Game for a movie

The recently released Warcraft will be followed by many more video game adaptations including Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and several others.

Video games have inspired filmmakers ever since the 80s but of late, with the recent releases of Warcraft (a fantasy film based on the video game series of the same name) and The Angry Birds Movie (a 3D computer-animated action-adventure comedy), and the anticipation of forthcoming films like Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed, it seems transforming video game concepts into mainstream films is fast picking up. Although these movies haven’t been massive hits at the box office, filmmakers have been keen on experimenting with the genre. We speak to gamers and movie buffs about how well video games translate onto the big screen and how much they appeal to a mainstream cinema audience.

For Akash Swain, gaming enthusiast and active member of Board Gamers of Delhi, a Delhi-based meet-up group, translating video games to movies is akin to translating books to films. “There’s not much to say about video game-based movies because they’re almost universally bad. As boilerplate action films, they’re passable. Their deference for the source material, however, is non-existent. Personally, I strongly feel that the kinds of stories that are told across the two media are very different. The level of immersion and the sentiment that video games seek to evoke don’t often translate well on the big screen. With video game films, you have a bunch of familiar characters in a similar setting, playing a parody,” he says.

It’s worse than book adaptations where they might get a few details wrong, points out Akash. He adds, “The best stories don’t necessarily make for the best scripts. With video game movies, they’re almost always milking the license for more money. Certainly, they made for decent films in the 80s and the 90s when the action genre purely meant action-packed films, but for the gamer who has grown to expect more reason behind why he’s squeezing the trigger, it’s usually a disappointment.”

Echoing a similar sentiment, gaming expert Ishaan Arya explains why video game-based films are a complete failure.

He asserts, “Historically, such movies haven’t done well because it’s hard to compress the complexity and depth of a gaming world and dozens of hours into a mere 2-hour format! It is the same problem that book adaptations face, and end up making several movies or deviating from the source material. Video game-based films face a tough task because people have already had a visual experience of what the makers are trying to show, so recreating the same experience for the audience becomes harder than just adapting something into a movie.”

Author Apurv Nagpal who loves watching movies based on video games feels such adaptations cater to a readymade audience, which makes filmmakers experiment with the medium time and again. He shares, “Although I am not a hardcore gamer but I love watching films based on video games. Films like Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time are my all-time favourites; Resident Evil (first of the series) wasn’t too bad either. But there are many which haven’t worked. Taking themselves too seriously, too little story, too much reliance on special effects, etc. are some of the common flaws.”

Video games are all about storytelling and so their adaptation naturally attracts the attention of filmmakers, opines gaming enthusiast and NGO professional Gautham Ravichander. He elaborates, “Over time, these stories have become more evolved and cinematic in nature, which obviously meant that they translated well on screen. Movies like Avengers, Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. have earned a good amount of revenue through game tie-ins in the past. Hence, games like Prince of Persia, Battleship, etc. are making the crossover. For example, did you know that the Matrix movies also had a game that extended the story For techies, it was exciting to see elements of the Animatrix and the Matrix games in the Matrix movies. It is only natural that the gaming world is translating back into the world of motion pictures.”

Gautham points out that another genre that’s becoming popular these days is video games that are essentially interactive stories. “Even shows like the Walking Dead have tie-in games that are interactive and let people explore the worlds of those stories in this format.”