Video game movies, when will they stop sucking?!

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Permalink Reply by Solid Snake (a.k.a. Jack) on November 3, 2009 at 5:49pm

The new PoP looks shite imo. MGS would make a good movie as long as A LOT of pointless shit is cut out. No 30 minute scenes of one character explaining backstory please Kojima? K thanks. I don't think the 2001 Final Fantasy movie was that bad it was just very cliche and had nothing to do with the games, I think it is possible to adapt one of the games to film but most of them are just too long, I mean how do you condense FF7 into 2 hours? Probably by cutting out a lot of the detail that made the game's story great. If one were to be adapted this way I would have to say 10 would be the most suitable (also one of my favourites). I want pixar to make a sonic the hedgehog movie!

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Permalink Reply by Butters on November 3, 2009 at 9:10pm

when i get to write and direct them

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Permalink Reply by mulcahytricky on November 4, 2009 at 10:35am

Probably never. I mean, they only make these things because it's a near guarantee that they'll make allot of money from it. That's never a good start.

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Permalink Reply by Luke on November 4, 2009 at 2:48pm

Not all of them are shit, I actually liked Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Slient Hill

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Permalink Reply by Andrew on November 4, 2009 at 3:07pm

Didn't like Tomb Raider but I did like Silent Hill as well as the first and second RE's. Tron was also hilariously good.

...I was talking about this with my English Professor and he said that he thought Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within was a good movie...seriously?

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Permalink Reply by 28daveslater on November 4, 2009 at 5:50pm

If you didn't know anything about Final Fantasy I could see how he could maybe think that... maybe

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Permalink Reply by Brett Mogilski on November 4, 2009 at 4:40pm

Video games now a days are so advanced and so movie like in nature that moving them to the bigscreen whether it be live action or animated makes them difficult to translate into something that is original material while at the same time pleasing the original fan base. Games them-self are an art and deserve to be treated as such some games would be done a great injustice by making them into a film, such as the Half-life series or Legend of Zelda. If you look at a game like Uncharted 2 it basicly is a movie which you play through. Although obscure games which could have a breakoff film based from the source material often don't have enough of a fanbase or would take a huge commitment from the producers in order to create. Basicly what im trying to say is leave video game movies alone... they never please the fans of the game and never reach those who weren't fans in the first place.

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Permalink Reply by ProtoEva00 on November 4, 2009 at 7:46pm

Video Games Movies are cursed, expect every VGM to suck hard core, until we get at least one to break the cycle. So far, the next one that has a smidgen of hope may be Warcraft, but no breath holding.
As for, there never being a good VGM, well, I have to disagree.

I'll defend this one as decent, and yes, has as much to do with FF universe as any of the games do to each other, but again, cursed, I mean it bankrupt Square.

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Permalink Reply by MDS on November 4, 2009 at 11:48pm

When will we finally see that "Masterpiece adapted from Video Games"? Well, honestly we will never see it in theaters. There are too many factors AGAINST them working in movie-format.

1) Too many Games steal (Sorry, pay homage) to movies as it is. Because of this, it's hard for a VG-based movie to appear anything BUT a copy of a prior movie.

2) Too many Games require you (The player) to advance the "Storyline used in the game". When you take that control out of your (the player's) hands, and put it into someone else's hands it gets boring. If you doubt this, I DARE you to sit through 2 hours of watching another person playing a game and NOT saying a word about what to do, or where to go, or where the enemies are.

3) The genres of games themselves. Many of you are expecting some form of "Masterpiece" from Halo. Really? Why? Haven't we already sort of gotten the "Halo Masterpiece" years ago with Aliens? Don't we sort of see the Covenant's side with Predator? The Flood? Or, you mean Alien-Predator based ZOMBIES? We've SEEN those already. The RPG? Don't they all sort of follow the same concept? Dwarf/Human/Elf gather together to defeat bad magician/dragon? (Even LoTR boils down to that single thought.) First Person Shooters? Oh, you mean all the OTHER WAR movies already made? The "Post-Apocalypse" RPG? We've already GOT those movies with Mad Max, Road Warrior, Escape from New York, and hundreds of OTHER movies. See where I'm going here? All the "Great Game Ideas" were probably already done YEARS before as a movie..... Case in point.

Now, having pointed those 3 things out, and not all the things against a VG-based movie, here's how to make a "Masterpiece happen".

You take a Video-Game, and turn it into a SERIES.... preferably at least as many episodes as there are missions/levels in the game. This way, we can SLOWLY build the character up, as it happens in the game. Plus, we can then spend some "Spare time" working with the characters having to DEAL WITH the events of the prior episodes, and how it effects them personally, and others around them. We can see additional characters (Party-members) having time to develop as well. However, the DRAWBACK to making VG-based Series, is that they'll simply go step-by-step of the game itself and add nothing original.

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Permalink Reply by 28daveslater on November 5, 2009 at 8:15am

well I'll give it a go. can't promiss to win you over but hear me out. first of all I agree, people seem to think that I love video game movies this could not be further from the truth also I'm not justifying the making of these films they'll get made no matter what me or anyone else says. I also agree with this TV show idea which others have brought up earlier and I think that'd be a step in the right direction, they're doing that with halo I beleive.
now on to the halo movie. many, including myself, see halo as the film that might break the mold because microsoft is behind it, unlike nintendo and the mario movie for example, and they won't let the film be anything less than what it should be, fuckin epic, hence y it's taking them like 4 years to shoot it. now I don't own a 360, at least not since it died, and I'm not an xbox fan boy, ps3 is better, but that everyone uses the same argument that all this has been done before to wit I say.

SIMPSONS DID IT! SIMPSONS DID IT!

nowa days nearly everythings been done already if you deny a game movie just because the plot is unoriginal then you are denying all unoriginal movies and some of them can be the best movies of all time, according to kanye west. the point is that ideas change and can be improved opon as time goes by. By this I mean, and I'm not using a very good example here but it's all I could think of, how Akira Kurosawa's, my fav director btw, movie plots where adapted for westerns.

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Permalink Reply by MDS on November 4, 2009 at 11:56pm

Here you go, just look at this. Then honestly answer this single question:

Has there ever been a VG-based movie that was truly faithful to the VG?

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Permalink Reply by AcE! on November 5, 2009 at 8:49am

I agree that videogame movies are pretty much pointless, but it's not really fair to take the entire library of one director and make the list longer by use of his films. Uwe Boll is one example of the wrong approach. He demonstrates that wrong approach several times, but it's still misleading to say each of one person's failure is a mark against the entire subgenre.

But like you said, almost every videogame ever made already has an equivalent in the world of cinema. Any sort of game like Doom is just going to be Die Hard with ________ instead of terrorists.

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