It’s All Geek To Me — All Your Movie Are Belong To Suck » 30ninjas

It’s All Geek To Me — All Your Movie Are Belong To Suck

Share on Facebook posted 03-08-10 by Dan Kaufman

So, the Tron: Legacy trailer was released this week, and it looks pretty cool, but in truth this is something Disney would have had to work very hard to mess up. Take a young star and zap him back into the mainframe, updating the script and fx for a new generation while keeping the trademark neon-aesthetic in place. And make sure Jeff Bridges is in there somewhere (now featuring “Oscar-glow”!). The trailer, and anticipation of said trailer, along with the international alternate reality game playing out for the past few weeks, have created a swell of nostalgia for the original 1982 classic – a movie that is admittedly among the few that can claim to have created an aesthetic that is instantly recognizable, and all its own. Its look was even spotted on the short track ice rink in the recent Olympics at Vancouver.

But all this excitement conceals a dark secret. Tron‘s visual legacy is unfortunately much cooler than Tron itself was. It was so concerned with all the effects and action sequences, and setting up the confusing mythology of existence inside the computer world, that it sacrificed interesting characters and story development. Anyone who tracks down the film to watch in preparation for the sequel is in for a rude awakening. And by “rude awakening” I mean a techno-babble induced coma. Pretty to look at, but dull. Kind of like Kathy Ireland at the Oscars pre-show.

Tron was the first example of a new sub-genre of geek entertainment – the video game movie (for purposes of this rant, I am including films like Tron, a movie about video games, in the same larger group as movies based on video games. So there.). While Tron is arguably the most durable and popular of the genre thanks to that all-powerful nostalgia, it still set the precedent that almost all others have since faced – varying degrees of suck.

Movies and games often attempt to entertain us visually and auditorily in very similar ways. Why, why, why is the marriage of video games and movies less like Mike and Carol Brady, and more like Ike and Tina Turner?

In some cases, I can understand why the relationship is tenuous. The deep characterization and epic beauty of Pong would probably not have translated very well into a narrative. But primitive technology aside, video games have always allowed us to visit abstract worlds and stories that are just too strange to translate into mediums other than Saturday morning cartoons. Can you imagine someone crafting a script out of Stretch Panic? How about Katamari: DaMovie? I mean, who would try to form any sort of cohesive plot about a pair of jumping plumbers who live in a magical kingdom where mushrooms give you super powers? Oh, wait. That happened. And it had Dennis Hopper in it.

In the case of movies about games, let’s not forget that we’re talking about a pastime that mostly involves sitting on your duff while staring at a screen. At least until the advent of Wiimotes, Project Natal, and Sony’s just-announced “Move” controller, which now means video gaming involves flailing your limbs like an epileptic monkey while staring at a screen. It’s not exactly Friday Night Lights.

But oh, that sure didn’t stop The Wizard. This road trip/competition movie from 1989 starring Fred Savage (and Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley!) thought its audiences would be wholly enthralled by the exploits of young prodigies conquering games like Double Dragon, Ninja Gaiden, and Rad Racer. Wow, he makes that 8-bit pixilated car move left and right an awful lot. Pass the popcorn.

But as gaming technology has advanced greatly, as the graphics and narratives have met and even surpassed Hollywood standards in many cases, why do the majority of video game movies still fail? I think to solve this problem we need look no further than the exceptional documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. While this is ostensibly a video game movie, I submit that its subject, the quest to achieve the highest score in Donkey Kong, is purely incidental. It could just as well be about who can grow the largest squash in their garden. What makes this film so great is the people – the “characters”, if you will. Whether through creative editing or through plain providence, Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell are fascinating people with fascinating stories to tell.

In contrast, most video game movies seem to have more interest in merely transplanting the game property to film rather than writing compelling characters to populate them or interesting things for them to do. Consider the Street Fighter movies, the Mortal Kombat movies, and to a certain extent, the Tomb Raider movies, which, while above average, were still somewhat forgettable. There’s a sense throughout all these projects of just capitalizing on the name of the games to cash in. Or, in some cases, they abandon too much of what makes the game so great in the first place, as in the Resident Evil movies. Why introduce laser traps and computers into the franchise when the concept of a military task force invading a spooky mansion was cool enough? The experience I had playing Resident Evil one for the first time is still more entertaining than any of the films thus far.

Then there’s Uwe Boll, who directed House of the Dead, Postal, and BloodrayneI and II. This concludes my discussion of Uwe Boll.

War Games holds a special place in my heart, but I’m not sure it ages well. Ditto for The Last Starfighter. I actually thought Silent Hill was okay – it stayed sort of true to the source material while creating a story of its own, but the property sort of allows for that. And Doom earns some points for its tongue-in-cheek recreation of actual first person gameplay in movie form. But these are exceptions to the rule. I haven’t checked out Gerard Butler in Gamer but from what I hear, it doesn’t exactly help the cause.

Here’s an interesting question. With the level of quality video games have now achieved, do they even need movie adaptations? I’m not so sure. Take Uncharted 2, for example, an exhilarating and unrelenting ride with A-list production values, performances and dialogue. Is there anyone out there who’s saying to themselves, “Yes, I’d like to see this same exact thing in a movie, just not as good, and minus the interactivity”?

But I guess telling Hollywood to back off of a money-making opportunity is like asking Duke Nukem not to kick ass.

Perhaps, with games being a recession-proof, multi-billion dollar industry, a little more legitimacy is headed its way, and a new era may dawn. Tron:Legacy could be very cool. Prince of Persia also looks like it might be worth our time. The theoretical Halo movie could be fantastic, if done well, but who knows?

On second thought, I would kill a mofo to see Will Arnett play Katamari’s King of All Cosmos. Someone make that happen.