(upbeat music)
- Why do video game movies always suck?
It's a simple question that no one seems
to be able to answer.
Beginning with 1993's mind-boggling disaster piece
Super Mario Brothers, video game movies,
especially live action ones, have almost uniformly
been what scientists describe as just astoundingly bad
and wait, does that means their names
are Mario Mario and Luigi Mario?
- It's Mario Mario and Luigi Mario.
- Now sure, some of them are halfway decent
and others are deeply guilty pleasures,
but why is that the bar for success?
Why aren't video games able to make the leap
from plastic case to the silver screen
like comic books have?
Well that's exactly what we're gonna talk about
on today's episode of the Dan Cave.
Now like it or not, video game movies
are the next big thing, at least they are if you ask people
that work in acquisitions for major Hollywood studios.
Now according to an article on Den of Geek,
there's approximately 61 video game movies
currently in development, let that sink in for a second.
This includes a Call of Duty cinematic universe,
Five Nights at Freddy's, Fruit Ninja, The Last of Us,
a Tomb Raider reboot, and a trilogy of films about Tetris.
How the hell you can make one film about Tetris,
let alone three, is a question that will haunt me
to my dying die, and if I live long enough
to see two Tetris films get made, that day may come
well before the finale of said trilogy.
Now despite the repeated failure of many video game films
both critically and at the box office,
Hollywood remains hell bent on finding that next big thing
or making games that next big thing.
For example, look at film history, everyone, for example,
used to make westerns until they went out of fashion
in the late '70s and early '80s,
then Star Wars and Alien came out,
and everyone and their mother was making sci-fi films
and then the '90s happened and we got more Steven Seagal
than any of us knew what to do with.
What do we do with that ponytail and those kimonos?
Nobody knows.
Now we have comic book movies as far as the eye can see.
How many comic book movies do we have?
We have so many that we've drained the world's supply
of handsome white dudes named Chris
to slake our impossible thirst for more.
Now my point is that once Hollywood sees something
being successful, it wants to milk it for all
that it's worth and the next udder they've got their eyes on
belongs to video games, except that this cow to date
has not yielded a film that scored about 50%
on Rotten Tomatoes and as for Meta Critic,
the highest score there belongs to 1995's Mortal Kombat,
a DVD that I, an 11-year-old at the time,
convinced my family to buy, and while I love that movie
dearly, I like many 11-year-olds, was dumb as hell.
- Hello baby. Did you miss me?
- But these films do make money on occasion
and because Hollywood at its core is a risk-averse industry,
it will always follow the money,
desperately clinging to the popular and well-known
intellectual properties like Ramora
clinging to the bottom of a shark.
Now if you try to think like a studio executive,
this gamble does make sense.
On paper, a Metal Gear Solid movie or a The Last of Us
or a Mass Effect movie sounds like a great idea,
they are all incredibly addictive video games
that sold millions of copies, have a massive international
fan base, and are renowned for their superior storytelling
or in the case of Metal Gear, it's more of us trying
to figure out what the hell's going on in Hideo Kojima's
brilliant mind, the dude is bonkers.
But these are all ingredients that would make
for a potentially successful and profitable movie franchise.
However, the problem in turning these games into movies
is that Hollywood has a fundamental misunderstanding
of why games are fun.
Like movies, they offer an escape from the humdrum reality
of work-a-day life, they immerse the player
in far-off fantasy realms, new galaxies,
and the nine-to-five jobs where they try to raise a family
before eventually killing them off in rooms
full of bookcases and fireplaces and no doors,
and actually, maybe that's just how I played the Sims
but I think you get what I'm trying to say here.
They let us travel down sewer pipes to rescue princesses,
scale snow-capped mountains to fight gargantuan dragons
and even throw pornographic magazines
to distract genetically modified super soldiers.
Video games let us do the impossible by putting us
in the driver's seat, the key word in all of this is us.
We are the player, we are in control,
there's a certain sense of agency involved
in playing video games that does not translate
to the intrinsically passive experience of sitting
and watching a film.
Now for example, the Angelina Jolie starring Tomb Raider
movies were fun, active-packed larks but they felt hollow,
capturing neither the Indiana Jones-like joy of the games
or the charisma of the character.
You weren't the one raiding the tombs,
you were the one paying an exorbitant amount for popcorn
to watch someone else do it, and yeah that someone else
was Angelina Jolie but was it as much fun as the games?
I don't think so.
Likewise, the Assassin's Creed movie seemed like it really
understood the appeal of the source material
but as it turns out, watching Michael Fassbender fumble
his way around a sterile abstergo facility
is even less enjoyable than playing those bull (bleep)
levels in the game itself.
News flash, the best part of Assassin's Creed
is exploring the past in living, breathing color,
and using cool parkour to pull off moves
that you could never pull off in real life.
It's not Jeremy Irons sneering his way to a paycheck.
- It's not my best work, but it gets the point across.
- Back in 2005, the late great film critic Roger Ebert
sent gamers into a tizzy when he declared
that video games are not art.
He wrote that, quote, video games by their nature
require player choices, which is the opposite
of the strategy of serious film and literature
which requires authorial control, end quote.
Now while I don't agree with his sentiments
regarding video games' capacity to become works of art,
he is correct in that films need directors in order to work.
Without a director steering the ship,
it'll inevitably scuttle itself on the rocky shores
of creativity and logistics.
In 2010, Ebert doubled down on this idea,
declaring that, quote, no one in or out of the field
has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison
with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists, and poets,
end quote, and yes, he said poets twice, for some reason.
Now this statement might rankle some of you out there
but he's not saying it to invalidate
the medium of video games.
He's saying that to highlight a problem
with trying to force video games into a medium
where they're ill-suited.
The biggest problem with many video game movies
can actually be summarized by another thing
that Roger Ebert wrote, his delightfully vicious
one-star review of 2005's Doom.
The late great critic wrote that the movie has been
inspired by the famous video game.
No, I haven't played it, and I never will,
but I know how it feels to not play it,
because I've seen the movie.
Doom is like some kid came over and is using your computer
and won't let you play.
Wow.
While Doom is decidedly not a good movie,
Ebert's point can be applied to video game movies
as a whole because as they stand now,
they feel kinda like you're stuck watching some other kid
play through all the good parts,
forcing you to just watch the cut scenes.
It's kinda like you're Rod and Todd Flanders
while Bart tells you, don't worry, you're on a team with me.
- Yay!
- Now some might point to the rise of things like Twitch
and YouTube Let's Play as evidence
that audiences don't mind watching others play games
but that's something of a false equivalency
because in these instances, audiences care less about
what's actually being played than who is playing it.
They're watching these videos to create the virtual
equivalent of hanging out with a friend in the living room,
playing games and commiserating about what's happening
with other friends in real time.
And speaking of personality-driven content.
Many video games are themselves anchored by strong
charismatic protagonists that keep players coming back
year after year to continue their adventures.
Uncharted has the puckish rogue that's Nathan Drake,
The Last of Us has the post-apocalyptic father-daughter
dynamic of Joel and Ellie,
and Mass Effect has Commander Shepherd,
whose sole mission is to smooch everyone in the galaxy
or die trying.
At least that's how I role played Shepherd, what about you?
These characters are the end result of teams of writers
and designers laboring for months and months
to create characters that would not only feel fun to watch
but also who you'd want to control and whose destinies
you'd want to shape.
Cut scenes work in video games because they feel like
the end result of your actions.
What happens when you divorce these cut scenes
from the feeling of control and just leave players
with a narrative that you've been made to watch?
Well you get Metal Gear Solid.
Hey-o!
Just kidding, I really love those games
and they have kickass game play to back up
their feature-length nonsense.
(garbled speaking)
You need that!
If you don't have compelling game play along with the story,
all you have is a non-interactive movie where none
of the stakes feel like they have any weight.
On the flip side, many video games don't even have
these outsized personalities to wrap themselves around.
Some of the greatest games of all time,
ones that are renowned for their storytelling,
star largely silent protagonists as a means of helping
players project themselves
into the role of the main character.
Games like Half-Life, Portal, the Legend of Zelda,
remember the Legend of Zelda animated series?
Yeah, there's a reason that Link never opens his mouth
other than to say, "Hop!"
- Well excuse me, princess.
- Now this isn't to say that video game movies can't work
but perhaps the problem lies
within the medium of film itself.
I mean, look at the average length of a game.
Even some of the shorter triple A releases
clock in at a respectable 10 to 20 hours of game play.
Because at $60 a pop, you wanna feel like you're getting
your money's worth from a brand new video game
and that is already the length of five to 10 feature films
or 2.5 Transformers films.
Maybe video games simply shouldn't be movies, period.
Maybe based on decades of empirical evidence
and the scores of unwanted DVDs filling up gas station
bargain bins, maybe video games are better suited
for the medium of television, where you can give these
sprawling narratives room to breathe
and meaningfully expand on the lore put forth
by the original rather than just giving us a microwaved
rehash of what we've already played.
A Mass Effect TV series, for example, could do for modern
sci-fi what Battlestar Galactica did in the mid-2000s.
The Last of Us, by putting it on television,
you could really encapsulate the relationship-building
between Joel and Ellie and get the drama
that the designers wanted players to have
over the course of dozens of hours,
that sounds so much better.
After all, we're supposedly living in the golden age
of television so why not capitalize on that
by turning these mega popular franchises
into the next Game of Thrones?
But maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe now with a decade of Marvel movies
showing the right way to build a cinematic universe
based on long-standing IP with legions of dedicated fans,
a video game franchise could transcend the genre
and do the same thing.
Maybe all it takes is three Tetris movies
to prove once and for all that yes, mom,
video games are art and that video game movies
should be winning Oscars.
Or maybe not.
One way or another, we're gonna find out,
and we're gonna find out whether or not certain
achievements were actually meant to be unlocked.
What do you think?
Are video game movies doomed to fail?
What do they need to do to succeed,
what would actually make a video game movie and why?
Let me know in the comments below and press thumbs up
to continue while you're there.
Now be sure to like and subscribe
or else you might miss next week's show
about the story of a weapons-dealing Nicholas Cage
who gets caught up in an inter-dimensional conflict
between orcs, humans, and whatever Paula Patton
was supposed to be, in The Lord of Warcraft.
Until next time, keep on digging.
(upbeat music)