Recipe for DestructionJune 4th, 2008 by Leslie
Del.icio.us | Digg | Technorati | Reddit | Stumble Upon
Many of us have dreams of the silver screen. And according to Uwe Boll, Simon West, and Corey Yuen, our favorite video game characters do, too.
Unfortunately most of the currently available video game-to-film adaptations have been worth neither our time nor our money.
Maybe it’s because Cloud, Lara, Rayne, or Ayane, for example, were just simply too green in the performing world. As far as I know, Cloud came too early in the Final Fantasy franchise to have experienced acting lessons through the Tantalus Troupe, and Croft certainly fails to strike me as the type to truly enjoy “faking it”.
But I digress…
I wouldn’t be particularly miffed if the fascination with this genre died out completely.
The problem? These movies typically use the brand name, several characters and their slight personalities from the original game, a few scenarios, and then change everything else.
Why is this bad? It’s really not. For the producers, anyway.
Think of a pretty genius recipe for a yummy, freshly baked marketing cookie. Or, an accidentally noxious chemical explosion reminiscent of your high school science lab days.
However you want to look at it works for me. Both can be pretty cool if experienced just right! This can apply itself to the literature-to-film genre as well.
You see, video game players usually have quite good taste in entertainment. We also form very loyal followings to our favorite franchises. Plus, anyone who would reject the movie based on its gaming origins won’t actually recognize the brand by its name and would watch it anyway if the trailers intrigued them. What a great beginning!
So, let’s get cooking
1) Pre-heat your Oven of Destruction to 666 degrees in preparation.
2) Start by stealing a title for your masterpiece – the Brand Name. This is where our loyalty is tied. And when everyone eats it up and then barfs because of it, they’ll of course need to tell the doctor the name of the snake that bit them. Anti-venom procedures, you know.
3) Make things feel more legitimate on the surface by throwing in a hefty amount of well-known and favored Character Names, sans personality (see 4, below).
4) Spice the “flavor” up by featuring a pinch, and I stress a pinch, of their famous Moves, Lines, or Personality Quirks.
5) Add a coloring agent for distraction. The Yellow No.6, so to speak, called the Game’s Original World and Plot to make the recipe catchy. Be sure use this sparingly! It’s simply for aesthetics.
6) Completely ignore the rest of the video game, and whisk in Unrelated Elements popular culture has, well, popularized in the best-selling blockbusters of the last two decades.
Bake well. Concoction is finished when fork comes out clean. Clean and free of its spokes because, well, your creation is now corrosive to flesh, metal, and even consciousness. Superb.
Satire aside, all of this isn’t to say these movies are completely worthless to everyone. I do find myself watching some games-gone-film, and enjoying a small few regardless.
Resident Evil is a favorite franchise of mine that packed many of the above ingredients into its movies. The brand name, great stylistic approach, and lots of substance-lacking action revolving around characters that may or may not have existed in the canon. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it for the mindless action, and the cast of actors.
And I like zombies, those are pretty cool.
I also watched the Dead or Alive movie several times because everyone and everything was quite beautiful, from the people and their fashions to the scenery about them.
The coming movie based on the Warcraft lore, I predict, will probably follow this “recipe”. Will I see it anyway? Probably. Blizzard is bloody amazing with its short cinematics, and I’m interested in seeing if they can carry that talent out into a feature-length film.
But I could most certainly do without it.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I was wondering when you guys were going to write the mandatory “Uwe Boll sucks” article. It had to come some time, this IS a gaming blog after all. I think it is a rule that you have to bash him at least a once
I agree that Resident Evil is probably the best video game adaption out there. I liked it a lot, but I watched the first movie before I had played any Resident Evil, so I don’t really know how faithful it was. Plus, Amelia Something-ovich kicks major ass.
I still want my Zelda movie that IGN promised me
June 4th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Be careful what you wish for. Cartoon adaptations of Zelda in the 80ies were atrocious. Sure, it had Zelda, Link and Ganon, but Link’s personality was completely butchered. Instead of the altruistic do-gooder we’ve know and love, he was a teenage brat with an attitude problem.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Man, anyone sane who cares for their fellows of the species will bash Uwe Boll for his accumulated atrocities committed. That aside, this was mostly a comedic dig at the general premise I see in most of these films- not necessarily targeting anyone in particular.
That April Fools Zelda trailer was hawt, for sure. But as Shalkis said, there’s a history of a total distortion of Link’s personality that I’d be horrified to see again! Oh, horror!
June 4th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
That is the problem with a Zelda movie, Link never fucking says anything! He is too bad-ass for speech.
Regardless, I would see it no matter how terrible it was, and I would love it. The cartoons only butchered it because it was the freaking 80’s, and nothing good came from that era, besides speed metal.
I forgot to mention that there is a petition making its way through the webz, asking for Uwe Boll to cease and desist from ruining anymore good games. It has about 100+ thousand signatures already, and Uwe Boll himself said that if it reached a mil, he would seriously consider resigning. Google “Stop Mr. Uwe Boll” and do your gamer community a BIG favor.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:07 am
This post sums up what I think about the petition: http://angryrobot.ca/2008/04/07/stop-uwe-boll-petition
Great effort, though.
I think the only game movie I’ve seen that seemed like it really cared about its origin’s premise was the first Pokemon movie. Hmm, it’s been years since I saw that, though…
June 5th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were two movies that I felt did the original video games justice.
Just compare them to Bob Hoskins as Mario, or JC van Damme and Kylie Mynogue in Mortal Kombat.
Lets face it, when you are turning a video game like Doom into a film, there really isn’t a lot of background material to deal with. I would challenge anyone to come with the a decent script for that sort of film.
June 5th, 2008 at 7:02 am
It is to my deep shame that despite total agreement on the Zelda cartoon, even in the eighties when it was out, I watched it every single day and currently have it on DVD. Sometimes I watch it in the dead of night when no one is around, or when my best friend and I have enjoyed too many refreshing adult beverages. I looked forward to every Friday when it was Zelda instead of Mario Brothers. Hi, my name is Alison, and I’m a member of Zelda Fangirls Anonymous.
But seriously: ahmahgahd, why did they make that characterization choice? It was a mystery to me when I first read about it in Nintendo Power, and they explained it by saying Zelda was five years older than Link, which… okay, and I’m not going to say real teenagers AREN’T brats like that sometimes, but hello, that’s why we call it a fantasy escape, we don’t want it to be like actual life. We, you know. Live that. The choice just baffled me, especially when the comic that ran in Nintendo Power based on the SNES Zelda was SO TOTALLY AWESOME, proving that you CAN give Link lines without making him a moron. (The Metroid one was pretty good too, and Samus had purple hair. Apparently she was going through her no one understands me and I’m going to be a bounty hunter pirate phase.) The OOT and MM mangas likewise succeeded on this, and also answered the burning question I had re: who pierced Link’s ears. (Oh, YOU WERE THINKING IT TOO, man pulls the sword out of the stone and wakes up seven years later with pierced ears, I WOULD THINK HE WOULD WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED.)
I enjoyed the Resident Evil movie and the sequel, because my friends and I decided there were really only two things we wanted from it. We wanted Jill Valentine to whine and also kick ass, bonus points if she did so at the same time, and we wanted the villian to employ a rocket launcher. Both of these things occurred, therefore it was awesome.
However, the same friends and I willingly and knowingly went to see Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, so our taste in modern cinema is highly suspect, if not hysterically bad.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Vlad - Your comment thus begs the question of “Why even make a relatively background-free game like Doom into a movie?”
The answer is in the post. It starts with the Brand Name.
June 5th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Allison E FTW.. that comment made me laugh out loud.. which baffled my supervisors since I’m at work =P
I could be easily amused or that was just so funny
XD
June 5th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
ZOMG Alison owns! I didn’t know there was an SNES comic for zelda. I need to consult the internet immediately.
June 5th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Excellent prognosis for the evolution of the “video game to silver screen” recipe. It seriously is spot on for every gaming movie I have ever seen. I didn’t even realize it until you said it, but step # 4 was so true, I actually wept blood (not tears, ’cause I’m a guy, and crying blood is amazing).
If a director is going to make a video game movie, then he should have the entire movie be BASED off the game. Why did the Street Fighter Movie have absolutely no haidukens by Ryu or Ken? Oh well, at least Advent Children did manage to feature almost every one of Cloud’s seven limit breaks from the game.
Much love gaming girls. Keep it up.
June 5th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
zomg. My boyfriend wants to get a triforce tattoo on his butt.
Because, if you tell someone you’ve got a triforce tattoo — obviously… they ask to see it.
/ slightly offsubjectness
June 5th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
OMG I just found out, like two days ago, 200 hundred people walked out of a free showing of Uwe Bolls “Postal” because, get this, He showed terrorists crashing into the world trade center. That is just wrong. I hated him mostly for the fact of the shitty movies, but he is evidently a giant asshole too.
June 5th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Bakemonky - Crying blood? Certainly does not sound comfortable! Step 4 is where all the coolest trailers usually get you… “Oh that was my favorite move in the game and they put it in o m g!” etc. Advent Children actually didn’t do too badly, at least from what I could gather - I hated FF7 with a passion and repressed most of my memories of playing the game. :\
June 5th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Demo–
I told her to mention that, but she didn’t. I mean it made me sick. It’s not the 9/11 shit, either, it’s that he DID it to be more infamous
June 5th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Yeah, I didn’t feel like expounding upon that particular subject because it is what you said - a testimony to Uwe Boll and his blatant ego and narcissism. The less anyone mentions of his intentionally terrible escapades the better, especially of that particular topic.