Game Over, Man: Just why are so many video game movies rubbish?

This article began as a review for the latest film adaptation of a successful video game franchise, Prince of Persia, but I quickly became depressed writing about yet another failed attempt at bridging the two mediums. So why are audiences still waiting for a great video game movie? I decided to look at a few key points that film-makers regularly get wrong, and suggest what should be changed in any future adaptations.

1. The story.

The single biggest challenge in adapting most video games is that plot is normally a secondary consideration to the gameplay, or how the game ‘feels’ to play. Naturally as a medium that relies on strong story-telling this is a problem for film, and so writers are required to expand upon the original material. Yet for some reason no adaptation so far has managed to get the balance right, either moving too far away from the source material or staying so close that the film ends up feeling like you are watching someone else play a video game.

Take for example 1993’s Super Mario Bros., a completely non-sensical take on Nintendo’s famous Italian plumber. Virtually ignoring the game’s slight premise of ‘get to the castle, save the princess’, the film features a bizarre parallel universe that New York plumbers Mario and Luigi find themselves transported to. There they find that dinosaurs have evolved to look like Dennis Hopper, and the following hour and a half is a truly miserable piece of cinema. On the other side there is Doom, which has marines shooting monsters in space but little else.

Of course this leads to the theory that it is impossible to transfer video games to the silver screen successfully, but the reality is that most unfilmable projects simply require a film-maker who has a passion for the material and an understanding of what works in film. The Lord of the Rings movies worked not because they put everything from the books on screen, but because certain parts were cut out and changed to suit the needs of a feature film. Interestingly Rings director Peter Jackson was involved in an adaptation of Halo in 2007, before financial difficulties led to the plug being pulled.

With the right screen-writer, a Metal Gear Solid movie could be a complex and exciting action film. With the wrong writer it would be an over-wrought melodrama or a direct-to-dvd spy flick. Start treating the script with respect, and the quality of the end product will shoot up exponentially.

2. The ‘Aliens’ effect

Even a cursory glance at some of the biggest franchises in gaming history will show how closely some video games go to ‘homage’ classic cinema. I call it the Aliens effect because of the influence that James Cameron’s sci-fi classic has had, with everything from Halo to Killzone copying it’s ‘space marines on a mission’ vibe. With so many video games being derivative of more famous movies, when they are translated to the big screen it leads to a feeling of deja vu. Studios need to start looking at more unusual properties that offer something fresh, rather than a regurgitation of what has came before.

3. The target demographic.

Despite exploding into a multi-billion dollar mainstream industry, video games are still perceived as being the play things of nerdy adolescent boys. What this means is that when studios are looking for games to buy the rights for, they target hardcore action games such as Gears of War that inevitably require huge budgets to realise on screen. What this does is greatly increase the risk on the film to perform well at the box-office, and with risk comes less creative freedom. Thus so many video game movies feel like a tick-box of moments designed to look good in a trailer designed to get teenagers through the door. Slow-motion action shot. Gratuitous rear-view almost-nudity of the female lead. Soundtrack by the Prodigy...

Smaller productions would have more creative freedom, and allow video game movies to break free of their current summer action film rut. Ask most gamers what their main memory of Prince of Persia’s story was and they will say the relationship between the Prince and Princess characters, at it’s core it was a love-story. Short-changing this relationship to get to the next action sequence quicker, as happened in the film, may appeal to 11 year old boys but it turns off anyone with a brain in their heads.

Hollywood still has many video game franchises in the pipeline that have the potential to be truly great films (Bioshock in particular springs to mind), but only if studios have the courage to treat the medium with the respect that comic books are currently receiving. The potential for cross-over, with films establishing characters and universes that can then be explored in greater detail via a tie-in game, is incredibly exciting and just waiting for a visionary to realise it. Though please, let’s not have Citizen Kane online anytime soon.