As the previews came to an end, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. With the exception of Tron: Legacy (being released in December 2010), the cinematic future looked bleak for those of us in love with immersive worlds. As the darkened cinema patrons rustled their snacks in anticipation, the latest video-game adaptation began to play.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a multi-million dollar movie directed by Mike Newell, the same director who scored with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), and backed by Jerry Bruckheimer, the man who adapted a cheesy ride at Disney World called Pirates of the Caribbean into a cinematic franchise that has grossed $2.7B worldwide. Prince of Persia has a good cast, quality stunts, and a requisite amount of CGI. It’s also expected to be the first in a series of action adventures starring the bloke from Brokeback Mountain.
Spoiler Alert: The best thing about this movie is the dodgy Persian entrepreneur operating illegal ostrich races.
As a movie, it is an adequate way to spend two hours if you have nothing more pressing in your life. As an adaptation of a successful video-game, Prince of Persia is another wasted opportunity to successfully merge the genres. It is not overly bad; it’s just not very good.
As a gamer and a film fan, it seems that Hollywood is determined to ensure that my trips to the cinema are destined to be bitter disappointments. It is no coincidence that, as we’ve told you before, many of the worst movies of all time are video-game adaptations.
In 1993, Super Mario Brothers arrived in cinemas, riding on the Yoshi of success that the game had been generating for many years. It starred Bob Hoskins and the late Dennis Hopper and was set in a parallel dimension based in New York. The film is very surreal and almost unwatchable. A year later we were blessed with Street Fighter, a film that managed to loosely adapt the classic game into a story involving a martial arts tournament, genetic manipulation and the quest for world domination. It had Jean Claude Van Damme in it, which should have been enough of a warning.
Stunningly, the case of the game-turned-film has actually got worse.
Here’s the #FAIL recap:
Mortal Kombat, Double Dragon, Resident Evil (of which there have been three), Bloodrayne, Bloodrayne: Deliverance, Doom – with The Rock and Keith Urban — Hitman, Max Payne, Dead or Alive — which managed to fuse the fighting with an inexplicable beach volleyball tournament — House of the Dead, Silent Hill, Alone In The Dark and Far Cry. Even Angelina Jolie failed to make Tomb Raider interesting beyond the first ten minutes, although the appearance of the future James Bond as a rival archeologist was as unexpected as it was pointless.
Later this year, we will be treated to the third Bloodrayne film, the fourth installment of Resident Evil, a straight-to-DVD version of Tekken and in 2011 a cinematic version of Kane & Lynch will pair Bruce Willis with Jamie Foxx. Lost Planet is in development and there are strong rumors that Bioware’s sci-fi odyssey Mass Effect is in the early stages of pre-production.
So why do movie studios continue to release films that are based on games? How many more attempts are we going to have to endure before Hollywood waves the white flag of surrender? Why, when so many media corporations own film studios and game developers, can the synergy be so wrong? If both are intended to be immersive consumer experiences, then why are we so short-changed?
Jon Radoff, the CEO of Disrupter Beam, believes that the differences in linear progression are the reason. Having not seen Prince of Persia, Radoff says: “Generally speaking, movies and games are just different media. Movies are dreamlike and linear (even when the plot is non-linear); games are immersive and non-linear.”
His gaming philosophy has always been based around three pillars – character building, decision making, and story – and he comments that “movies are dominated by storytelling, whereas games are dominated by decision-making. Because of these differences, it’s challenging to recapture the magic of a successful game within a movie, or vice versa”
The unseen difficulties faced by movie studios are one of many reasons that video-game adaptations don’t deliver the goods. Dejobaan’s Ichiro Lambe says: “As a game developer, I’ve often marveled at this. Interactivity often means that the best stories don’t make for the best big-budget video game narratives in the first place.” Warming to his theme, he asks, “ How many AAA games are there where you can exert nuanced control over your character’s emotional development, and have that significantly affect plot? I can’t think of any! Most of the time, you’re aiming a targeting reticle and hitting ‘X.’ That means big, broad strokes of the story brush, with the occasional opportunity to determine whether a sidekick lives or dies.”
If we apply this to the desire by movie studies to appeal to the gaming industry, Lambe believes that “If you tear the interaction out of a game (even one that’s praised for its story), you’ll most often get enough plot for a short story. There’s just not enough meat in there for a film.”
Even those involved in the development of Serious Games understand that video-game adaptations are generally aiming to be nothing more than low-hanging fruit. Mat Williams, from educational software developer ImaginEngine, sees the difference between games and movies as being very simple, saying: “Its sort of like players are mothers and the game is their kid. They’re more forgiving of it and also more emotionally affected by it because their invested in it. Movies are like someone else’s kid, without the investment and connection you’re generally going to not be as affected unless there is something particularly engaging or intriguing about them.”
As gamers, we want to see that the product that we love is being treated fairly and, perhaps, our levels of expectation are raised beyond reasonable limits. Lambe thinks that sometimes the film is a more accurate representation than we think, noting “For Doom, that’s walking into a dark room and shooting at something. For Final Fantasy, that’s leveling your character up. For ooo! ooO! oOO! OOO!, that’s growing a world from your music (assuming anyone does ask us to license the movie rights). These games really don’t resemble stories.”
Williams takes this concept further: “Narratives in games usually leave a lot of space for the player to fill in their own story or character motivations, and these have to be created and explicated in script for movies. Believable, sympathetic characters aren’t easy in the best of films, much less films operating under fairly absurd premises that are unlikely to have the best screenwriters on the project.”
This would certainly make a lot of sense. Films such as Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life and Max Payne operate in a world that fuses the supernatural with the apparently mundane and there is always some shadowy figure manipulating the ‘players’ for their own nefarious ends.
Annoyingly, the worlds of gaming and movies are not the conjoined twins that we all hope them to be, in some ways they are bickering stepbrothers that resent the expectations that the other places on them. When we pay our money at the cinema to see a movie like Prince of Persia, we should expect to be immersed in a cinematic experience over which we have no control and although small elements like plot and dialogue seem to be overlooked, we should try and enjoy what is being presented for our entertainment.
The final word goes to Williams, who thinks that “game movies are generally hampered by a misguided desire to make the movie ‘like a game’ just like comic based movies are generally more successful when they’re not trying to be a comic, so too would game based movies likely be more successful if they weren’t trying to be like games and just tried to be great movies.”
Movie adaptations of graphic novels? That is a discussion for another day.
