Pajiba

I really wish that Hollywood would give video games some breathing room before they buy the rights and start production. It would be nice if we could get a chance to play them a little before they are forever ruined by the inevitably shitty adaptations.

So by 1.5 cool movie adaptations, Resident Evil has 0 points contributing to this score right?

Look, I know it gets no respect anywhere, but the first Mortal Kombat movie is a fantastic B movie, that captures a lot of the goofy "let's have a tournament to the death" charm that populates all sorts of Kung Fu movies. Come on the penultimate fight is against a muppet fof Godtopus' sake! Isn't that worth at least 1/2 a movie? At least for the soundtrack which has been used at every martial arts tournament since it came out?

"Resident Evil has 0 points contributing to this score right?"

--RE contributes negative points for giving us the continued works of Leeloo Dallas (stick with Maxim, stay out of movies), and having Mike Epps around in two painfully unscary, boring sequels.

--Positive contributions of the video game movie adaptation genre include;

-That one scene in Silent Hill where that chick gets her skin ripped off
-Helping to kill Freddy Prinze Jr.'s career
-The last half of Advent Children (NERD ALERT!)
-Olga slinking around Marky Mark's apartment in Max Payne
-Tomb Raider posters. And ONLY the posters.
-The comedy that is...Chris Klein
-Roger Maris fighting Kevin Nash in Punisher

-woops that was Mickey Mantle fighting Kevin Nash. Roger Maris defeated the aliens in the year 3000 led by the tyrannical Tony Manero. I'll stop now.

Where's that Bioshock movie? In the right hands, it could give the world its first good video game movie (sorry, but RE was wretched). Bioshock's story is already better than 90% of the shit H-wood puts out.

I like that Brad Pitt. I'm mildly interested, simply because as a gamer I suck at the button mashing aspect (I'm a tactics weenie all the way) but I mangle my way through because I just love cut-scenes.

I like the idea of such techie-tech threads too, but those helmets? I always say...'ow' when those things get all snap-together. You know some people would totally bitch.

By the way, on the cut scene love, Dead Fantasy is SO worth your time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryH1TB4gEUY

Touchee creosote, touchee...

And the Bioshock movie (I think like Halo) is one of those "in-flux" dealios, where the movie has a new writer, then a new draft, then the studio backs off, rinse, repeat.

It would just be nice if someone would make a leap in directing choice or something like that for video game movies. It's going to take someone with a different vision or some other cliched artistic attribute to make it work. You can't just keep throwing the same cookie cutter wire effects (Street Fighter) or action movies lacking either depth/un-stupid plot/lack of scope (Doom).

Video Game Movies are kind of like Comic Book Movies. It takes something special to see that they can be viable projects. You had nothing decent between Superman 1-2, and then it took Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson to make Batman gigantic.

A few years later, crap like Batman Forever, later on Daredevil/Fantastic 4/Catwoman/Hulk are kicking around, and it took Spidey/X-Men/Batman Begins to legitimize comic book movies. Another step back with Elektra/Ghost Rider, and then Iron Man and Dark Knight show that comic book movies can just be good movies when you hire the right actors and production people.

So the question is, what is going to make video game movies legit? Is it a Peter Jackson/Neil Blomkamp backed Halo? Sam Raimi working on World of Warcraft? There have been movies you could financially call "successful", but we aren't going to get the adaptations fans want until someone makes a good enough movie to be "critically" successful.

(ps sorry about length. I could make this a rather long blog post, but no.)