Multi-Million Dollar Cutscenes

Has there ever been a good movie based on a video game? Not a commercially successful adaptation (the top spot there would be Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, by the way) but a movie that you can watch – with or without prior knowledge of the source material – and enjoy throughout. The answer you almost certainly had no trouble looking for is “no”.

I’m no film snob, so I like to trust the collective opinion of Rotten Tomatoes, and they’ll be quick to amass reviews and throw a percentage at you. Take the $300million-grossing Tomb Raider movie, for example, which scores 19% on the Tomatometer. For the rare few of you out there who are unfamiliar with fruit scoring systems, this means that the film is bad. But consider that on paper, and at the box office, the film seemed like it could do no wrong. You take the concept of a woman who shoots things while raiding a tomb and lift out a few key scenes and characters from the games and you’ve got a summer action blockbuster to slide right in to your DVD collection along with all those other action/adventure films I haven’t seen. I think one of them had Nicholas Cage in it.

Street Fighter (1994) is actually super funny, but it's not a comedy.

Even cinematic punchline Uwe Boll got his hands on a few easy hits. You could scribble over Night of the Living Dead with a marker and change the name to House of the Dead and nobody would even notice. Being Uwe Boll, of course, he managed to create a movie that didn’t appeal to either zombie fans or House fans (that’s short for House of the Dead, I’m not suggesting for a second that Boll could rope Hugh Laurie in on his antics) and as a result nobody cared about him or his stupid movie. If you crave pain, most of Boll’s video game adaptations can be watched via Lovefilm’s movie streaming service. If you are disturbed enough to check out some of his films, keep it in the back of your mind that somebody, in another time, could have made a good film out of them.

The concepts lying behind video games can often be more interesting and original than those behind movies, so when you see that Tomb Raider or Resident Evil or Doom got signed up for a movie deal, you don’t think twice about it. You might not even think once about seeing it, but you can picture the film in your mind: somebody goes on some sort of adventure, bad guys get done in and the slow-mo action effects lose even more credibility. But not all video games (unless you only own a 360) are about shooting people in the face; some video games don’t even have guns in them at all! Hard to believe, I know, and you do really have to question the sanity of film producers when you read about some of the video games they want to adapt into movies.

One of the very best (or worst, depending on how you look at it,) examples of this is 1993’s Super Mario Bros. movie. When the video games enthusiast thinks of Mario, they most likely think of colourful environments, bouncy music and a guy in red bopping turtles on the head. How it occurred to the three directors behind S.M.B. that Mario should have nothing to do with innocence or fun is beyond the realm of mortal understanding. Despite Mario clearly being a kids’ series, the film was taken as far away from the games as possible till all that was left was a shambling wreck that begged for death. Maybe the idea of a live-action Mario movie was silly (why not make it animated, then?) but how did the moviemakers compensate for the complete lack of anything resembling realism in the Mario games? They beefed it up! They injected it with dark age steroids and turned everything you might associate with Mario into a hulking, sinister mess that brooded in the ever-night. How do you take everybody’s favourite family-friendly plumber and put him in that scenario? How does that even work? The answer is: it doesn’t. The Mario movie bombed like a party at Jon’s house, and it might have had a little something to do with the fact that the movie had almost nothing to do with the Mario games.

Now, Mario is a fine example of how film makers will take a video game idea, throw it out the window, make their own movie and then try to fit the broken remains of the game around it, but at least there was something you could take from Mario and use in your screenplay. God help you if it’s seven feet tall goombas in trench coats, but at least it’s something! It would be pretty difficult to make a movie out of a video game that had no story or characters at all.

Maybe Universal Studios are asking for a challenge, because they recently announced their plans to create a motion picture adaptation of Asteroids. Yes, that Asteroids; the 1979 smash hit arcade game where you control a triangle that shoots little lines at circles. Occasionally a flying saucer comes out. Your typical interest in an Asteroids game wanes after about three minutes, but don’t hold your breath wondering how they’ll stretch that interest out for 90 minutes. There is so little to make of an Asteroids movie that you can’t get the same impression of disbelief or disgust with it like you can watching movie adaptations of video games that actually have stories, characters and scenarios. The best bet with video game movie adaptations is that the more you enjoy the game being adapted, the further away you should stay from the movie. Maybe someday they’ll catch on and stop throwing all their money down a pit.

I’ll leave you now with this vintage issue of Penny Arcade from January 2003.

I think that movie could actually be kind of awesome.