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what are you thoughts in general on video games being turned into movies? Do you have any favourites? Any games you would like to see turned into movies? If so what actors would you pick?

Overall I'm not a fan of video games being turned into movies, just the same as I feel about books into movies...just because it's hardly ever done right.
I am, however, looking forward to the Prince of Persia movie. for once, I think that might be done well. The trailer looks awesome anyway...

I try not to be biased about it but I just generally don't like many that have been made. It needs to be tackled differently. I've only seen one of the resident evil movies; it wasn't bad but I wasn't that captivated by it cause I thought it was a bit over the top but that's just my tastes rather than the movie being bad itself.
I don't mind the first Tomb Raider movie but it isn't brilliant. I don't think it captured the same atmosphere at the games but I can see how they would have wanted it to be seperate from Indiana Jones cause otherwise it could have been too similar.

Sidebar: This line is beautiful! biggrin


Anyhoo, games into movies always has the same problem: Turning an interactive media into a one-way interface. The game-to-movie track is quite frequently a case of eating one's cake and having it too (how that saying SHOULD be said to make sense) since all they do it for is to turn a popular franchise into a movie to reap in the cash. However few producers keep making the constant mistake of picking games we enjoy for gameplay, not story. So they write a storyline which is similar to what you'd find in the game and then wonder why you'd dislike it.

Resident Evil movies for example always lack the personal touch of Capcom's zombie madness because it's hard to relate to the characters since we don't spend any time having to navigate their sorry asses away from the rotting teeth around them, so their only hope is to sell us on a dedicated storyline which, I'm sure I'm not the only Resi-player who says this, I could care less about. I mean come on, who played Resident Evil 5 JUST for the storyline?

Now Biohazard EXTREME calls it right when he said that bit about not comparing the movie to the game but holding the movie in it's own accord, which I know is a smart way of approaching the subject, but for me I would suggest the following: How about NOT putting "Resident Evil" in the title of the movie and instead calling it something like "Zombie Doom-Death", that way we'll hold the movie up to it's own accord and not butcher it in comparison to the game. Sure, less people will care for the movie since the familiar title is gone but wouldn't that be better than the ton of people who buy a game-movie and whinge about it not being true to the actual game?

Though everything I said is mute since, at the end of the day, I still enjoyed the Hitman film and watched the DVD of it again only 3 days ago.

I like kids films that are still entertaining as an adult...like toy Story and Shrek.
The thing with video game movies is that they can't be exactly like the game because it's a movie..it's a different medium and needs to be filmed differently...saying that though it can't be too far away from the game otherwise it's just taking the game characters and putting them into a movie and creating a whole new world for them, which I don't think works that well either.

I'm excited about the Prince of Persia movie because from what I've seen so far and heard so far it seems to have been converted rather well - it's not sticking exactly to the game, which is brilliant....the characters have been given fuller personalities, which is essential...and tit's had alot of money spent on it to make it look very convincing and not tacky...it might still be complete rubbish but I've yet to find out. I trust Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney.

Well, Resident Evil used to be my favorite franchise, period, back around 2001 - 2004. So I just felt like everything after Resident Evil 4, completely bastardized the storyline. I'm a purist when it comes to the games.

But Resident Evil (as we knew it back in its PS1 era) was about more than just zombies. The cool thing about the storyline was the conspiracy of it all. Uncovering the truth, a huge company that does evil things behind a friendly mask. That's what was awesome about its backstory.
Romero's movies were great, but they never really had a ture explanation for the zombies, and it surely wasn't caused by a rich company who made bioweapons. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's that aspect that made Resident Evil more than "Just a zombie game" and anyone who saw it as just a zombie game, obviously didn't play enough of it.
So, because of that, if there WAS a zombie movie with that particular conspiracy angle... And it wasn't called Resident Evil, then it would be accused of ripping off Resident Evil. Not because of the zombies, but because of the zombies combined with the large company making bio-weapons.
And the thing is, that's why I like the Resident Evil movies. They're films that incporporate the core concepts that I liked about the games. And they don't have to flow into the story of the games 100%. The thing is, I think Resident Evil movies would be good on their own, without the Resident Evil label. But it's the Umbrella Corporation, T-Virus, and those specific monster designs that make it that much more awesome.
Basically, I look at it as a franchise of its own. And it's good that way. But at the same time, it incporporates the things that I liked the games for.
And I don't believe they're a cash in. I see them as a piece of fan fiction that's been published in film form. Paul Anderson is a film writer and director and has the power to do that.
If you had the power to publish your fan fiction as a feature film, I'm sure you (and anyone) would. And I'm sure there'd be plenty of people who b***h about it. But I bet most of them can't write a better movie.
Most of them, you ask, "Well, how would YOU have made the Resident Evil movies?" And they'd say, "I'd stay true to the game, and have the STARS go into the mansion, and Wesker would betray them," basically, retell the story that everyone already knows. Making movies like that, I think, is a bad idea. Games are an audio-visual media, just as movies are. Books are different, you can't see the book's content, you can't hear it, you can only imagine it. That's why making a movie based on a book is different, and you CAN just retell the story. Even though most of the time it doesn't turn out as good as the book anyway.
But with Video Games, we already hear it and see it, and all you can do with retelling the story in the movie, is make it look real. But that does less for the franchise than anything.
At least with Paul Anderson's movies, there's a whole new story, that only borrows basic concepts from the source material.

And another thing is, like Shadow Dweller said, they're movies, a different medium. And let's put Resident Evil aside, because the video games themselves are relatively short.
But if you have games like... Metal Gear Solid, for example... That usually has at least 4 hours of pure dialogue, not counting the action. How would you squeeze all that into a 1.5 - 2 hour film? The storyline would have to be simplified beyond recognition, and the characters would lose 80% of their depth. And obviously with a result like that, we're not gonna get anything even close to being as good as the game.
And even though the Metal Gear movie isn't out yet, I'm sure it'll have a different chain of events from any of its games.
The only game that they could probably fit into a movie without taking too much away from it is the very original Metal Gear 1. And honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing that retold as a movie. But only because the narratives back in 1980's weren't as strong as they are now.

On the other hand... You said that there are movies created intentionally to flow into the game storyline, and give us new perspective of the overall plot. Can you give me some examples? Because if you're talking about things like Advent Children, and Resident Evil Degeneration, then I think if anything, they only take away from the overall plot. Because those two movies just blew. Final Fantasy 7 shouldn't have been touched at all, all the sequels and spinoffs only cheapened it. And Degeneration was just bad. Badly written, and not entertaining. I mean, I can't believe that the first scene they show the "jerk" of the film, he actually says the, "You call this coffee?" line. That line was already a cliche' in the 1980s. Anywho, point is, these CGI movie sequels that the gaming companies themselves make, really suck.
I haven't watched the Dead Space animated feature, but it actually looked pretty cool. Frankly, I thought the game was boring, and considering how awesome of a narrative the animated comics, and the feature film were, I expected more from the game.
Umm... But yeah, other than those three, I can't think of anymore examples of game based movies that actually flow into the overall canon of the game.

Doom, to me, is in the same boat as Final Fanrasy Spirits Within. I think they're both good movies, but because they don't even capture the core concepts of the games they're named after, they're look upon poorly. If they even took out the Final Fantasy part, and just called it, "The Spirits Within" and Doom they could've called... I dunno... Pandorum, for example... They would've been higher acclaimed and would've done better money wise. So yeah, I think Doom was a cash in. And Spirits Within was pigeon holed, because Squaresoft were the ones who paid for its production, so it HAD to be called Final Fantasy, those were probably square's terms.

But that's not necessarily a winning situation either. Because we're talking about writers, directors, etc. who have nothing to do with the game company. What if they made an original story that flowed into the Resident Evil timeline (using Resident Evil as an example, it could be anything)... I mean, gamers are rabid. It's one thing when you make a whole new story based on the concept and people don't like it. But imagine you try to flow into the storyline, and you misrepresent a certain character, or the storyline... Then it's war. Because if the writer/director is saying, "This is supposed to be a part of the game storyline." Meanwhile, it tells a story of... Let's say something so over the top that it crosses the boundaries. Or god forbid, it relays some inaccurate information... the outcome could be worse than just basing it on the subject.
That, and they don't want to isolate non-gamers either. If you say, "I'm gonna make this movie assuming that those who see it, already know what happened in the games" then everyone who's never played a game, would either be disappointed, or not bother watching it at all.
It's still important to appeal to non-games, because it's not a game. It's a movie. And that's kind of the difference between something like Anderson's Resident Evil, and Degeneration. That's why Degeneration wasn't in theaters, because non-gamers don't know these characters. They don't care about what happened before. Basically, Degeneration is a video game without gameplay. It's one long cinematic, meant for the people who are fans of the game.
But if you start a brand new storyline, keeping the core concepts, but changing the overall events, then you get what most game movies are. And lots of people have problems with that. But does that mean that game based movies shouldn't be made at all? I don't think so.


Well, I don't know too much about ZoE, but as I understood about .hack. It wasn't a game. It wasn't an anime. It was a full fledged cross media franchise. Meaning it's all at once, but none of it is MAIN. That's how I understood it.

Ghostbusters was a game based on a movie, which should be a whole new topic in itself, I think. But yes, it was very well done.


No argument. And that's the difference between game developers and movie developers, I think. The movie developers have lots of limitations, prime one being time, and they know how to write a 1 and a half hour story.
With game developers, I think they're so used to drawing out the storyline however long they it needs to be, that once they are met with time restrictions, they just suck at it.

Well, when I first played Indigo Prophecy, I actually thought that David Cage was a French film director. And that he went out to create... What basically is a truly interactive movie. Not that, "We'll let you push buttons and call it interactive" but actually affect the outcome sort of thing.

Now, he, I think, revolutionized it, but it's been done for a while, with games like Syberia and Still Life, which are pretty much what adventure games evolved into. From Myst, to Still Life, to Indigo Prophecy. And yes, it's a great thing. But it's still just a game. There's still no franchise loyalties, no time constrictions, no actors that might not look like the intended character.
And, again, it takes me on average, about 8 - 10 hours to beat Indigo Prophecy. If it was to be turned into a movie, there's be less scenes, the characters would be more shallow.
I think I said this before, with video games, the only way to make the movie-equivalent of them as deep and drawn out as the games themselves is not to make them into movies, but to make them into TV series. But that's probably even more difficult in terms of pushing something like that through.

Doom was a fun movie though. I mean, the subject matter is cool. Space marines, fighting against mutated monsters. It's always good and fun.

I fully understand your train of thought here and at points begrudgingly agree, however overall I do feel it's not approaching the media in any way new. I was just researching the Resi Evil movies and found it was actually written purposely to be based between the events of games 1 and 2/3, when Racoon City's outbreak begins prior to Jill's arrival, without approaching any established characters. So it's actually more an advocater towards my "fits the cannon" arguement. So to use an opposite point we'll use Hitman and Tomb Raider which broke established cannon.

Both these movies tried hard to cover the high-octane action sequences these games featured (though to me high-octane is an example of playing Hitman wrongly but let's focus on those players who went the more violent routes) but both movies tried to approach 2 rather cold game characters with new ways to know them and in the end failed to invoke any empathy towards the character you had before. Games bring you closer to the subject, seeing as how the game character's life rests in your hands and it's up to you to protect them, and it is possible (and very likely in a Tomb Raider game) that the main character will die, though you do get the option to try again. In the movie however you know fine well the main character will survive to the end (I welcome the director hat has the balls to fully kill of a character established by another media that didn't die in it's original bases also). Your relationship is cut severely from the gaming experience and as such you are not as attached.

Take this opposite a book that becomes a movie, how it brings a new level of depth to the story, especially a book which was previously a first-person narrative. To use Fight Club as an example, if you read the book to fight club you don't get as close to Tyler Durden and instead cover the main character's admiration of him, like you're judging him by his standards. When it became a movie though you got to judge Tyler Durden by your own standards and built your own admiration for him, not just used the main character's for reference.

God you milk the Resident Evil movie series for all it's worth on this one. I still think it (and the whole series while we're at it) was a big pile of scriptwriting arse but never mind, let's continue:

I don't think it's too hard for a movie to draw you in closer to a character, Die Hard's John McLain is a character you grow respect for in the course of the movie. You are right that it's easier to do in TV series (name me a man who watches How I Met Your Mother and doesn't love the crazy logic of Barney Stinson) however when it comes to movies you need a very strong character to draw you close. The main problem you get from that is that, once the immersive depth I was talking about in my last reply is removes, You are usually left with a video game character with less depth than a paddling pool.

Take Lara Croft for example. OK, she's an archaeologist with a dark past and a brooding personality, but seriously what more to her is there? All she seems to do is kill everything she doesn't like and gets over obsessive over stupid little trinkets rather than the people around her. Compare that directly against Indiana Jones, a character with wit, duty to those around him and just enough crazy to make him entertaining, and you can see how shallow Lara Croft is.

This hole argument comes down to this constant point that the game to movie process is constantly ruined by directors who fail to grasp the points of the game which envoke the best emotion. Like I said it's best for the director to go for the established setting/storyline since it allows a director to approach the already established subject and build more onto it, like how the Silent Hill movie brought more out of how evil the town was. When you base it on the character regardless of setting you soon realise that only few game characters have enough depth to survive this process.

2 examples of this argument will be coming soon with the Prince of Persia and God of War (might still be rumoured but I'm sure I heard it got a go-ahead) movies that are coming. While the Prince of Persia has enough depth on him from established storyline to be a good basis for a character and be entertaining Kratos has such little depth to him that a movie about him is sure to be s**t since the gameplay to God of War is what makes the series amazing, not it's storyline.