The Trouble With: Video Games and Movies

Video games and movies have never made good bedfellows. Think about it. Any time you see a game based on a movie, you only buy it because you like the movie, and then the game itself ends up sucking balls and then you realize it was just a slapped together attempt at grabbing even more of your cash.

 Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between. This one is from over a decade ago.

The relationship doesn't work well in vise versa, either. Any time a studio tries to take a video game and adapt it to the big screen, it usually ends up sucking hard.

Again, exceptions, but this was still over ten years ago. Since then, our video game movies have mostly just been
(Ben Kingsley is revealed as the villain halfway through? Jumpback!)
(Do people actually see these movies? They keep making them)
(You forgot about this one, didn't you?)
In recent years, the number of movie video games seems to have dwindled to almost none, but the number of video game movies, or at least attempt at making movies, has skyrocketed. In recent years, Hollywood has 'confirmed' several movie projects that have all gone nowhere. The most famous of them being

Splinter Cell starring Tom Hardy
Assassins Creed starring Michael Fassbender
Bioshock directed by Gore Verbinski
Halo produced (maybe directed) by Peter Jackson
Uncharted starring Mark Wahlberg

All of these projects were anounced at least two years ago and nothing has happened with them since.

So the question has to be asked: Should video games and movie be intertwined? Rather let's break it down into two questions

1. Should video games be made based off of movies?
The answer to that is yes and no. No, they should not be directly made off of the movie that has been released. Yes, they can make video games that tie-in to the movies.

Take all of the Star Wars related games for example. Of all of the Star Wars games that have been made, very few of them were straight up adaptations of the movies. Their more successful games have all been spin-offs or other stories told within the universe.



This one is a fan favorite not only as a game but as a story, and it takes place hundreds of years before any of the movies take place.

This puts you in the shoes of a soldier fighting the major battles of the series, and you get to choose if you want to play the level as a rebel or a stormtrooper.

 

Both kickass games. Criminally underrated.

Star Wars isn't the only franchise to do this. The Alien and Predator franchises have done similar games that are not necessarily based on any movie, but still tie in and are sometimes canon to the films. You can still make games that have a movie property tied to them, but they don't have to be the exact movie itself. The Alien and Star Wars franchises, being that they are science fiction, have a rich lore and expanded universe that fans want to see, they don't want to live through the events of the movie all over again, they can do that just by watching the movie over and over. It's the opportunity to explore the universe outside of what we saw in the movies that draws us to games like Knights of the Old Republic or Alien: Isolation. And more importantly, it gives fans the opportunity to branch out and create their own stories because lord knows every Star Wars fan ever has fantasized about being a Jedi or a bounty hunter.

Should movies be made from video games?

My answer is a definite hell no. For starters, video games have always had a history of making shitty movies. Thanks in no small part to hack german director Uwe Boll, but we'll get to him another time. Video games don't translate well into movies. In the older days it was because the story was too simple or because the studio wanted to add their own touches to it and we end up with shit like this
(No, you didn't read that wrong, they really got Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper)

Nowadays, it's because the games that they want to make into movies already have a cinematic feeling to them. The movie made itself, and then it gave the audience control of what happens in the story. Not only that but the games also added in an element of choice to the controllable character. The majority of the popularity behind games like Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed and Bioshock is giving the characters control over parts of the game. Do we go with route A or route B? Do we spare this person or kill them? A lot of times these options have a huge impact on how the rest of the story goes, and can change the ending in a big way. How would a studio adapt something like that into a movie? What if they adapted the more sympathetic progression of the Bioshock story and the happier ending even though some fans liked the alternate, more darker ending better?

Bioshock is one of those games that has been stuck in movie development purgatory for years. Whatever director that they get, they keep telling them to make the movie PG-13. If you have played even a minute of the Bioshock games you'd know that it simply isn't possible. Apart from being a survival horror and an FPS, the game also deals with some pretty heavy themes that would almost certainly be overlooked in a movie adaptation. It has an element of social commentary about how good people can be driven to do insane things through coercion, desperation and greed. And the things some of the inhabitants of Rapture and Columbia do is pretty fucked up. Columbia still believes in racism and has images of Lincoln as Satan. It would be one of those situations where critics wouldn't get behind the harsh nature and audiences would be thrown for a loop at what they saw. The only people who would get behind it are the fans.

How about a game like Mass Effect or Skyrim? With those games, everything is determined by the player. It almost feels like the player is the one writing the game.

In these regards, the games themselves are far superior to any movie hollywood could fart out because whatever route the story of the movie would take would just be one of a dozen ways things could go, and every fan watching it would think "That's not how I would have done it".

Bottom Line: Movies don't necessarily need video games, and video games need movies even less.