I don't think it's necessarily a temporary condition, but as I think about the implications I wonder whether that matters. Sci-Fi was pretty big after the first Star Wars film 'cause merchandising was proven to be a cash cow of unsuspected proportions. Tron lent itself to videogames pretty easily, obviously, but E.T. sunk Atari pretty much for good. As mergermania amped up in the eighties and the number of studios collapsed, sci-fi got pushed to the margins again because it couldn't support advertisements (again, with the exception of Reese's Pieces in E.T.) very well. So you get a bunch of flicks that err on the side of real life, and even the science fiction takes place in cities or homes, places where a coke can can shine, or a billboard can save the day. Then we start seeing renewed potential in the mid-nineties or so, with muscular Star Wars rereleases and a trend toward multiple games based on the same movie. The conventions for games have stayed pretty much the same: shooting, jumping, and racing with an empahasis on speed. Movies like Mission Impossible, Menace and Clones, Minority Report, and the newer Bond flicks, incorporate these elements with the intention of conversion to games. On the other hand, some of those elements existed already in "action" flicks and have certainly grown since Die Hard and Speed.
I may be going out on a limb when I say those two movieshad more story holding them together, though, than Clones does. Where they moved the plot, or at least the action, along in the earlier films, in Clones (the conveyor belts) and Minority Report (the platform jumping) they exist as straight up screen shots.
I don't think it's enough to sit back and say Capital's just doing what it does or call this a triumph of immersive multimedia entertainment. From an easychair angle or a Business angle each certainly has an elemnet of truth to it, but it doesn't really mean anything for movires, or culture, without a little more thinking.
Rugal, yr last comment is pretty fucking interesting. Can you name names, film titles, and game titles? It sounds good, but is ultimately only a suggestion without some faces on the generalities. And I know nothing about the faces.
A.I. had a lot more game elements than anybody seemed to notice. The quest was predicated on puzzle solving and involved some pretty empty characters in its execution. Gigolo Joe appears in the role of guide who takes David to an even more game-like Dr. Know... but yah, the conversion to game would fall flat. Existenz was more a comment on the invasion of game elements into movies than it was game-like itself: characters who responded to only one set of commands and Zork'd at the player if divergent commands were entered; stores, stops, and enemies around every corner; nonsense groups and scene-changes; poor mystery. The Matrix, contained some similar stuff, but wasn't really constrained by merchandising in the same way sure-thing blockbusters were. Gattaca wasn't even in theatre that long. The popularity of a genre will always mean the possibility of more good films, or at least different films, in that genre, right? Gattaca was a decent B-movie; A.I. was a decent pet project made by a rich fella.
Kids have always had ever-increasing disposable incomes. Advertisers have known that for a good thirty years now. Again, it's not enough to say advertisers recognize that. That's made obvious by all the cheap, bad movies that were intentionally based on successful game franchises: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider. The fact that more obscure films engage in a meta-discussion of the tendencies of film to adopt game structures, and that these same game structures are expressed in more and more films, amkes some discussion of its relevance to culture necessary. Yes, for the most part studios wanna make a Billion dollars in merch before the movie even opens, but is that completely insignificant to those receiving the message?
Film's been notoriously slow on the uptake. Advertisers have tried over and over again to find ways in, around, and through an certain realities of the most captive audience available: ads before films, placement in films, stories about products, and now *ahem* synergies among diverse product lines. People don't like ads in their movies, for the most part, so there's a certain saturation point where effective becomes intolerable.
I thnk maybe because folks see scifi as juvenille it's more permeable, easier to hijack. But millions of people still go see it. In fact, lately it's grossing more than anything else. And people still go to the movies and watch a story unfold and allow it to become part of their lives. It's just I'm woried ever so slightly about what we bring home from a game-like movie: what ways of thinking are offered, how satisfying it is, and whether, on a simpler level, the changes simply look bad. |
