Adaptations

The list of Video Game adaptations that is provided on Wikipedia makes for some interesting reading:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games

The percentage of positive reviews each movie has received, as collected by Rotten Tomatoes (an online film review aggregator) is also shown. Not one of the internationally released films receives a mark above 50%, with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within coming off the best at 44%. Most sit well below 30%. Even if you don’t put much stock into reviews, or think that there may be a general bias against video game adaptations in the movie industry, I think most would agree that these films are not brilliant.  

I watched the Tekken movie a little while ago with a few friends and several beers, which seems to be the best way to watch such films. I didn’t think it was too bad as a piece of entertainment, and the production was quite good, but the plot was a mess. I got the feeling that the producer’s attitude was that the fans will flock as long as the film was 'okay'. As it turns out, it was a miserable failure.

In its review of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, Empire magazine made this observation: “And after years of wondering why Hollywood can’t ever quite succeed in making a decent video game adaptation, Scott Pilgrim appears to confirm what Crank and the like had already suggested: it’s entirely possible to make a video game movie, as long as you don’t bother basing it on a game.” Scott Pigrim, itself an adaptation of the graphic novel series, was full of reverence for video games and gamers; personally, I geeked-out when a recurring theme from Nintendo’s Zelda series of games appeared on the soundtrack. Perhaps the Empire reviewer is right in his resignation, and it is somehow not possible to make a good video game adaptation.

I thought of a few reasons why this might be. Maybe the problem lies in the fleshing out of characters that were never intended to be much more than avatars in the first place. But then, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was pretty good, and that was based on a Disney ride! Perhaps the writers and producers who make these films don’t really ‘get’ the games they adapt, i.e. they aren’t gamers. They are filmmakers, professionals that follow a kind of template when making movies. In trying to make games ‘fit’ these templates, something that the games were never meant to do, the films end up as a kind of movie-game hybrid that just doesn’t work.

At any rate, I don’t actually think it is impossible to make a really good film based on a video game. I’m just not holding my breath.