Get ready for Bioshock........... - by BrokenArts
chk772 on 17/2/2022 at 17:06
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Bioshock's world was so absolutely nonsensical, good luck to anyone trying to wring a coherent narrative from it.
Hehe, you definitely have a point about that. :)
Pretty chaotic creative design development as well, as Ken Levine once stated.
Great game, but, it definitely makes a lot less sense than System Shock.
Does it matter for a contemporary film production? Not really. They don't make much sense in Hollywood anymore anyway.
faetal on 17/2/2022 at 20:30
Quote Posted by rachel
As for existing ones, the
Witcher TV show on Netflix is pretty good.
That's a show of the books, not a show of the game. There's probably some crosstalk due to cultural impact, but the source material isn't the game storyboards, so not sure it counts.
Nameless Voice on 17/2/2022 at 22:11
At least a film won't be filled with bullet-sponge enemies, I guess.
I can't really think of any game-based films that were actually good.
The Tomb Raider ones were okay I guess?
A few other game films were okay on their own, so long as you didn't associate them with the games they were based on, since they had very little in common.
The "Doom" film was watchable, for example, but had nothing to do with Doom the game at all.
Tomi on 17/2/2022 at 23:05
According to this, there are no good "game films": (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games)
Not that Metacritic ratings always mean everything.
I didn't even know about most of these films. And out of all those, I think I've only watched Max Payne. That film always bothered me. I don't think that it's terrible, but why go all weird with the story when there's a perfectly good plot in the game already? I suppose that's just how it goes with game films and reboots. It never made any sense to me, but there must be some good reason why they get made.
Pyrian on 17/2/2022 at 23:07
Quote Posted by Tomi
It never made any sense to me, but there must be some good reason why they get made.
"We've got this idea for a terrible movie!"
"No."
scribble scribble "We've got this idea for a terrible movie
adaptation of a popular IP!"
"GREEN LIGHT GOOOO!"
rachel on 17/2/2022 at 23:19
Quote Posted by faetal
That's a show of the books, not a show of the game. There's probably some crosstalk due to cultural impact, but the source material isn't the game storyboards, so not sure it counts.
I wasn't aware of that... Beats me then :erg:
The first
Resident Evil was a kinda decent zombie/horror flick I guess, though the rest of the franchise is an unmitigated disaster.
Max Payne was okay, I'd say its main draw is the aesthetic but that's not enough. Not a fan of either the
Doom or
Tomb Raider ones.
Need for Speed was a dud. Both
Hitman and
Agent 47 are more like "forgettable action flick #47"...
These are the ones I've seen, and I can't say any of them were really good movies. I never played these games though so I can't judge based on that.
Aja on 17/2/2022 at 23:37
Quote Posted by faetal
I got the sub-text and was agreeing.
Have there been any films / TV shows of gaming franchises that have turned out well?
(
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113855/) Yes.
(I know no one will agree with me, but I like it)
demagogue on 18/2/2022 at 03:25
Now DE would legitimately make for a good tv show. The characters and the world alone are so rich; there's a lot you could do with it. Although in this case, even the game was originally based off of a novel to begin with.
As for movies based on games, Mortal Kombat and Mario Bros. are kind of cult classics.
I thought Silent Hill was ridiculous but I mostly just remember the imagery and atmosphere, all of which was good, like a good '80s horror movie should be.
Movies about video games (in a way) tend to be good, interestingly: TRON, The Last Starfighter, Cloak & Dagger...
I can think of some narrative-heavy games that would be good for movies now... Disco Elysium was one, Firewatch... I bet you could do something with Return of the Ober Dinn. Maybe an irony is that the games best fit for making a movie are also narrative-heavy indie games, and I can't imagine anyone investing enough to make a game based on an indie movie... Uh, sorry, movie based on an indie game.
Oh, then in the other direction, you have narrative-heavy AAA games that are already so much like movies you can legit wonder what the added value of an actual movie is, like GTA V, RDR 2... Okay, there's Last of Us. I'd say it's also in this category, but that's being made into a tv series, and I can imagine that can be good. So that will probably be your best chance to see an adaption work well.
nicked on 18/2/2022 at 10:29
The reason there's no good video game movie adaptations is that, outside of the financial reality of making a quick buck off a known IP, there's not really any legitimate reason to try to convert from one medium to the other.
What makes a good game good, and a good movie good, are often opposite to each other - e.g. a linear narrative with no player choice usually makes for a boring game.
It almost made sense 20-30 years ago, because the draw of a movie adaptation would be seeing your favourite game characters in live action fidelity (e.g. translating Mario's 100-odd pixels into Bob Hoskins). Now AAA games have such good graphics that you gain nothing by filming it for real, so all you can do is either lose what makes the game interesting (player interactivity), and just have a film of a character doing the same actions over and over again, or differ wildly from the source material. Obviously most movie adaptations choose the latter, but then you're just making an unrelated film with roughly the same aesthetic as the source, so it falls in the gap of blandness between a film that's interesting for its own sake, and a film that actually respects its source material.
What I don't understand is who the target audience for these things is supposed to be. If you're a fan of a game, it's because you enjoy playing it. No-one finishes a game and goes "That was amazing, but I wish I could have sat back and watched just the cutscenes instead of having to play it!" (unless it's a terrible game with a good story I guess, in which case it's not going to be popular enough to be a big draw for an adaptation). So you get a movie that is, by definition, inherently not that appealing to fans of the source material, and if you're not a fan of the source material, why would you care anyway?
