The future of video game movies

I recently read an article by Devin Faraci on BadassDigest.com, where he suggested that we could be on the cusp of finally seeing a good film based on a video game. To my mind he seemed overly optimistic and I have to say I'm not sure the two examples given there will lead to great movies. Splinter Cell especially, the mere announcement of Tom Hardy as Sam Fisher didn't particularly inspire me. Okay so the games have the potential to make either a good action blockbuster or a taut thriller but one good actor doesn't really make a film. Certainly when I heard that the Prince of Persia movie was going to feature Jake Gylenhall and Ben Kingsley I thought they were good choices but it was still fairly disappointing.

It got me thinking about what has been the best adaptation so far but looking at a list of films based on video games, I think I'd forgotten how universally terrible they've been. Even though it scores the best in terms of Rotten Tomatoes ratings, I wouldn't really count 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within' among the rest as it's essentially an original story. You're then left in the rather embarrassing position of having Resident Evil and Dead or Alive joint third after the Prince of Persia film. I'd probably be among the first to mock Paul W. S. Anderson's efforts but sadly on a personal level, I actually kind of enjoyed his take on Mortal Kombat back in the day - as a straight adaptation of a game it's probably the most accurate. Given that I wouldn't really rate anything on that list very highly, it feels like the old comic book movies that Devin describes have nothing on games to be honest, where even before breakout hits like X-Men and Spiderman, there were at least reasonably rated adaptations of its leading franchises in Superman and Batman.

So I would say we're really waiting for our first passable game adaptation, rather than being in a situation where plenty of great films are suddenly going to appear. I think an Assassin's Creed film has potential, though but it will take something special to make a truly memorable film. My first thought is that with Michael Fassbender on board, he should play both Altair and Desmond (and Ezio if he comes into it). I really liked how the first few games basically used the same model with a few tweaks for each ancestral character, relying on the voice acting to differentiate them. It made you wonder whether what you saw was totally historically accurate or if it was coloured by the person using it, even if the real reason for doing this was probably just to cut modelling time. I was a little disappointed that the developers seemed to bottle it and start making major changes to the character models in Revelations, at the same time severing this perceived link to the past.

Having the same actor play multiple roles would be a nice nod to its video game roots (and their frequent re-using of assets), while at the same time being a challenge that most actors would relish. It's something that has also been done recently in the Wachowski's take on Cloud Atlas (perhaps stealing some thunder from this idea). I think that there would need to be a bit more depth to the characters of Altair and Desmond though, to either distinguish them or to draw parallels between them more clearly. I've always thought that the games never really clicked with me until Ezio was introduced, giving someone whose journey you actually want to follow.

As mentioned in Devin's article, when translating from game to movie it's important to remember the different strengths that each medium has and I think another way of making the distinction between the two media would be to change how the Animus system works. Since films are missing the aspect of interaction it could focus more on the visual aspects and have the past memories be like a film within a film. Make it more clear that when in the Animus the subject has to be an actor and put in a convincing performance, not just be a passive observer of the action. That would really work well with the concept of real life and virtual reality becoming blurred as you spend more time in the system (a little like Avatar perhaps).

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself in thinking of things to make it a truly great film but I think it's important to aim high, rather than end up with just another passable attempt. Overall I think that Assassin's Creed shows promise because it has a lot of good ideas that could be adapted but that I'm not overly precious about the story, so a film could tread its own path - in fact if the film ended up slavishly following the plot of the games it's probably guaranteed to put me off. The same is probably true of other games that I wouldn't mind seeing as films - Halo is one example where I thought that the combination of the religious zealotry of its alien antagonists, its 'rampant' AI characters and the hidden purpose of the halo device could make for something interesting without directly adapting one of the games. The same could possibly be said for the Mass Effect universe but I think with that series so centred around player choice, there's less of a desire to see one definitive story put on film - and if they went with a male Shepherd it would be wrong!

I suppose the question is how many people really want to see movies based on games. I know that when I was younger there was certainly a feeling that it would see the medium justified but I think I've moved past that and can appreciate their differences. There was also the desire to see some games fully realised in a way that primitive 16bit graphics could never achieve but that's much less of an issue now. When games can look almost as good as a CGI movie, would it be improved in any way by appearing on film with human actors? But if these films are perhaps no longer being made specifically to cater to the demands of gamers, maybe it bodes well for the creation of something worthwhile on their own.