Resident Evil, Max Payne, Hitman.
These are all films released over the past few months that are adapted from video games, that completely failed to live up to the standards that their predecessors had set before them.
And why? My theory, and you are free to object, (but seeing as though you are reading this, you care about what I have to say, for which I thank you) is that it is nearly impossible for these pieces of art in their own right to make the astronomical leap onto the silver screen.
It is far from easy to think of a game that has made a half decent film. This is because of the director's "Creative license". This allows the director to take the art that has been presented before them and rip it to shreds quite literally changing the things integral to the game and mutilating it for the sake of Hollywood's bucks. But in putting the game in the cinema, it takes an integral part of the game away, the heart and soul of the game: you.
You, the player are the missing piece of the puzzle, and that's what makes the game so immersive; the fact that you are in the shoes of the protagonist, be it Nathan Drake, Gordon Freeman or Agent 47, you see things from his or her perspective. And in taking this integral feature out of the game just gives you an inaccessible watered down 2 hour long film version of an incredibly immersive and epic journey that you go on with the character.
In response to these stinkers of movies, the creators of the games have sat up and taken notice of it. Games such as Uncharted, Bioshock and Metal Gear Solid 4 have attempted to blur the line between the mediums of video games and movies, not just playing incredibly well, but they create an atmosphere that could only be described as cinematic. Some of these games take the more cinematic route, with Metal Gear Solid 4, culminating in an hour and a half long cutscene; and while some may reside in calling this sort of thing dull beyond belief, when you have spent tireless hours plugging away at this thing, growing attached to the characters and actually feeling a genuine sense of compassion to something that is no more that a few lines on the screen, I honestly feel that that is a better, more entertaining, experience than any film can create.
The huge irony to this now is that the film makers are going to spoil these pieces of real artistic merit by turning them into films, I know that certainly Bioshock is aptly being converted from the human that it is, into the form of a mindless "Big Daddy" of the silver screen.
But there may yet be light at the end of the tunnel. The much talked about, and now apparently cancelled, movie based on Halo, was to be directed by none other than Mr. Hobbit himself, Peter Jackson, a man who knows how to take on projects of alarmingly large scope and make them work as epic movies.
There is still a part of me that doubts that even the capabilities of Mr Jackson would be able to convey a game of Halo's scale onto the big screen, and an even larger part of me wants to tell all of these fools who want to see these games as films to pick up a controller and just play them at their purest form without the likes of Uwe Boll dumping on it.
Even the largest technophobe can not just throw these games to the kerb as pieces of art just because they think that they are designed for kids, I can assure you that this is the way forwards, take for example soon to be released Heavy Rain, it is basically an interactive film and I hope to God that after games like this the mass populous will start to take video games seriously as pieces of art.
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