Picture this. 1992 – a hollywood studio pitch meeting for Super Mario Brothers the Movie.
“So, this guy is a plumber?”
“He’s a plumber and so is his brother.”
“And his girlfriend is a princess?”
“Of a magical kingdom, yes.”
“That has dinosaurs?”
“That’s right.”
“But he’s from New York?”
“He can be from New York!”
“So how does he get to this magical dinosaur kingdom?”
“Erm… through the pipes!”
“Pipes? Because he’s a plumber?”
“You’ve got it!”
“Who’s gonna play him?”
“Bob Hoskins!”
I’ve just realised this conversation sounds stranger than the game itself. What we ended up with was a fairly odd, underground, parallel universe world in which dinosaurs had evolved into people and Bob Hoskins trying to… oh, it doesn’t really matter does it? The point is Super Mario Bros the Movie was the first of its kind – a video game turned film that totally managed to remove all the fun between cartridge and cine reel.
That was twenty years ago. Today, there is a long list of successful video games that have been turned into fairly awful movies. But why so? How come there is such an inability to get this kind of thing right? Let’s look at some case studies.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Despite the fact the game is one of the biggest franchises ever. Ultimately, this was just Angelina Jolie in shorts being part Bruce Wayne, part Indiana Jones. That’s not what the game was about. It challenged gamers to solve puzzles in a 3D landscape never seen before in the world of video games. Can such a thrill be captivated whilst sitting in a cinema seat? No.
Street Fighter
This film literally has the late and brilliant, Raul Julia as M. Bison being defibrillated by his own suit. But this is kind of more believable than the wholly american Guile being played by the Muscles from Brussels, Jean Claude Van Damme. The plot has something to do with Bison trying to over throw the leader of a country and become a dictator (of something like that) only to have the U.N. (or something like that) show up full of characters from the game. From fighting competition to this? If Enter the Dragon can be happy being just that, why couldn’t this?
Max Payne
This shouldn’t have even been that difficult. It’s a dark revenge story, it’s already been done a thousand times on screen, yet somehow its one of those few Mark Wahlberg films you wished you hadn’t seen. Demons and weird things falling out of the sky – didn’t make this copy of a copy of Sin City any better. The game gave us bullet time and yet, this film came a decade late for that kind of Matrix-effect. And although it gives the game a real rush, watching people get blown to bits a hundred times slowed down, just gets boring after a while.
The problem with these and their kin is the fun factor. Behind every one of these projects was a hit game – there had to be for them to make a film in the first place. But behind every game were the elements that made them fun, addictive, challenging and memorable. When a game pulls off these elements, they become loved by millions, but it is in then pulling apart these mechanics to make something purely passive that usually ruins them on screen. Gamers have no interest in watching there favourite characters battle bad guys in far away lands. They want to be that character! It’s why they bought the game in the first place.
There are a few exceptions I might add. The first Resident Evil film is good fun – but that’s because it was the first zombie film of this long long wave of zombie films that is now upon us. What good work that film did has now been fairly ruined by the on going sequels that get worse and seem to be less zombie related every time. The Manga Street Fighter 2 film was also a big improvement on the real life version, sticking to the characters background stories and using these to tell a very entertaining story with a great end fight sequence.
And what of the future? Duncan Jones is working on the World of Warcraft movie. How will this hold up with gamers? Will their itch to have free reign over where they go and what quests they take leave this as flat as the long list of movies to come before it?