The relationship between movies and video games has always been close-knit, and one could argue that video games would have turned out entirely different were it not for cinematic tropes and conventions. Bruce Lee\u2019s films act almost as an ur-text for an entire subset of video games: not only the premise and structure of Enter the Dragon<\/em> (which was itself influenced by the James Bond films of the \u201860s), but even the title of Lee\u2019s debut, The Big Boss<\/em> (1971), provided both a shape for future video games as well as gaming nomenclature itself, with most enemies at the end of game levels being dubbed \u201cbosses.\u201d In the wake of 1977\u2019s Star Wars<\/em>, mainstream cinema during the \u201880s delved further and further into genre, providing fantasies that became perfect fodder for video game developers to reference and riff on. Just about every major style of video game\u2014side scrolling action beat \u2018em up, spaceship battle sim, adventure platformer, first-person shooter, and so on\u2014has a cinematic antecedent, to the point where the majority of video games made can trace their roots to a popular movie genre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps that\u2019s part of why the first wave of video game movies made such outrageous efforts to graft other genres and elements onto adaptations of games that already had cinematic analogues. To be fair, the first one out of the gate, 1993\u2019s Super Mario Bros<\/em>., was adapting a game that virtually had no story, let alone a cinematic equivalent. Sure, the 1985 game had a thin narrative structure that goes back to the roots of drama\u2014save the princess\u2014but it was stuffed with disparate elements and characters not meant to hang together narratively. So it\u2019s no surprise that the Mario Bros.<\/em> movie is a messy stew of a film, a C.S. Lewis-style alternate dimension\/magic realm premise with notes of dystopian cyberpunk and comic-strip pulp. Derided by both critics and fans upon release, the film still stands alone as arguably the most original video game movie made to date, if only by default. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Double Dragon<\/em> and Street Fighter<\/em> (both 1994) have less of an excuse for their own hodgepodge messiness\u2014after all, both games were deliberately emulating action and kung-fu films of the \u201870s and \u201880s, so it wouldn\u2019t have been a stretch to simply make another type of those movies, slap a title on and call it a day. Yet Hollywood was still generally operating under the notion that a cinematic adaptation needed to be its own beast, and wasn\u2019t worried about the Comic-Con audience generating negative feedback. So, Double Dragon<\/em>, a game about two brothers punching and kicking their way through bad guys to save a girl, became a movie about two brothers punching and kicking their way through a future dystopian Los Angeles (redubbed \u201cNew Angeles\u201d) that acted like a mash-up of The Warriors<\/em> (1979) and Escape From New York<\/em> (1981). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Street Fighter<\/em>, based on a game about fighters in a tournament, took a \u201cripped from the headlines\u201d approach, having its multicultural characters swept up in a Bond-esque action-movie narrative as members of a United Nations-type peacekeeping force attempting to stop a coup by a Saddam Hussein-esque dictator. By the time 1995\u2019s Mortal Kombat <\/em>came around, some invented elements added to video game source material would occur on occasion, but that film\u2014again, adapted from a game about a fighting tournament\u2014took a lateral approach and was about a fighting tournament. Video game movies then began to follow suit: Wing Commander<\/em> (1999) was about space dogfighting, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider<\/em> (2001) was about a treasure hunting woman, Resident Evil<\/em> (2002) was about a zombie outbreak, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Hollywood continued cranking out video game films, they generally ceased to invent new styles or narrative ideas, choosing instead to make copies of the genres and subgenres of films that the games themselves had been based on. Even the odd entry that seemed to be a bold choice was really nothing new: 2005\u2019s Doom<\/em> made a big marketing push of being presented in the \u201cfirst person,\u201d as the game had been, but Robert Montgomery had beaten it to the punch about six decades prior with 1947\u2019s Lady in the Lake<\/em>. At the same time, video game technology increased rapidly to the point where the \u201ccutscenes\u201d\u2014the game term for non-interactive scenes included solely for narrative and exposition\u2014started to not only more smoothly integrate into the gameplay graphics themselves, but frequently resemble feature films. Where video game acting roles used to be the province of jobbing voice actors and\/or B-list live action performers, games started snapping up more A-list talent. The influx of actors into the game world meant advancements in performance capture tech, allowing games like \u201cUncharted,\u201d \u201cThe Last of Us\u201d and \u201cMass Effect 2\u201d to earn accolades for their performances as much as their gameplay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings us to the current stalemate between video games and cinematic adaptations of video games, the two mediums now close enough in form, feeling and structure that most adaptations feel like a moot point. For instance, 2008\u2019s \u201cDead Space\u201d is a game that brilliantly evokes the feeling of playing through a version of 1979\u2019s Alien<\/em>, so much so that if a film were to be made from it, that film would become yet another cinematic rip-off of that late-\u201870s classic (and plenty of those already exist). \u201cUncharted,\u201d a game series that blatantly seeks to translate the Indiana Jones<\/em> movies to gaming consoles, has just been adapted into a feature film that releases this month. While I have yet to see the film, judging by the trailers and clips it seems like a fairly rote recapitulation of tropes and concepts that were better done by Steven Spielberg in the four Indy<\/em> movies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike the comic book movie, where a disparity between mediums will always exist, video game movies and video games have merged to the point where most video games already are<\/em> movies, in effect. This is why, despite their flaws, the first wave of video game movies had the right idea in attempting to find new narrative and genre elements to combine with video game material that already had ties to cinema. Otherwise, video game movies at their best can only be a copy of a copy, a feedback loop of adaptation that dilutes rather than expands. There is some hope for the subgenre: the 2018 Tomb Raider<\/em> film took the Lara Croft character away from being merely a female Indiana Jones clone, and 2021\u2019s Werewolves Within<\/em> adapted a game that didn\u2019t have a rabid fanbase, allowing the movie to (delightfully) be its own thing. If filmmakers can\u2019t make creative choices like those films and if fans can\u2019t get over their obsessive need for adaptations to be slavishly devoted to the source material, then it might soon be game over for the video game movie.\u00a0 \u201cUncharted\u201d lands in theaters this week, so let\u2019s take a look at the sketchy history of video game adaptations \u2013 and why the interplay between these two media make them so hard to pull off. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":17849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162,1104],"class_list":["post-17847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies","tag-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22054,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847\/revisions\/22054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/super-mario-bros-1024x580.jpg\")
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