Hello adventurers, I’m Andrew,
and I never expected ‘Jumanji’ to be one of the better video game movies out there.
Or even a video game movie at all.
But I guess times change, and dusty old board games don’t cut it anymore.
I quit playing board games five years ago.
Despite not being based off an existing videogame,
‘Jumanji’ actually has more in common with the medium as a whole than most straight-up adaptations.
There’s been a ton of great source material wasted on crappy films,
but a lot of them were doomed from the start.
Today, I want to talk about
Why Video Game Movies Don’t Work,
and why ‘Jumanji’ does.
The single biggest factor holding them back?
You can watch, but
You Can’t Play
The concept of ‘interactive media’ doesn’t really lend itself to linear cinema.
After all, movies are a passive experience; you just sit there and take it in.
But in games, you’re a participant,
and the entertainment comes from the impact your actions have on a world.
They’re a thing you do, not a thing to watch.
I play ‘Street Fighter’ because it’s an intense experience.
It’s about making that crazy comeback with just a sliver of health,
or smashing your fightstick when you whiff a crucial Super.
I've been very guilty of that. My friends hate playing 'Street Fighter' with me.
But the movie can’t replicate that,
So it just takes the ‘Street Fighter’ characters and slaps them into a generic action plot.
I'm gonna get on my boat, and I'm going upriver.
And I'm going to kick that sonhuvabeetch Bison's ass so HARD
that the next Bison wannabe is gonna feel it!
The movie never even tries to capture the fighting game experience,
And the only scene involving an actual street fight gets cut off when Jean-Claude Van Damme bursts through the front door in a tank.
You're all under arrest.
It’s just G.I. Joe on steroids, with even more stereotypes, and steroids.
That was beautiful.
On the other hand, ‘Mortal Kombat’ does a little more justice to the genre.
The action actually revolves around an arcadey martial arts tournament,
and while it’s not a flawless victory, it comes closer than most to recreating the one-on-one encounters of the source material.
Finish him!
Goro wins. Fatality.
I definitely can’t say the same about ‘Super Mario Bros.’
The film almost seems embarrassed by the simple source material.
The directors tried to hide it beneath grimy sci-fi set dressing,
And they bogged down the story with classic Mario concepts like corrupt local governments and the Mushroom Kingdom party scene.
Let's just say they don't call it the mushroom kingdom for nothing...
Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo have great chemistry as Mario and Luigi.
Wow, there were dinosaurs in Brooklyn?
Relax, Luigi. There used to be Dodgers here, too.
and Dennis Hopper steals the show as Koopa,
Monkey!
but the movie is a bleak, joyless mess with none of the fun and charm of the original games.
Can you imagine modern Nintendo signing off on something this weird?
I mean, what did Shigeru Miyamoto think when you showed him the Blade Runner city filled with boogers?
It took the company 25 years to get over it,
but there’s finally a new animated Mario film in the works from the makers of ‘Minions,’
[MINIONS GIBBERISH]
It makes more sense than live-action, but I’m not sure a cartoon solves the fundamental problem.
Ooough, Yoshi don't like meatballs!
Nintendo’s number one development rule is that gameplay comes first.
Their games are famous for the way they feel.
Have you played 'Mario Odyssey?' Jumping in that game is a joy.
Mario isn’t really a character, he’s just a vessel for the player to move around the world in.
He doesn’t have any desires besides saving the princess and eating some delicious cake,
and the only thing that drives him is the controller, A.K.A. you.
Now youre playing with power!
You can’t stretch Mario’s charmingly paper-thin lore into a serious movie,
it’s just window dressing for the gameplay.
Thank you so much for to playing my game!
Which brings us to the other big problems with adaptations:
With games,
The Story Is Secondary
Doom programmer John Carmack once said
“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie.
It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.”
Interactive narratives have come a long way since then,
and porn is just .gifs now,
but nostalgia-obsessed Hollywood loves to adapt games from an era where all you got for story was a paragraph in the manual.
And an awesome premise for 5 minutes of arcade action is tough to translate into two-hour movie.
‘Wreck-It Ralph’ had a brilliant solution to this problem, by the way.
It took beloved, but fairly shallow ‘80s arcade icons,
and made them side characters in the bigger story played out by characters created for the screen.
They add flavor to the world and give credibility to the production,
without have to force in a tragic backstory for Inky, Blinky, and Clyde.
Then you have movies like the upcoming ‘Rampage.’
The whole point of the classic arcade game is that you get to control the giant movie monsters.
There’s nothing like popping in a quarter and chowing down on tiny humans,
But do you really want to listen to a 50-foot blue werewolf slobber for 200 minutes?
Or would you rather spend it with the Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment?
GEORGE!!!
I love the Rock.
The movie needs a human protagonist to keep things grounded and give the audience someone to connect to.
Empathy plays a big role in movies.
But in doing so, it loses the role reversal that makes the original game fun.
Consider the Great One’s first game movie:
‘Doom.’
The legendary FPS has all the story it needs:
‘Demons from Hell are invading Mars, and you need to rip and tear through every single fragging one of 'em.’
Who cares about a narrative? I’m busy murdering Hellknights!
Throwing grenades and watching body parts and gore explode out the ass!
But movies have things like ‘arcs’ and ‘structure,’
so the adaptation has to graft on some bullshit about ancient aliens and genetic engineering, whatever.
The first-person sequence is a cool nod to ‘Doom’s’ action,
but the film made the mistake of trying to adapt the story, not the game.
Since the days of ‘Doom,’ game narratives have come a long way,
Hey there...
with excellent storytelling and genuinely cinematic experiences.
And a lot of them seem tailor-made for theaters.
The ‘Assassin’s Creed’ series has nine games full of intriguing story, gorgeous locales, and a cool sci-fi framing device,
so how could the recent movie be such a bomb?
In open-world sandbox games, most of the time you’re nowhere near the story.
You’re plenty busy just messing around,
and the plot only progresses when you’re bored enough to check it out.
It’s designed to keep you engaged in a twenty hour interactive experience,
but the Animus system and Assassin/Templar backstory is too convoluted to work when it’s condensed into a two-hour movie.
‘Prince of Persia’ had a similar problem, and I bet ‘Tomb Raider’ will too.
The new movie is based extremely closely on the 2013 reboot,
to the point where scenes from the trailer look exactly like the game.
Which begs the question: Why not just play the game?
If they’re going to recreate the awesome set piece cutscenes,
then I might as well experience the hours of exploration and awesome stealth in between.
You build a much tighter connection to a character after you’ve done 13 hours of sidequests with them.
There’s more story in modern games,
but it’s still just a supplement to the actual experience of play.
You just can’t capture that in a video game movie,
but you can in
A Movie About Games
Why even bother adapting a video-game to a medium that doesn’t support it?
You just risk pissing off an established fanbase with your crappy movie,
and alienating anyone else who’s not a true believer.
But a movie like ‘Tron’ isn’t based on an existing game,
it’s about games.
In the real world, Flynn is just a humble User.
But inside the mainframe, he’s a gladiator fighting for his life with deadly discs,
or a racer flying around the lightcycle grid.
The hero of ‘Tron’ isn’t a mopey assassin or an overprotective plumber from Brooklyn,
it’s us.
We might be sitting on a couch slamming Doritos and Dew,
but in the game, we’re superheroes, or athletes, or rockstars.
By making us the hero of the story, ‘Tron’ nails how video games make us feel.
And it’s not alone.
In ‘The Last Starfighter’ our hero’s high score at the arcade makes him the last hope of a desperate alien species,
proving everyone who calls gaming a waste of time, dead wrong.
Take that, mom!
Games might be just polygons on a screen, but when you’re fully immersed,
When you get in that zone,
When you spend endless hours dying to Sephiroth’s final form, but get a little better every time,
It really does feel like the whole universe is at stake.
Even a documentary like ‘The King of Kong’ has more tension, emotion, and thrills than every single ‘Resident Evil’ movie combined.
You can take that to the bank, it's very emotional.
Moose cried at the end!
He's too pure for this world. He's just a sweet boy who wants to do good at 'Donkey Kong.' That's all.
He's a teacher. He got laid off. I love Steve Wiebe. It's sad!
‘Jumanji,’ the new one, anyway, is about four high-schoolers who get zapped into the video jungle,
And transformed into four extremely different avatars than who they started out as.
I'm still an old fat guy, right?
I'm afraid so.
Each has their own name, backstory, nerfs, and perks.
And they’ve only got three lives before it’s game over.
I know it sounds like the plot of a ‘Goosebumps’ book,
but don’t powerups and extra guys seem way more ‘Super Mario.’ than a cyberpunk city filled with dinosaurs?
Granted, there are plenty of terrible movies about games,
like Mike Calabro’s 2015 movie of the year, ‘Pixels,’
It's garbage, but it's a good kind of garbage.
That garbage that, twenty years down the line, y'know...
I know I have diabetes now, but I'm not upset with my choices.
But for the most part, movies like ‘Jumanji’ take the best parts of the experience,
and let us have fun without having to worry about running out of continues.
Video games are about what you put into them, and what they give back.
They’re about the experiences we share with a community of outsiders that’s developed its own language and culture, memes and references.
or the fondness you feel when you look all your old cartridges stacked on the shelf and think back on your life in gaming.
It’s still a new medium, and I’m sure someone will come along with a great adaptation someday,
But until then, movies about games are the best solution,
for those of you who seek to find
a way to leave your world behind.