The conventional wisdom when it comes to movies based on video games is that they generally suck. Why? Is it because film-makers don’t necessarily understand why people play the games in the first place? Or are they trying to reach a wider audience that may not necessarily know about a particular franchise? Whatever the case may be, we have MANY examples of video game-based movies that are awful. Now, a lot of these you could probably chalk up to former film-maker Uwe Boll not actually caring about the source material of the movies that he’s made. He’s notorious for some of the worst video game movies of all time: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, In The Name of the King, Postal. The list goes on and on. If you’re trying to reach the gamer audience, you’re automatically going to have an uphill battle. Gamers, like myself, will pick apart these movies like its nobody’s business. At the same time, the casual film-going audience isn’t necessarily going to be familiar with the game that you’re basing the movie off of. On top of that, there are a lot of movie fans who aren’t gamers. So, you have to try to appeal to THEM as well. While there have been exceptions, movies based on video games have not fared well against audiences and critics. I can go all the way back to the FIRST movie based on a video game: Super Mario Bros. That movie was a complete disaster. It was so poorly received, that Nintendo would never allow a movie to made on Super Mario Bros. Now, there is a new animated movie that’s in the process of being made, but that comes nearly 30 years after the live-action film fell flat on its face. The key to any good movie is the story and characters. When you’re adapting a video game, you can’t just do a straight adaptation. You have to figure out what won’t work in a movie and throw it out or alter it to make it fit. That’s the truth with ANY adaptation.
That brings me to another point: Story-telling. Telling stories has been a part of human civilization since we first walked on this planet. It’s one of many ways of passing on knowledge to the next generation. Story-telling has taken many forms. From cave paintings to books to movies, story-telling has evolved exponentially over thousands of years. The key to any good story is writing. You need to have a beginning, middle, and end. You also have to have compelling characters and ideas to propel that story forward. It’s not just that, though: You need to have conflict and connections between characters. You know, the things that the audience can identify with. The best movies have been doing this for almost a century. With video games, though, they’ve only recently started to become more and more serious about telling stories. By recently, I mean within the last 10 to 20 years. Granted, a lot of gamers generally don’t go in for the story, but rather the gameplay, and rightfully so. It’s an interactive experience that’s supposed to draw an audience into its world. But what happens when a video game has a really good story to tell that’s well-written? That’s the cherry on top of the sundae. To be fair, most stories in video games are little more than window dressing to drive the player from one part of the game to another.
Stories have been in video games since the mid-80s, but as I said earlier, they’ve only been lip-service, essentially. There have been a few exceptions where the story is compelling like the original Final Fantasy on the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I would argue that it was around 2003-2004 when video games started getting serious about telling stories. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a perfect example of a role-playing game with decent gameplay mechanics wrapped up in an interesting and exciting story set in the Star Wars universe. It was well-received by both critics and audiences. BioWare, the company that made the game, proved that you could have an awesome gameplay experience with a great story. That’s been their bread-and-butter for decades. At least up until to the last few years, but that’s a topic for another day. I would actually point to the original Mass Effect trilogy as being one of the best examples of narrative-driven games. It was important that the gameplay stood up to scrutiny, but the story was epic and original. It was also very cinematic. As technology has advanced, so has cinematic story-telling in video games. The line between movie story-telling and video game story-telling is becoming increasingly thinner as technology continues to improve. Now, we’ve got amazing cutscenes and stories that are bolstered by motion-capture, allowing for more realistic-looking characters. There’s an example of this that I want to bring to your attention: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.
For those of you that don’t know, Uncharted is an Indiana Jones-inspired adventure game centered around a character called Nathan Drake. He searches the world for lost cities and treasures, but ends up running afoul of nefarious groups and organizations that are intent on finding the treasure before he does. Uncharted is one of the first games that really felt cinematic in scope, but it’s the fourth game that takes it another level, at least visually. I’m going to show you a clip from the game and I want you to pay attention not just to the graphics, but also the writing and chemistry between the characters. The scene in question takes place after Nathan Drake and his long-lost brother Sam have been chased out of the fictional city of King’s Bay in Madagascar. We see Nathan and Sam regroup with Nathan’s best friend, Sully. When they enter their hotel room, Nathan is confronted by his wife, Elena, who he had been lying to for the previous several weeks about a job that never actually happened.
This particular scene is one of many throughout the entire game, but it shows something very important: Chemistry. Look at the way Elena and Nathan react to each other. These are two characters that love each other and Nathan’s deception has caused some…problems with that, and you can see that on Drake’s face: He screwed up, and he takes it out on Sully. It’s an emotionally charged scene that I feel rivals a lot of movies that deal with this kind of relationship. It’s that good. You can see the emotions and the disappointment on Elena’s face when she’s confronted with…everything. It’s tense and it’s heartbreaking. It helps that the graphics and the technology on display in this game can deliver those performances, but it’s also the voice-acting that makes it work. This…is film-making, but for a different medium. We’re seeing more and more games take this approach to telling a story. The Resident Evil 2 remake from a couple of years ago is another great example, but for a horror game instead.
Story-telling in video games has come a long way in a surprisingly short amount of time. The Uncharted video games are probably my favorite example of cinematic and narrative driven adventure games. Movies and video games will always be separate in terms of story-telling, but the quality of story-telling is quickly catching up to and may actually exceed what movie are capable of. With video games, the story can draw you into a really amazing interactive experience unlike anything else. Movies are more passive experience where you just sit and watch things unfold, and that’s just fine. Obviously, I love movies and good stories. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for film-makers to adapt video games into movies. They’re two vastly different kinds of experiences. At the same time, film-makers are trying to lure gamers in by appealing directly to what film-makers THINK gamers want. The recent Mortal Kombat movie threw in buckets of blood and gore saying, “Hey, we’re R-rated now!” “Look at us!” The recent Resident Evil movie visually got the original games right in terms of character and location design, but both film suffer from the same problem: Bad. Writing. It’s not enough to try and placate gamers by showing us what we want to see. You have to get us to actually care about it, and that’s the crux of the issue. There is a new Uncharted movie that was just released to theaters starring Tom Holland as Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as Sully. Judging from the reactions of both the audiences and critics, film-makers got it wrong…again. I’m going to go see it tomorrow and I will let you know what I thought of it. I just thought it would be interesting to talk about how much video games have evolved in terms of story-telling, and how they continue to evolve. It’s really interesting, in my opinion.