Games & Film Part 1

One of the big stories to hit in recent weeks was that the proposed Gears of War movie has hit the skids. The movie was to be helmed by Len Wiseman of the Underworld movies and Live Free or Die Hard. He recently decided to leave the project after the budget was slashed to under 100 million, and the story, allegedly, was changed to a more straightforward alien invasion story line. No word if chest-high walls were still in the film.

While I actually dig the story to Gears of War very much why did it deserve a movie before Halo or Mass Effect?

I don’t know the answer to be honest. Halo is one of the most successful franchises of all time and was this close to being a movie. But the studios balked at spending nearly 200 million on a movie based on a game. For a long time I thought the studios were just being obtuse and ignorant about games. How could they not see the potential?

That got me thinking about the track record of games being made into movies. Does anyone remember the Super Mario Brothers Movie? If you don’t, then you should go back and watch it again. It is a special kind of terrible. It has the power of killing you with awfulness while at the same time reviving your dead corpse with powerful face rape and visual vomit. I know I’ve mentioned on the podcast that I find it odd that they were so willing to diverge from the games main story and visual design on every level, yet they still felt they had to shoehorn in the fact that Mario and Luigi jumped a lot with awkward feet jump packs. And this disaster of humanity is one of the first examples of video games being turned into movies. In a way we should be grateful for the great crash of 1983 because it probably forced the Pac-Man live action film to be put on hold.

Super Mario Bros. The Movie came out in May 1993. I remember because I was there. General Cinemas, Bridgewater, New Jersey. I can only remember Nick going, but I shudder at the thought that I made my whole family go. So how do you follow this travesty up? You cast a pre-Party of Five Scott Wolf in Double Dragon. He plays Billy. Frankly, the movie is just terrible. Its one of those early 90s movies that felt that LA would be completely destroyed by a big quake and change its name to San Angeles or New Angeles. There were so many of these movies that its practically its own genre. Double Dragon is god awful and should not be viewed by anyone.

Only a few short weeks later, the Raul Julia performed in his last role in a movie called Street Fighter. I’m curious as to how many people actually saw this movie. I actually own it on DVD because I found it at Wal-Mart for two dollars. I only bought it because there was Directors Commentary and I just had to listen to it. Boy, was it worth it. First of all, the movie is terrible. It has such weird production design that it feels like a 60s Bond film with no money. Plus they had to shoehorn in every single character from the second game. Even a couple of the characters from Super Street Fighter 2 make an appearance. The “world famous” Kylie Minogue is in this flick as Cammy. For some reason, they also made Guile the main character of the film. Which as a kid made no sense to me. I always felt that Ryu was the main character. Only later in life did I realize that in the first Street Fighter he was indeed the main characters, so making Guile the main hero was their first of many mistakes. I guess it made more sense to cast JCVD as Guile instead of Ryu. The movie takes an especially stupid turn when they introduce Blanka into the movie. He even does his special barrel roll move. Yes, he flies through the air a great distance spinning around in a ball like motion at someone. Even with all of that the movie was actually quite successful. It made nearly three times the amount it cost to make. The director even openly discussed a sequel. However, he mentioned that the commentary was for the Laserdisc several times in the commentary, so it probably was recorded a long time ago.

Next in line was Mortal Kombat. This movie stars Chris Lambert playing Raide, Pete Sampras’ old girfriend as Sonya Blade, and the crazy guy from South of Hell as Johnny Cage. Basically, the movie was awesomely cast Unlike the previous movies this one did stay pretty close to target with the storyline of the game. In fact it translated pretty well all things considered. It even has Reptile. Each one of our heros has a big fight with a villian and they beat the crap out of the villian. Johnny cage even does his ball-buster special move in a hilarious moment that you have to witness to believe. In the end the movie isn’t terrible, but the fight scenes are ancient compared to anything we see nowadays. The movie was pretty successful and even had a sequel and a TV Series. The TV series is the series that TNT (We Know Drama) wanted to keep over the Babylon 5 spin-off Crusade. Yes, 11 years later I am still bitter.

To close out the 90s came the strangest of all of the Video Game movies – Wing Commander. Wing Commander was one of the most acclaimed video games of all time. The first three games form one of the best examples of video game storytelling that you can ever find. The third game even successfully used Full Motion Video to tell its story. As anyone who played computer games in the mid 90′s can tell you that is no easy feat. I remember Dick Clark hosting one of those blooper shows and they pulled out a clip from Wing Commander 3. He herald it as a new beginning for entertainment and used it to show the audience how far games had come. The clip was pretty mundane as it featured Biff from Back to the Future getting an earful from Mark Hamil about something and then Biff going, “Hey, wasn’t he in Star Wars?”. It’s barely funny even with canned laughter.

The movie was supposed to usher in a new age for video game movies. It was directed by the games creator Chris Roberts so you know it had to respect the source material. It had a fairly decent budget and a decent cast. At least that’s what I thought going into the theater. The Kilrathi looked like oversized muppets but without the fur or realism. The acting wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been. And the science fiction at times seemed more like science fantasy. The production design didn’t bother me all that much. I dug the World War 2 influenced fighters, and on some level having the carrier look more like a Submarine makes more sense. I didn’t get why they still had a runway, in space. The plot was weak and inferior to most of the games it was based on. Seriously, what the fuck was that pilgrim shit? He has some evolutionary power to do space math fast? You’d think by the 27th century Intel would have space math down pat. I can buy Freddie Prinze Jr as a space pilot but I can’t buy him being a natural at Space Math. That’s like Denise Richards playing a nuclear scientist named Christmas Jones.

After Wing Commanders’ loud thud came the biggest success story yet for video game movies, Tomb Raider. Everyone knew that this game was going to be made into a movie. British chick with big boobs and treasure hunts? Even without a game to base it on Hollywood would have made that movie. The movie stars Angelina Jolie before she started collecting children and lost a ton of weight and became less hot. The movie is an adventure movie that has Jolie going around the world finding artifacts to save the planet. Nothing really special. With that being said the movie is still the highest grossing video game movie of all time, topping around 300 million world wide. I haven’t seen the movie in nearly ten years, but I seem to recall that Jolie’s boobs seem to get bigger and bigger as the movie goes along. That’s basically the whole point of the movie. Boobs.

Now at this point you may start believing that I’ve left some movies off of this grand list. You’d be half right. Generally, video game anime hasn’t been all that bad. The Street Fighter 2 animated film was quite good if I remember correctly. So this column is intended to only discuss the live action movies based on games. But there is one animated movie that needs discussing, Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within. If you believe that the Final Fantasy games have been missing something since the PS1 era you have this movie to blame. The movie is about future earth being invaded by aliens called the Phantoms that have driven humanity to barrier cities and some chick has to find a way to save humanity. The chick was voiced by Ming Na. At the time the character Aki was featured on magazines – even dirty ones – because she was so lifelike. Everyone thought that these virtual actors would replace real actors and directors would finally have all the control in the world. Only Robert Zemekis still believes this to be a feasible way to make movies.

Well the movie came out in July of 2001 and was a huge flop. It forced Square to have its first profit loss in nearly two decades and closed the studio that was created to make the film, Square Pictures. The director of the film was Hironobu Sakaguchi, who created and oversaw the Final Fantasy franchise up until Final Fantasy IX. IX came out in 2000 and this movie came out in 2001. After its disastrous box office return it was rumored that Square took away all of his duties and put him in a closet to die. He eventually left the company in 2004 and started his own company, Mistwalker. Square would later use some of the technology and artists from the movie to create one of the Animatrix shorts, Flight of the Osiris. That was back when we all thought the Matrix sequels were going to be good and not the turds they became. The short was attached to the movie Dreamcatcher and is to be blamed for any money that film made.

That’s it for Part 1 of this awesome three part series! Join us next Thursday as I take you through the Resident Evil and Uwe Boll era.