Can Good VIDEO GAMES Make Great MOVIES?

Written By Ben Dressler

How many great video game adaptions have you seen so far? Yeah – me neither…

18.08% – That is the average score on RottenTomatoes for films that are based on a video game, the highest score being 43% for FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN. Again: Eighteen percent. And FAR CRY wasn’t even taken into account!

For those of you who don’t know the RottenTomatoes score system: It aggregates movie reviews and ends up with a score, the higher the better. AVATAR got 83%, MATRIX 87% and THE DARK KNIGHT even got 97%. So 18% average is nothing to be proud of. In fact, it’s just slightly better than BATMAN AND ROBIN!

The first thing that obviously comes to mind is: Why the f*ck are there no good, or even great, video game adaptations on film? There are tons of brilliant novel adaptations, an increasing number of extremely well done comic book adaptions and lots of stage play adaptions that I haven’t seen but that won lots of awards and stuff! But where is the masterful gaming adaption we are waiting for?

Where is our WATCHMEN? Where is our HAMLET? Where is our LORD OF THE RINGS? Nope, this is not a candidate.

Even though we all feel it is wrong, there are some people that would defy that truly great video adaptions are even possible. The great-but-in-my-opinion-no-longer-ahead-of-things Roger Ebert went so far to say that video games just cannot be art–so how could they be adapted into art? I totally resent that thought. Actually, it even makes me angry. Because it shows the true problem behind this whole thing: While many people start taking Video Games more seriously, the industry that tries to adapt them still refuses to. Maybe the creative people think a well made action film is all we gamers want from the adaption of our favorite games? Or perhaps movie makers are stuck listening to critics like Ebert who consider the source material to be of the same artistic quality as an exploded octopus?

Getting a video game over to film is far from easy and I’m sure that some of the folks who tried so far had the best intentions. But maybe it might have helped had those guys known more about video games and what can and can’t be done with them. When Peter Jackson was doing LOTR, he knew that he couldn’t show three minutes of consecutive landscape footage like it is in the book. Yet he achieved to get the land of the Hobbits, on screen, to feel pretty close to what it felt when reading. So how did he achieve that?

Before we get deeper into analysis, I’d like you to comment or mail what you liked or disliked in any video game adaption you have seen. I for one liked the TOMB RAIDER adaptations for Angelina Jolie (=hot) but I absolutely hated them for adding all that stuff that had nothing to do with the TOMB RAIDER universe: A training robot – wtf? Lara Croft doesn’t have to get training equipment on Michael Bay’s garage sale!

If it will help the cause of this discussion I will even risk my psychological and physical health and watch another one of the Uwe Boll adaptions – that is just how much I care! Stay tuned for more and add in your comments below to give your two cents on your impressions of the gaming and movie industries.

Ben Dressler is a guest blogger for the Jace Hall Show. Since local film schools successfully fought him off, Ben Dressler turned his love for games into the zero budget short film /AFK. He also has a BS in Psychology and tries to convince people it doesn’t give him mental powers. Twitter: @BenDressler ben@afk-movie.com

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