Gamertell

If you’re into games and gaming culture at all, you’ve surely heard far too much about Uwe Boll, the director of some of the worst videogame movies ever made, including Alone in the Dark (which has the honor of being “1% fresh” on rottentomatoes.com), Bloodrayne, House of the Dead, and the recent In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Boll is famous for his terrible films, for boxing his critics, and for his confusing attitudes towards gamers and games in general.

A recent comment he made in an interview on Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld caught some attention in the great game blogosphere. From an excerpt published on Destructoid:

“A lot of video games have no story. I did the movie House of the Dead and got bashed and I said, what were you expecting, Schindler’s List? I showed zombies chasing people and this is basically what the movie delivers. I don’t know what they were expecting if you make a movie based on an ego shooter where you kill ninety minutes of people non-stop.”

Stepping aside from the usual knee-jerk reactions associated with Boll, he has a point. Or rather, half a point – many games don’t have intricate, well-crafted narratives. They have a premise. In House of the Dead, its “you’re in a mansion killing zombies”. In Street Fighter, it’s “combatants from around the world fight each other”. However, many games DO showcase engaging, intricate narratives, and some may even (gasp!) be capable of translating well into film.

The problem is his sweeping generalization that the majority of games are essentially mindless amusements. This is just as silly and misguided as making the assumption that all movies are pointless fluff, or that all graphic novels are violent and shallow, or that all Jazz music will corrupt your children (hello, 1920’s). Judging a medium as vast and varied as videogames in such a way is just plain wrong.

There’s a long list of games that would make for fantastic cinema, given the proper talent behind the camera. The Final Fantasy games, the Half-Life series, and recent blockbusters Bioshock and God of War sit near the top of the pile with well-developed, linear narratives ripe for movie translation. Which is not to say that making the jump would be easy or 100% spot-on, surely it’s a challenge to bring a 20+ hour interactive (and frequently repetitive) experience to the silver screen. However, creating a gripping narrative from any adaptation is difficult, and skilled filmmakers have proven that its possible to do so, creating great cinema from stories that originated in theater or novels, or the more complicated niches of graphic novels, TV shows and toy franchises. Videogames are no different in this respect.

Take a game like Deus Ex for example, or even BloodRayne (the subject of one of Boll’s most infamously terrible films). Surely, a capable writer and production team could craft a well-made narrative featuring the key characters and settings of the game. Imagine BloodRayne directed by James Cameron, or a Bioshock-inspired prequel depicting the rise and fall of Rapture directed by David Cronenberg. Right now, videogame adaptations may be relegated to the ghetto once occupied by comic book movies (thanks in part to Mr. Boll), but the current crop of critically and commercially successful films based on graphic novels (the first two X-Men and Spider-Man films, Sin City, etc.) shows just how flexible this barrier can be. The games industry has grown immensely in the last five years (and the last year alone) so it stands to reason that clearer skies are on the way. Many had their sights set on Peter Jackson’s (now canned) Halo film, and the mantle now rests on Hideo Kojima’s adaptation of his own Metal Gear Solid franchise.

Assuming that games have no story (and will therefore always make terrible films) isn’t the correct view – it’s the lazy one.

Read [Destructoid]

Keep up with the latest Gaming news! - Subscribe to our feed →