How to Make a Great Video Game Movie: Make a Crappy Action Movie
Put a bag on your head, because I'm about to blow your mind with the following two statements. You may rage. You may think I'm an idiot. But I'm right, and that's what's important.
1: Sucker Punch was a nearly perfect video game movie, and the template other video game movies should use.
2: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was the perfect tournament fighter movie, but it wasn't a general video game movie at all.
You're not with me on this. That's fine, because I'm going to explain.
The Akira Movie Will Suck. I Promise.
They should have just used these guys. It would have been less offensive.
I am making an empirical declaration. There is no way in hell the Akira adaptation isn't going to completely and utterly blow. Now I know that many of you had already drawn this conclusion for yourself, but for those of you still holding out hope for this to be good, I am here to crush that feeble belief. What has me so riled up (other than the bastardization of one of Japan's most seminal works)? The plot synopsis (via Bleeding Cool):
Captain America: Fun For Everyone, Great For Comic Fans
Captain America is the definition of mindless and enjoyable, like Thor and Iron Man before it. It's well-paced, full of action, and faithful to its source material. Frankly, it's what we should expect out of most comic book movies. It's not great, but like any other summer action movie it's entertaining enough to watch at least once in the theaters whenever it's on cable. It doesn't try to have the dramatic weight of The Dark Knight or Watchmen, but it doesn't try to. It doesn't have to. It's genre-oriented fun, with little thematic vision beyond what's exactly on the box and a big streak of love for the comic fans. That's what makes it great.
Thor: Stop. Hammertime.
Thor has hit theaters, and another Avenger is ready to be part of Marvel's team in what could be the biggest victory or most spectacular failure in comic book movie history. But I'm not one of the Nords and I can't see the future, so let's instead look at the movie itself.
Off-Topic: Star Trek 6 is the Stupidest Star Trek Movie
For some reason, SyFy (eughhh) has been playing Star Trek movies all week. Last night, I watched Star Trek 6 while playing through Prinny 2: Dawn of Operation Panties on my PSP. Even while pushing through the remarkably unforgiving platforming, I noticed some massive plot holes in the movie that didn't occur to me before.
Every Star Trek movie is stupid. Ridiculous. Insane. But usually the really stupid shit can be handwaved with technobabble. Some radiation stops something from working, some super science project lets something happen, something gets modulated and something else blows up, and so on. Star Trek 6 doesn't bother with that, and because of it the movie had plot holes you could fly a Sovereign-class ship through. Star Trek 5 was boring and Star Trek 10 was a freaking abomination, but Star Trek 6 might be the stupidest movie of the series.
Here's why.
Inception: The Dream: The Movie: The Dream: The Game: The Dream
Variety (via GoNintendo) reports the master filmmaker Christopher Nolan has intentions to spin summer blockbuster Inception into a videogame.
"We are looking at doing is developing a videogame based on the world of the film, which has all kinds of ideas that you can't fit into a feature film," Nolan said. "That's something we've been talking about and are looking at doing long term, in a couple of years." I, for one, would love to see an Inception-based videogame, though I can't even begin to imagine how it would work. Hopefully it won't bend my head like Inception did.
Inception came out only two months ago, and in that time it's made over $250 million domestically and over $750 million worldwide. The timing for a video game might be off, but that's just as well, considering how bad tie-in games tend to be when they're anchored to a release date.
The Definition Of Injustice
[Credit: Box Office Mojo]
Scott Pilgrim is a fantastic movie packed with video game references and worked on many levels. It made $30 million (half of its production budget) in a month and is already out of most theaters.
Machete is a fun, ridiculous action film that developed an Internet cult following due to Robert Rodriguez' fake trailer in Grindhouse. It made $20 million over 10 days.
Resident Evil: Afterlife is a giant piece of crap that doesn't work as an action movie, doesn't work as a horror movie, certainly doesn't work as a video game movie, and has almost nothing to do with the video game series from which it takes its name. It made more than $27 million in its opening weekend.
Not much more can be said.
Resident Evil: Afterlife: They Weren’t Even Trying
[This review has spoilers.]
I'm not a huge Resident Evil fan. I honestly haven't played through any of the games. I enjoyed Paul W.S. Anderson's first movie, and even found Resident Evil: Apocalypse somewhat enjoyable. I have no emotional investment in Capcom's survival horror franchise at all. That said, Resident Evil: Afterlife is the most offensive movie I've seen this year. Oh, it's bad.
It's Wing Commander movie bad.
It's Double Dragon movie bad.
It's Uwe Boll bad.
Friday Flashback: Resident Evil 4
I know Resident Evil 4 is only 5 years old. It still deserves its place as this week's Friday Flashback for a very simple fact: it would be a far, far better purchase than a ticket to see Resident Evil: Afterlife. Currently Amazon has Resident Evil 4 for the Wii 
And yes, a review for that cinematic debacle I witnessed this evening will be coming, very soon.
Blizzard Wants A Starcraft Movie Directed By James Cameron
MTV Multiplayer recently posted a short interview Rob Pardo, the EVP of Game Design over at Blizzard about the progress of the World of WarCraft movie. "We're still super excited about it," he says, "but it's still in that story-development phase."
The World of WarCraft movie is based in the WarCraft universe, the setting of the strategy trilogy and wildly popular MMO. Coming from Legendary Pictures, the movie was first announced in 2006 and Sam Raimi, of Evil Dead and Spider-Man fame, attached to direct last year. Having just released massively critically and financially successful StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, MTV asked if the other Blizzard properties would be coming to the silver screen as well.
"We've always had an interest in seeing our stuff on film or TV," Pardo replied. "It's just tricky to find the right partners. We probably could have made a ['StarCraft'] movie or something on TV years and years ago, but it's really important to us that we find creative people that are really talented but also really excited about our properties. That's always been the challenge for us. I think if Jim Cameron came to us tomorrow and said, 'You want to make a 'StarCraft' movie?' we'd probably sign that ... That's why we did the 'WoW' movie. We were really excited about being involved with Legendary Pictures, who we thought had a really good track record with these sorts of movies that would make sense for our franchises."
It's interesting to note that the WoW film is currently in development hell, with few people actually expecting it to go anywhere. That being said, maybe in a few years people will stop attaching such a stigma to films related to video games. Yes, I'm referring to Scott Pilgrim.
Navigation
Recent Posts
- SMBC Covers Internet Policy Better Than Me
- The Humble Bundle is Back Again, and Now For Android
- Happy Quinceanera, Final Fantasy 7
- Panning Silver: The Wrongo Superman (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #114)
- Bronycon: Bronies and Q Hit the Meadowlands This Summer
Recent Comments
- Doubleself on The Top 5 Sandbox Games
- I_TBAG_U87 on Anatomy of the Rage Quit
- Hosting forums on Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Yes, Deadpool Can Shoryuken (And Why This Is Awesome)
- TheShufflingSkeleton on Get a LittleBigPlanet 2 Beta Key Here!
- Brian on Is Sony Screwing Up the PS Vita? Not Yet. Maybe. Sort of.
