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I think there could be, with a) suitable IP and b) a willingness to throw out a lot of the game-ness.
The former is obvious; you can't translate some franchises so well to the screen - eg, Super Mario Bros. The latter is more complex.
There's a pretty good article by Mark Kermode on this. His major problem is that whilst games have perfectly acceptable plots, they don't do a lot of narrative because that's what the player does. In Half-Life, there's an accident, there are monsters, then soldiers, and you have to survive. Basically. How you survive is up to you; your approach to scenarios is the story you come away with. You know, how people describe playing a game: "then this happened, so I did this...". That's narrative.
And many films do just translate plot wholesale with no thought to narrative.
That's why I suggest "throwing game aspects away". Doom, for instance, wasn't very good, but it had quite a lot in it that was new-to-the-film, and bad, rather than directly ported from the game. It tried to become its own thing, which is worth praising it for; compare that to, say, the Street Fighter movie, which darted from location to location, seeking excuses to get key moves and fight sequences in... you get my point.
A lot of the game-like features don't work when there's not a player to drive narrative. I have a treament for a Metal Gear Solid movie in my head, for instance - have had it for quite a while. And one thing that I think has to go in any adaptation of that is Psycho Mantis.
Why? Because he breaks frame; the game is escapist, but PM is a step too far. He gets away with it in the game because he has some fabulous sequences that only work within the game - the memory-card telepathy, moving the controller. Without his "money shots", he's literally a floating guy in a mask with some hokey superpowers that just doesn't fit in the world of the story. He's the kind of thing you remember for sucking. So he has to go. By contrast, you can keep/explain the supernatural abilities of Ocelot, Wolf, Ninja and even Raven quite well within the world of the story.
If you stick to the plot of the game - and use Mantis - you introduces things which are no fun to watch.
The problem is many games being adapted are action-heavy. I can't see how to make an entertaining Halo movie. It was a hugely entertaining game, and it was mainly about shooting stuff. The plot was good, but very much backgrounded.
The recent adaptation of Silent Hill gave me a bit of hope, even though it sounded quite dreary in the end. I just think more people need to look towards games where the narrative (as played by the player) can be more strongly adapted to a narrative you can tell a viewer.
Fahrenheit, for instance, might translate, but a lot of that game (story-heavy as it was) was designed around "playing" rather than watching. The flashback to the burning barn - you can do that in twenty seconds, not ten minutes - for instance.
Does any of that make sense? I think a greater willingness to take plot elements and then shape narrative, rather than assume it's there - even if that means plot changes - will produce better films, though not necessarily films that fans will recogtnise. |
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