Random Rambling: Video Game Adaptations
There are a lot of different things that have become successful movie adaptations. Books and comics are the big two, but some plays or even toys/games have had decent adaptations (I think the "Battleship" movie is an absolute blast to watch, even if it is not even close to a good movie.) "Barbie" set the bar high for what a movie based on a toy could be. One piece of media that has been incredibly hard to adapt is video games. There are no great video game movies; 2019's "Detective Pikachu" and 2020's "Sonic The Hedgehog" are enjoyable but don't reach the level of "great."
There are many reasons why most video game movies are terrible. The most obvious is that when you sit down to play a video game, you are an active part of the storytelling; the player has some control over how they approach a level or mission, for example. I just finished the latest 'Assassin's Creed" game, "Assassin's Creed: Mirage," and there are multiple points where you get to decide how you are going to get to your target; will you sneak in with the crowd or hire mercenaries to fight off the guards so you can sneak into the building? In a movie, you cannot recapture that. My experience playing a game might not match with someone else's. How do you relay those different experiences in a movie? What if I hated the part of the game that you chose to include in the movie? I could go on and on. While you can say the same thing about book adaptations, there is something singularly hard about putting a video game into a different medium because of how the user interacts with the material.
Another significant barrier is that the story takes place over an extended period. It took me about 11 hours to finish "Assassin's Creed: Mirage." While some of that time was spent on various side quests and dying because I made a dumb choice, it still amounts to a story that unfolds over a long time. How do you tell a story that takes the player 11 hours to experience in a two-hour movie? You really can't. This brings me to the crux of this Random Rambling: video games should only be adapted as television shows.
HBO’s “The Last of Us' and Prime's 'Fallout' exemplify successful video game adaptations. These shows have accomplished what movies often struggle with—they prioritize the 'why.' Why this story? Why tell it in this way? They use the game as a jumping-off point to tell a compelling story. Instead of attempting to recreate the game, they have chosen a few elements and crafted a story from there.
Let's look at moments from "The Last of Us" and the "Uncharted" movie lifted directly from the games that, I think, perfectly illustrate what I have been rambling about for over 500 words now. In 2022's "Uncharted," starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, we get a recreation of a major action scene from "Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception." Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is on a cargo plane and, after an action scene, is dangling from a long line of tethered crates. Playing this in the game is a ton of fun. You are dodging falling debris, shooting bad guys, and trying to climb back into the plane. In the movie, it's a fun action scene, but it loses a lot when you are not in control of Nathan.
Compare that to a moment from "The Last of Us." Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) have been on the road for a long time. They have made it from Boston to Salt Lake City, where the doctors are working on the cure. In a small moment before the big finale, Ellie finds some giraffes that have gotten loose from the zoo and show them to Joel. It is a quiet moment before the game/season ends. It's not a massive action set piece; nothing important is revealed during this scene. It is purely a character moment for the two main characters.
This gets back to the "why." If you choose to adapt something, it cannot be for just the moments of action. Nothing matters if you are not invested in the characters. A TV show's length allows the characters to develop and the audience to care about them so that we are invested in their fates when the action happens. That is what the movies have been missing; a reason to care.
