Raving Rant: In the Can - Editorial

Axel Cushing talks about games to movies and what Chris Roberts did...

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Raving Rant: In the Can

It should go without saying that I love computer games. (I write for this site, don't I?) It should however be said that I'm not just a gamer. I'm an inveterate book lover (almost half the boxes from my recent moving experience were filled entirely with books, and a few others had some books in them either as filler or because I missed them on the first sweep), and I'm a music lover (two full boxes of CDs, not to mention my guitars and amps), and I'm a serious film buff (another three boxes full of DVDs). Now there are times where I find that one of my great loves sometimes ties into another one of them, and I find my collections are better for it. Some of those previously mentioned CDs were soundtracks from games and from movies. I've gotten the collector's editions of the three Lord of The Rings films and the stylish noir horror film Lord of Illusions, based off one of Clive Barker's really good short stories. But there is one crossover which is horribly under-represented on my shelves, and that is the video game-movie crossover. Why wouldn't I have films such as Doom, Alone In The Dark, Street Fighter, Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat, and House of The Dead? Maybe because the best of those movies don't impress me enough to want to own them and the rest make me want to punch people out.

In the interest of fairness, I should point out that there are examples of books that have been turned into movies which are not represented on my shelves either. Jurassic Park and The 13th Warrior are in my collection, but Timeline is not. Vampire Hunter D (both the original and Bloodlines) are on my shelf but John

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Carpenter's Vampires (based off John Steakley's Vampire$) is not. Bad adaptations of novels into films is almost considered obligatory, despite the examples of Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez, and Zac Snyder on how fidelity to the source material pays off. But the shortage of good video game-to-movie translations is not something new. It's been a problem for

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a while now and it will likely continue to be a problem for years to come. And who can we blame for this problem? Certain douchebag German frauds cum directors notwithstanding, there are plenty of people to blame. Producers who are looking to cash in on the latest hot fads, lower level studio executives who are desperate for anything that might boost their precarious careers, game developers who aren't thinking clearly, game publishers who want or need to pad out the bottom line, writers who treat the source material as utter crap, directors whose "vision" is blinkered at best, and actors who basically don't give a damn so long as they at least make scale. Me, I blame Chris Roberts for getting us into this mess.

Scenes from Wing Commander III

Some of the younger gamers out there may be asking "Who's Chris Roberts and what did he do wrong?" Chris Roberts was a developer who, like so many other people on the road to Hell, had the best of intentions. Computer games and video games were either all story (like the text based adventures that ruled in the early days of PC gaming), all action (flight sims or arcade ports), or ungainly RPGs (you think 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is bad, try figuring out the system behind the original Wizardry or Bard's Tale games). Roberts wanted something better. He wanted more than just mindless shooters, boring flight sims, or overwrought retreads of Tolkien pastiches. And so, he gave us Wing Commander. The fast action of a shooter, simplified flight sim conventions, and a branching storyline that was tied into the player's success or failure a lot more intimately than any RPG on the market, combined with cinematic cutscenes that helped flesh out the story. It was an excellent game for it's time and one I remember quite fondly. The cutscenes weren't anything fancy, just cartoon-style heads with moving lips and eyes, but with top notch writing the characters came alive. Naturally, a sequel had to be made, and it was with better animation and small segments of voice acting to help further bring the characters to life. And when you make one sequel, you have to make another. And it was here that Chris Roberts began the downward spiral not only for the Wing Commander franchise, but the entire computer game industry.

Now, it must be pointed out that during the early 90's, there were numerous computer games that were making use of full motion video (FMV), and a few were using decidedly big name talent (Take 2 Interactive's FMV adventures Hell and Ripper cast names like Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Grace Jones, and John Rhys-Davies just to name a few), but the FMV sequences were usually something that you saw inbetween puzzles and pre-rendered corridors. They had movie-like elements but were nowhere near the "interactive movie" experience that had been advertised. The Wing Commander series, prior to the third installment, was more of an interactive movie than titles like Ripper or The 7th Guest. Yet, Chris Roberts decided that he was going to bring in cameras and make Wing Commander III even closer to his vision of an interactive movie. Yeah, he got Mark Hamill in front of the camera again after a long absence after Return Of The Jedi. He got Malcolm McDowell to be a hardass admiral. He got Thomas F. Wilson from Back To The Future to be an overconfident ass instead of a big bully. And the game was successful, which demanded yet another sequel. Only this sequel got attention for precisely the wrong reasons. When your project lands on the cover of a magazine with news that your budget is $10 million US and might possibly be the most expensive game ever made, that should stop you cold right there. It should cause one to reflect, to wonder if maybe this path is not one you want to go down. Either that moment of self-reflection never occurred or the answer to the question was "Hell, yeah, I wanna go down this road!" The result was a big expensive "interactive movie" that managed to also mortally wound the Wing Commander series. The fifth entry in the series, Wing Commander: Prophecy managed to look even more like a movie, but also managed to have some genuinely lackluster gameplay as well as issues stemming from the raging 3D card wars at the time. Privateer II wasn't much better, though it still boasted big name talent. The more the games tried to be movies, the less fun they were as games.

The deathblow to the franchise was when Roberts wrote and directed the film version of Wing Commander. Having already seen the general trend in video game movies up to that point (I'm sure Robert Patrick would love nothing more than to have Double Dragon disappear from his resume), I'd hoped Roberts would have stuck to his original vision, giving us a good fast paced sci-fi popcorn film evocative of that first wonderful game. Not only did he manage to fail on a truly epic scale, Roberts sealed the dark bargain that haunts video game development AND video game-based movies today. The actors were badly miscast in some cases (I like David Warner, but he was wrong for his part, as was Tcheky Karyo), the plot was nonsensical even to somebody who hadn't played the game, and the makeup effects for the alien Kilrathi were substantially worse than the overgrown and poorly made Muppets from the third game. Think about that a moment. A big budget Hollywood film with worse creature makeup than the FMV portions of a video game made for a tenth of the cost. The movie bombed. Roberts never directed another film again, though apparently he continues to serve as a producer and executive producer to various films. However, his last game effort was as a producer on the RTS Conquest: Frontier Wars from now defunct Digital Anvil.

It is my firm and unwavering belief that the desire of many developers, Chris Roberts chief among them, to elevate video games from basement dwelling pleasures to an art form equal to if not superior to film has managed to have the opposite effect. It's a noble thought but the process has managed to inflict serious damage upon the business. Just as Hollywood cranks out sequel after sequel because it's a safer bet financially, so too does the games business crank out sequel after sequel. Just as Hollywood resists the provocative and the innovative for the comfortable and familiar, so too does the games industry. Bloated budgets, bloated development times, bloated egos, companies that are simultaneously corpulent beyond belief and as fragile as a house of cards. Yes, we get some good games that aren't sequels, but those almost invariably get sequels made in short order, just as some good movies come out and immediately get sequelized to the point of irrelevance.

This brings me to the problem of video games being adapted from movies. Just as FMV was getting more and more use in the early 90s, and slowly being infected with the dread "Hollywood Production Values Syndrome," Hollywood was discovering video games as a source of material. Cheap, easily exploited, and low cost material. One has to wonder if Midway or Nintendo would be in a better financial situation if they'd been a little more circumspect about the terms by which their properties were licensed. Super Mario Brothers wasn't too awful, but it probably could have been a lot better, and this was a Nintendo property. Nintendo, the guys who (if the stories are to be believed) had reps stand over reviewers while they played their latest releases and actually locked up the consoles when the reviewer stepped out to get a snack. Mortal Kombat could have become a wire-fu phenomenon. Street Fighter could have been a glorious end to Raul Julia's career. Uwe Boll could have stayed in Germany directing crappy movies that nobody would watch, leaving more talented writers and directors to make House of The Dead and Alone In The Dark. However, none of these things happened, and all for exactly the same reason: the publishers let Hollywood get away with it. Instead of demanding that their properties be treated with a modicum of respect, they let Hollywood treat them like three dollar whores while movie studio execs said "Don't worry, we've been doing this for years, we're the pros at making movies, trust us." The first movie adaptations of Moby Dick or Romeo & Juliet might not have been line for line to the originals, but I have to believe that the cast and crew wanted to make a good show from such venerable material. And yes, I'm well aware that movies are a medium with stringent limitations on time not only in production but in performance, whereas a game can go anywhere from ten to a hundred hours or more. I'm also aware that no game or game developer can make the sort of claim that Herman Melville or William Shakespeare can in regards to the impact on human society. That doesn't invalidate the basic point: nobody said "Waitaminute!" Even the most soulless executive at Nintendo should have had a look at the rough cut of Super Mario Brothers, or even a first draft of the script, and called the studio out on it if he thought something was amiss. Unfortunately, that's not how Hollywood works. Clear visions are rare. Consensus rules the lots. The guy who gets the writing credit for a script is not the same guy who did the umpteen million rewrites between the time filming started and the time it left the editing room. Everybody's got to get their finger in the pie, which pretty much destroys the pie.

I tried to watch Alone In The Dark on cable once. God help me, I tried really hard. But I couldn't sit through it. Not because it was too scary. Not because it was too gory. Because it was a great steaming mountain of crap. I have to wonder if it was because of this film that Tara Reid felt so little self-esteem that she got a botched boob job. I have to wonder how Christian Slater, a guy who had a really great film career going for a while, could have let himself get talked into doing this film. I have to wonder what sick pleasure Uwe Boll gets from taking a video game setting and brutalizing it. I have to wonder why the hell the video games industry hasn't woken up to the fact that the man shouldn't be allowed within a thousand miles of their offices to even suggest adapting their games into movies. Unfortunately, too many have let him do it, with predictable results.

So what must we do? How can the scourge of crappy movies based off video games be thwarted without resorting to violence? As gamers, bugger all, really. Yes, we can pay attention to Variety, we can keep Ain't It Cool News bookmarked, and we can keep our eyes and ears open for word that our favorite titles might be coming to the big screen. Problem is that by the time such news actually gets out into the world, the deal's already done. When I heard that BioShock was going to be turned into a movie, my initial reaction was less than charitable. However, word that it was Gore Verbinski at the helm actually gave me hope. If he could make the concept of a Disneyland attraction into an asskicking blockbuster powerhouse trilogy, what could he do with the meaty ingredients in BioShock? Word is that the film is currently delayed because of budgetary concerns, which dims the hope considerably since the property may end up getting passed around like a teenage hitchhiker at a Hell's Angels' clubhouse. Hopefully, 2K Games will find their fangs and take the property back rather than let it languish in development hell. Another recently announced adaptation is for Shadow of The Colossus. This one worries me even more than the BioShock adaptation. BioShock might have the mechanics of a shooter, which makes it easy to put fast paced action on the screen, but it's also got a strong element of psychological and sci-fi horror, themes on the nature of humanity and the costs of playing God which can make for a strong storyline and strong characters. Shadow, on the other hand, is more meditative and surrealistic. While there's action elements to it, I almost see it more as a sort of art house Lord Of The Rings, the environment of the Valley of the Colossi being as much a character in the film as the actors themselves. It could be done as a feature film, but I have a sinking suspicion that all the surrealist elements will be stripped out in favor of a dumbed down action flick where the Lone Hero goes to stop the Evil Rampaging Giants. That would, of course, completely miss the point.

One venue which I don't think either game developers or Hollywood has really given a lot of thought towards is adapting games not to the silver screen but to the small screen. Rather than trying to cram loads of material into a two hour movie, why not try cramming it into a short run TV series of six or eight episodes? Or even a one season blink-and-you'll-miss-it series, no renewals, just a one shot deal? The idea isn't as far fetched as it might sound. Chris Roberts, for whatever reasons he might have had at the time, made an animated Wing Commander series and got the cast from the games to lend their voices to that effort. Sony's Arc The Lad was turned into an anime series and those don't go more than a season's worth of shows as a general rule. I could see American Movie Channel (home of surprise hits Mad Men and Breaking Bad) doing a one-off adaptation of Shadow of The Colossus a lot better than a two hour movie could. Yes, TV viewership is contracting. Yes, people are using DVRs and the Internet more than sitting down and watching. Maybe that's because the TV industry is just as moribund and hidebound as the movie industry, so tightly linked are the two. Maybe instead of creating yet another version of CSI or another insipid American Idol clone, the networks could take a chance on creating TV shows that are less about the familiar and more about the unique. And yes, I'm well aware that the economy is in the tank and everybody is losing money left and right. I submit to you that the networks are bound to be losing money anyway, that the hemorrhaging is going to happen whether they put on the safe bet or the risky bet, and since that's the case, the safe bet isn't really all that safe and the risky bet isn't as risky as it looks. Think of the DVD sales. Think of the merch. Think of the advertising dollars that come in once word gets out that your network has got the shows people are actually staying home to watch as opposed to simply recording it for later. There are angles to be played here, and ones that can make everybody not only happy, but possibly rich as well.

For now, gamers are probably going to be stuck watching crappy adaptations. And it will likely happen in the future as well. The question is whether we're going to stop hauling ourselves to the multiplex out of some perverse sense of fandom or keep up the status quo. Remember, Uwe Boll is still out there, and he's got sequels in the works. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

- Axel Cushing

(May 28, 2009)