name? You want to win this crowd back, we've got to have a story that's good on its own in addition to being a good adaptation. Maybe adaptors should try working with games where the characters didn't have much personality, and try giving them some, along with a backstory that fills in a lot of gaps and gives us some reason to care about the characters. If you could honestly say things about a movie such as "Hey, I never thought of the sibling rivalry between Billy and Jimmy Lee that way before!" or "You know, that is a good question: what kind of romantic relationships would the robots in Megaman's world have, considering that they don't have any sexual organs?" wouldn't that be entertaining?

[Mofo Rising]

Inyarear Wrote:
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> "You know, that is
> a good question: what kind of romantic
> relationships would the robots in Megaman's world
> have, considering that they don't have any sexual
> organs?"

Obviously you haven't been reading my fanfiction.

All this talk of "nods" to the source material has reminded of a movie that never gets brought up when this subject rolls around.  CLUE.

Sure it's based on a board game, but it should serve as a good example of the adaptability of anything.  You've got the mansion, the characters, the secret passageways... They even included the interchangability of who killed Mr. Body with the alternate endings.

How about a TIME PILOT movie?  That sounds pretty cool.

[dean]

I think the thing that annoys me the most out of some adaptations is that whole 'stick to the source material' thing.  I'm all for innovation and plot development, but if you miss what I feel is the key feature of a game in the movie adaptation then you've essentially failed.

I mean, I enjoyed both Doom and Resident Evil, but to me they are failures because they both fail to live up to my expectations on what should happen in the movie.  Eg. RE is a great trashy zombie film, but in my opinion it ain't what the game was about, that is, not mindless action and more suspense etc.

I guess the thing that really gets to me is the fact that I wouldn't be annoyed if they were made without the name recognition of the game.  But therein lies the problem: would they have been funded if they didn't have that name recognition.  Well probably not...

[Inyarear]

>Obviously you haven't been reading my fanfiction.

Well no, since you mention it, I don't read a lot of fanfiction. I'm sure Megaman fanfiction writers have their own answers to this hypothetical question. The point is, answering questions in the movie that aren't answered in the game allows the director to stick to the source material without being confined to it.

>All this talk of "nods" to the source material has reminded of a movie that never gets brought up >when this subject rolls around. CLUE.
>
>Sure it's based on a board game, but it should serve as a good example of the adaptability of >anything. You've got the mansion, the characters, the secret passageways... They even included >the interchangability of who killed Mr. Body with the alternate endings.

Dungeons and Dragons got made into a movie, and that's a board game. It's my understanding that some vampire role-playing game that's sometimes played as a board game was also made into a TV series. Clue I could see as a TV series, but are you so sure it would make a movie? Every potential story in that game is really a short story. Stretching any of them over an hour and a half, let alone two hours, might be impossible. Then too, alternate endings may be fun for DVDs, but I don't think they'd play well in the theaters.

This is part of my quibble with the idea of making RPGs into movies: when the plot is so open-ended with so many different stories, you can't really fit it into the movie format, which is usually more close-ended and linear and has to stick to one story. Dungeons and Dragons managed to have a workable plot as a movie mainly by nature of the game being a world in which one could set any number of stories rather than being a story in itself. (The flaws that dragged that movie down came from the kind of problems that any movie might face: that the actors didn't bother to do much acting, the characters were annoying, and its low budget tended to show a little too much in places, etc. Of course, it would have helped the movie's makers to have a little more respect for the players and play the story by the game's rules, too.)

One could likewise make movies from Nethack and other dungeon games, but it would be a misnomer to call such movie (for example) "Nethack: The Movie" since no single character's story out of Nethack is the essence of the game. It would make more sense to call a movie based on Nethack "Sisterhood of Athena: A Nethack Movie" just as the Dungeons and Dragons Movie should have been called "Dungeons and Dragons: The Dragon Sceptre" or "The Queen's Thief: A Dungeons and Dragons Movie."

A Clue story... well, again, I think that might make for a decent TV series. The fun of that would be having the same characters star in every episode and maybe even the same story, but having a different ending every time to make the viewer say "Wait a minute! Colonel Mustard is the culprit this time? You mean this isn't a rerun?"

>How about a TIME PILOT movie? That sounds pretty cool.

Yes, if you could get it a plot and a character worth following, I could see that. There has to be some reason for the character to be traveling from one time to the next, but I'm sure someone could flesh that out. There's also the question of how many people would notice that it's a video game movie. I grew up in the Nintendo Era when Atari's line of games had faded from public memory, so Time Pilot (which I had to look up before I even knew what it was) might not have much name recognition anymore.

The games that occur to me as potential candidates for cinematization, of course, mostly come from the old 8-bit Nintendo gray box: The Legend of Zelda, Gauntlet, Ninja Gaiden, River City Ransom, Astyanax, Battletoads, and Double Dragon, to name a few. I also liked Earthbound and Chrono Trigger from the Super Nintendo 16-bit system, though I'm not so sure they'd be so easily given the cinematic treatment.

[Inyarear]

[DPK]

[dean]

Inyarear Wrote:
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>
> The games that occur to me as potential candidates
> for cinematization, of course, mostly come from
> the old 8-bit Nintendo gray box: The Legend of
> Zelda, Gauntlet, Ninja Gaiden, River City Ransom,
> Astyanax, Battletoads, and Double Dragon, to name
> a few. I also liked Earthbound and Chrono Trigger
> from the Super Nintendo 16-bit system, though I'm
> not so sure they'd be so easily given the
> cinematic treatment.

I've heard a lot of rumblings of people wanting a Zelda movie, but having not played the game much I wouldn't know how it would work out.

Also Double Dragon was made into a movie, which I have on DVD.  Sure it's nothing special, but I found it fun enough to warrant a thumbs up rather than a thumbs down.

[ulthar]

Wasn't TRON considered to be a pretty good adaptation of a game to a movie?  What elements are present there that are absent in the newer attempts?

[Fearless Freep]

Wasn't TRON considered to be a pretty good adaptation of a game to a movie?

The movie came frst and then the video game...and that worked because the whole premise of the movie was about being inside a computer system with elements of video games, etc...anyway

[ulthar]

Fearless Freep Wrote:
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> The movie came frst and then the video game...

Ah.  I couldn't remember which came first, but thought I'd throw the dice and try, for once, to look cool.

[AndyC]

Inyarear Wrote:
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> series. Clue I could see as a TV series, but are
> you so sure it would make a movie?

It was a movie, twenty-some years ago. Had Tim Curry, Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan and a bunch of others. Pretty funny. If I recall correctly, the alternate endings went to different theatres. The video shows them all.

The good thing about Clue was that it provided basic characters, a setting, some murder weapons and a bit of structure, but not much of a story. The filmmakers were able to build a nice spoof of whodunnits around these elements. It looked and felt like Clue, but it was also a decent comedy, and a genuine novelty.

That might be the problem with today's video games -- too much story of their own. You either adapt them exactly or build a new story around the basic elements. Either way presents problems. A simpler game, that would allow you to tell your own story, while staying faithful to the source, would work better.

Funny, we complain today that movies based on video games are nothing like the games. I remember when the same complaint could be made about video games based on movies.

[Inyarear]

Notably, adapting movies into video games hasn't worked very well so far either, though Tron was a very good exception. Of course, Tron also didn't do so well at the box office, although it's become a cult hit and made a fair amount on video sales since then. (Another modest movie-to-video-game success came from another box-office-bomb-to-video-success, Willow.) As I recall, the particular game in Tron that got adapted most often was the one with the racing cars that built walls behind them to trap the enemy. My own brother wrote a version of that game on his PC back in the 1980s.

There actually is a Clue movie? Yes, checking the Internet Movie Database, I see that there is:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088930/

It does strike me, from the preview and all the user comments, as the very kind of movie that works best on a DVD: it has numerous endings, any of which could be considered legitimate, and this in 1985! I'm surprised, though, that it actually went to theaters. Does anyone know how it did in the box office?

AndyC does have a very good point: video games with a lot of story might be too confining for adaptation into a movie script. That's part of why those old 8-bit games strike me as some of the better ones for adaptation: they've got stories that are little more than bare-bones outlines of a plot. A competent writer could fill in the gaps with more of a plot, a moral message (not too heavy-handed, mind; Keep It Simple Stupid is the rule to follow here), and lots of character development. After that, an editor could throw in various miscellaneous sight gags, pop-culture references, puns, double entendres, etc.

The problems with the Double Dragon movie, as I see it, mostly came from its immature style. The Double Dragon video game being based on lots of cheesy kung fu flicks, nobody was really expecting high-brow art here, but it could at least have had some of the stuff from those cheesy kung fu flicks that had everybody watching them back in the 1980s. Instead of teens, the Double Dragons should have been twenty-something men just as they appeared to be in the video game. Instead of brothers, they should have been identical twins. Instead of those astoundingly gay-looking costumes, they should have been wearing some more credible martial arts uniforms in darker hues of blue and red. Of course, they should also have both known enough martial arts to look good for the camera. (Scott Wolf didn't.)

Here's what I would have done (in addition to the obvious things mentioned above), had the movie been mine to make:

I would have based the plot mainly on the first Nintendo game, in which Billy was the big hero fighting against his twin brother Jimmy, the villain running the Black Dragon gang which (apparently) runs the city. The opening to the movie would involve a setting up of the romance between Billy and Marion, maybe back in the days before Billy and Jimmy became enemies. In the aftermath of a nuclear blast that destroyed most of the city's inhabitants but managed to leave most of the structures standing (a plot point from the second game), the twins went their separate ways, Billy setting up a dojo to train local citizens how to defend themselves in one of the still-somewhat-civilized quarters of the city; Jimmy, at this time, fought his way up from the ruins into leadership of the violent Black Dragon gang that came to rule one of the otherwise more anarchic sections of the city.

For personal reasons left to be explained at the end, Jimmy sends some of his henchmen to bring him Marion, and they kidnap her right outside the dojo apartment while Billy's out scavenging for groceries. Coming home earlier than expected, Billy sees the thugs fleeing the scene and takes off after them. Fighting ensues as he battles his way through the hordes of thugs sent to stop him, many of them fresh from Black Dragon's new accelerated-cloning vats (which are casually shown to be a kind of technological foundation for the gang's metropolitan empire.)

Meanwhile, Jimmy renews his acquaintance with Marion along with his rivalry with Billy for her affections. She's not so happy about being kidnapped, but he tries to make it up to her by insisting that he didn't really authorize his henchmen to beat her up as much as they did, and giving her a tour of his gang's technological empire, which he insists serves the admirable purpose of rebuilding civilization. He also sets her up in a comfortable apartment and tells his henchmen to bring him his twin brother alive, authorizing the use of knives and dynamite only as it becomes obvious that Billy is too tough and clever for mere brawling and blunt weapons to bring him down.

As for Billy, he keeps interrogating the various gang leaders he meets (and beats) with the same basic questions: who do you work for, and where is he? Little by little, he finds his way through city warehouses and reforested country estates on the outskirts of the city to his brother's underground residential complex and throne room in a former crypt. There, Jimmy throws everything he's got at him, including his right-hand man Machine Gun Willy, who has orders to shoot to disable--Jimmy still wants Billy alive.

Finally Jimmy comes out and fights Billy himself, in a scene involving a lot of back-and-forth dialogue to go with the physical battle which has Jimmy insisting that he only wants what's best for everybody and Billy insisting that Jimmy's authoritarian methods are not really the best way of rebuilding civilization. Their argument ultimately gets personal as it turns to Marion, and how Jimmy wants her for himself, or at least someone like her: he makes an entirely credible offer to clone her so that the twins can each have a girlfriend and, ultimately, a wife. He insists that Billy is throwing away a chance at a very good deal for them all. Billy counters with a kind of individualistic argument that diversity and uniqueness are still very important to humanity, and that made-to-order people would be a blight on human liberty and dignity.

In the end, neither Billy nor Jimmy can persuade each other, and Billy prevails only physically, knocking his brother out. Finding Marion in her comfortable apartment, he embraces her and they go home together. In the final scene, after a happy homecoming, Billy gazes wistfully out his apartment window at the streets below, while Jimmy, recovered from the beating Billy gave him, sits on his underground throne looking very lonely in the solitude of his underground lair. Each brother then quietly vows to persuade the other to his own point of view the next time they meet.

See how this goes? The script follows what little story there was in the NES game almost religiously, right down to the part about why the enemy thugs are all copies of the same few guys. There's a message of sorts--kind of a pro-individualist moral which, while it doesn't condemn the clones themselves (Billy and Jimmy being natural "clones" themselves after all), does condemn the rather utopian purposes some scientists have in pursuing human cloning. There's plenty of opportunity for character development (which the director had better not allow to go to waste or--so help me--he's fired!), and if you're not into all that deep philosophical stuff, you still get plenty of cheap thrills from watching Billy beat the crap out of hordes of thugs with his advanced martial arts in a post-apocalyptic setting. It even leaves open the possibility of a sequel (based, of course, on the video game's sequel). What more could you want?

[Mofo Rising]

For those of you who have been waiting for a good video game to movie adaptation, you're prayers have been answered.

Dead or Alive

Is this a joke?  No, really.  Is this a joke?

[Mr_Vindictive]

Mofo,

No, it's not a joke.  It's 100% real.  Now I enjoyed the DOA games, but this looks awful.

[Inyarear]

I believe this is what we call a "dick flick" where I live. Dead Or Alive? Try "Dead On Arrival" for the real title of that movie. What little I know of the game comes from this:

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/censorship.html

In the words of the writer (Wong):

3. Most games do appeal to the worst in us.

Or, more specifically, the worst in teenage boys. Can any of us deny that game makers profit from the hormone-driven urge to define manhood through violence? Do you think the makers of the Dead or Alive series know a thing or two about how to tap into sexual frustration in young males?

Look at how her boobs jiggle when she gets kicked in the face! Girls are even hotter when they're in pain!

So in the course of defending the right of game makers to express themselves through their art, let's not pretend there's anything redeeming about a whole lot of the games they make. And let's leave room for people to express their freedom of speech by calling such games "worthless s**t."

[Inyarear]

Much as I'm in favor of pretty women being in games and movies in general, I also agree with this point from Wong's Gamers' Manifesto:

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/manifesto.html

Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless. They have money. They like doing fun things. And yet, how do you think they feel when they play a game where the heroine looks like this:

Yeah, that's what she wears into battle. Thong-length kimono, no bra for those flopping DDD breasts.

And this is years after analysts told developers that women would happily play games if they didn't feel so objectified by them, and several decades past the point where they should have even needed to be told that. Have you guys ever met a woman? Then why don't you try making just a few games that don't play off of a 14 year-old male's idea of womanhood on the apparent hope that he'll play the game one-handed?