Right as rainy

Whenever a movie is announced that is a conversion from another medium – book, comic, video game – I get a bit wary. Some of these movies worked – others were dismal failures on the count of quality. Out of all these options – comic adaptations seem to be the easiest, as they usually just take the general motive and spin a story which follows the spirit of the comic. Books and games are somewhat more difficult. How do you capture the essence of a 500+ page book in a movie of 90, maybe 120 minutes? Or the same for a game of 15, 20 hours?

The movie-to-game conversion has been around for a while, and very few times it actually works out well. Most movie-license games are just there to add something to the merchandise range and increase the profits from the franchise, but quality doesn’t always seem to be a concern (see “Calamity James“). And while the game-to-movie adaptations are still fewer in numbers, they will become increasingly more.The main problem comes in with the fact that titles for adaptation are chosen by popularity rather than suitability. Sometimes it works in the movie’s favour – the Tomb Raider movies were rather acceptable and enjoyable, and Hitman was certainly one of the better movies around – other times it doesn’t. The Doom movie, albeit well-made on the technical side, was just a colourful piece of Hollywood popcorn trash. And the Max Payne conversion left fans of the title angry and other people wondering what that was all about. Mark Wahlberg, albeit a decent enough actor, just doesn’t cut it. According to the IMDB trivia page for the movie, he has never seen or played the game, and the original game creators were less than impressed with the movie result. Having seen it (shaking my head almost all the time), I am not surprised.

So what’s coming up? A Lost Planet movie. All I can say is ‘Why?’. Another Tomb Raider. Let’s see if Megan Fox can fill the shoes of Angelina Jolie – she was impressive enough in Transformers. Gears of War – dare I say I am actually looking forward to this one? That is, if they can keep it in the game’s spirit and find the right actors to do the job. The games relied heavily on dialogues, cinematics and great voice-work and certainly rank as some of the most atmospheric and story-heavy FPS titles out there. It would be a crying shame if they had to mess that up with a mediocre, rushed movie like Max Payne was.

I sometimes sit and think which games could make great movies. Titles like Deus Ex, Thief, Gabriel Knight come to mind. Movies following those stories or characters would have to be written, cast and directed with passion and attention to detail, very much like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But then I remember that Hollywood and its counterparts all over the world are mainly there to make money, and in order to do that they tend to rely on big names and big franchises, but not always on quality.