Why You’ll Never Be Happy With Video Game Films

Thing is, games with bad stories and characters aren't likely to make good films, and those rare games with good, well handled stories and characters wouldn't necessarily have those things improved by being translated to a film.

More interesting would be films that aim to be companion pieces to the games, convincingly set in the same world. I don't need to see Grim Fandango retold on the big screen, but who wouldn't love to see Henry Selick or someone playing around in the same universe?

That said, Advent Children was basically doing something along those lines, and that was the worst thing ever.

I'd very much disagree with the article.

Sure, most games do have very simple stories, but many flicks aren't The Wire either. Die Hard? I'd argue that the most important elements are execution and details. The script of Die Hard for example could easily have been done into some Corin Nemec tv-flick of the week, but great direction and an even better main actor did wonders. People argue that games always have more time to develop emotions and depth, but so do books. And there are tons of great novel adaptations.

Let's take Max Payne. Why couldn't this have been as good as Death Sentence? There's simply no excuse. None.

I mean videogame flicks aren't important to begin with, but it always bugs me to see them failing at most basic elements. Reducing the action elements to nothing and choosing a teen Mona killed Max Payne. Seriously, what's the point in adapting anything if you change most things? People'd be pissed too if the new Jane Austen adaptation missed tons of romance and changed key figures into jokes.

Now a character like Marcus Fenix clearly is a bland canvas, an empty fuck not worth telling an interesting story about... but frankly, it's the screenwriters task to create that. In concept, Anton Chigurh was just a killer. The writers made him special, the directors made him even better. Same can be done even on Monopoly: The Movie.

I like how you brought up Max Payne. There is no way that it could have made a good movie without losing all connection with the game. Its a mash-up of genre cliches from dozens of movies. There is nothing inherently "new" in Max Payne. Which is cool when the plot is just a thing to get you to a new room where you down a half-dozen guys while doing a flying headstand.

Games do not make good movies. Even if the game is great, what made it great has nothing to do with what a movie would need to be any good. Different mediums follow different rules.