What's Your Take On Videogame Movies?
 

And I guess I'll broaden this a bit by including comic-book movies, as there seem to be a lot of those going around, too.

Having not yet seen RE: Apocalypse, I can safely say that the first two movies entertained me. But that doesn't mean that I respect the Resident Evil label they've slapped on to them. Bleeeh. I just don't like how the movie gets credit for being related to the game, yet has nearly nothing about the games in it. There's news of a Watchmen, a World Of Warcraft, a Dungeon Seige, and a Metal Gear Solid flick, and I wanna go see them all - but I betchya that I'll have one or two scathing reviews for all those movies.

I'm beginning to really enjoy comic book movies, simply because they're getting to be more accurate. Check out Sin City and Batman Begins. I know all about having only 60% of the true source material in your flick, but.. come on! The reason we go to films is to see our heroes be put through the same adventures we read about, but only on a different medium.

And I know that Immuna receive flak for this - yes, I know that all movies can't be perfect to their source material, and I know that you can't fit an entire videogame/comic book series into two hours, etcetera, some movies are doomed to begin with, and yeah - I know. I just want there to be a slew of great fan service movies,

Comic Book Movies, I like. Blade, X-Men, Batman and even those League of Extrodenary Gentlemen movies that some find so cheesy, I really get a kick out of.

But Video Game movies...I have yet to see very many ever entertain me. Worse, most Video Game movies are done by a handful of people who don't even seem to care about the games, but just seem to want to capitalize on the success of the games and turn those profits into DVD sales (through the long process of box office media hype and slander of who they get to play the parts). And don't evwen get me started whenever these perticular movies are based off of Japanese games...

There has only been a couple of exceptions. And only because they decided to drop everything and just make them different. A good example is the Doom movie. A lot of people hated the thing because they were either expecting it to be a 'good' movie on its own or be totally true to the gaming series. I on the other hand saw it for what it was. A movie just dropping everything and trying to be enteraining, with a basic plot 'like' the games and a 'feel' of the game. Complete with a first person romp of blasting aliens and 'two guys go in, one goes out' arena battle finish.

It was actually rather ok for a gaming movie in this way and didn't fail for all the reasons a gaming movie usually does. Including trashing over gaming canon (that I could see) or producing horrible acting or following up with 3 sequels that interfear with the games timeline or 'hollywood' a gaming series until you don't even understand what you are watching. And I thought the movie should have been 100% made for the Halo/Doom/Unreal audiance...but I guess not.

I refuse to believe that all video game movies are impossible of being good, but most of them seem like cheap attempts to cash in a franchises popularity rather than an actual movie. Of course, this schmuck hasn't really helped things out.

Comic book movies can also be really good, like Spiderman or Batman Begins, but that's because they've had directors who actually know what the franchises are about. If we could get people like that making video game movies, I think the quality would also improve.

I think that too, but it's hard to find the good amidst the bad. For instance, Spidey 1 and 2 were pretty good - but 3? Icky.

Ah, video game movies... Resident Evil 3 was good, but has very little to do with Resident Evil. Silent Hill was good. Period. The Super Mario Bros. movie would have been good if they hadn't tried to pretend it had anything to do with Super Mario Bros. Hitman looks cool. Mortal Kombat was a good movie. The first one at least. I liked both the Final Fantasy movies.

Anyway, that kind of rambled on. The problem is that most people don't respect the source material, and like everyone is saying, just want to make a quick buck. Some could have been great, like Doom, but they just changed things so much that it pissed off the fans, and there weren't enough non-video game players interested in these movies to make them succesful. You want to make a good movie, know your audience. If you are making a video game movie, your audience is going to be video game nerds who will nail you to a cross if you change too much stuff.

I agree - I did like Silent Hill. I liked seeing all the monsters up and around. The Janitor guy - Colin, I think - was pretty neat. But it seemed like they tried to put three games into one movie. And Alessa at the end? Bleh.

=3

...That movie was interesting... if you had drugs on you at the time.

...Okay. I'll admit. This does look cool. I just have a problem with 47 - not the right body type.

I liked both - just for seeing the characters. It was a great movie - I mean, it had more plot than I expected a video game movie where the source material was a 2D fighting game with characters who shared the same sprites with 3 other characters would have.

...How could it not, though? I mean, if you have a game where you shoot stuff until really big stuff comes and you have to shoot it lots, the only character development is the main character bleeds when he gets a fire-ball to the face, and you really have no idea why you're fighting demons on Mars... it's kinda hard to make a decent movie out of that.

I was thinking more of a Doom 3 storyline, and I have assumed that the story of the previous two were similar. You know, portal to Hell, imps that actually throw fireballs, and they just could have had more monster types overall, but they didn't and it was lame. Doom 3 actually had a storyline, not a deep one, but it wasn't terrible, and it was a lot more interesting than watching the director try and hypnotize the audience into being against genetic research/stem cell research or whatever.

I'm perfectly fine with videogame movies, mostly because I'm a nerd and it always amuses me to see my favorite characters/settings in other mediums. For example: Final Fantasy: Advent Children. I'm not a big fan of FF7, and by a writer's standpoint, it's plot was pretty terrible (especially for anyone who hadn't played the game) but damn if it wasn't cool to see all of these characters in action. And I've always been a fan of random action scenes.

Even if it's cheesy and doesn't stay "true to the game" or whatever, I just have always found it fun to see what they do with it in a movie.

Comic book movies are a perfectly fine medium - lots of bad ones, a few good ones, a handful of outstanding ones. Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Begins, Superman 1 and 2, (I say) Superman Returns, Sin City, etc. It's a great medium because it's taking something that is already a short story arc and putting it into a real-time film.

Video game movies can be absolutely abysmal, though. I have yet to see one that exceeds simply "Good", and god willing Hitman will be the first. The only one I like is Mortal Kombat, and even then it was just a really good B-movie.

The problem is translation - you can't keep things faithful to the original because, by definition, games don't have to have a good plot. Sure, it helps, but there's no reason. For example, Devil May Cry, God of War, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Prince of Persia, all have fantastic plots. Hitman has potential because the source material was all about "Kill someone in this mission, it helps progress the overall plot." Sounds like a movie to me.

Then you can take Soul Calibur 3, Street Fighter, Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, even Metroid. The plot just doesn't work. Here the plot is just a tenuous grasp on getting from point A to point B, where you engage in fighting of some kind.

That might work for an action movie, but even then people would hate it because it won't get the attention it deserves.

Even beyond the plot, how do you represent some of the sillier concepts that appear, even more so in Nintendo titles? The Mario Bros movie makes perfect example of this: The use of the mushroom and fire flower and jump shoes was terrible: It basically amounted to the old King, a flamethrower, and a pair of hydraulic shoes that probably didn't even work anyway.

I mean the movie Super Mario Bros was a decent concept, but the execution was so terrible it makes a blight on Mario Bros as a whole. Yes, even worse than that one for the Virtual Boy.

One video game that I think would make an excellent movie is Rule of Rose. The game had an great plot in my opinion, and even though there isn't a lot of action, what bosses and monsters there are are cool looking and just plain neat. This could translate into a movie very well in my opinion. I am hoping Silent Hill 2, the movie, is good. I haven't played through the game, but a lot of people seem to say it was their favorite, although I personally want the second movie to be about Silent Hill 4, I loved that one for the freakiness and the plot.