Inkwell: Game-To-Movie Adaptations

Dark Horizons, a site which covers news on the film, television, and (increasingly) video game industries, recently reported that the film version of Tom Clancy's The Division was still in the works and recently had director Sean Gaghan attached to the project.  Gaghan's best known work was the movie Syriana, a Middle East political thriller told from multiple perspectives which made George Clooney go fat for the role and probably helped Alexander Siddig (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) stay going as an actor.  There is, of course, incredible noise over this.  Lots of hand waving and fist pumping and name dropping.  "Look at all these stars we've got!" is basically the message of every press release at virtually every stage of the production.



It was, I suppose, inevitable that once video games started to become popular, some Hollywood exec would do just the right amount of blow mixed with the right amount of booze and think, "Hey, we could make movies out of video games!"  Sadly, Hollywood's track record on these projects has not been encouraging.  Let's take a quick look back, shall we?

• Super Mario Brothers - When your two leads are spending every minute not on camera in their trailers pounding scotch to work up the courage (or casual indifference) to do their next shot, there is something seriously wrong with your project.
• Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever - It's a hard thing when the director of a film disavows the final cut that gets shown to audiences.  It's even worse when the actors disavow it.
• Double Dragon - Robert Patrick became a household name when he did Terminator 2, projecting the sort of dead eyed menace that only a few actors ever come close to accomplishing.  This movie undid a lot of that success.
• Mortal Kombat - When your best known actor at the time (Christopher Lambert) doesn't even want to do the sequel, you as a director/producer/agent/studio exec should be panicking.  Nobody did.
• Uwe Boll - A cottage industry of awful and German tax evasion, he's probably done more to destroy the credibility of the idea of game-to-film adaptations than any one person over the last decade, and he's probably inflicted untold damage on a lot of actors' careers. Look upon his IMDB page and despair.

A large part of the blame for these and other failures lies with a degree of institutional arrogance that sits within virtually everything to do with Hollywood.  As an industry, they've been making movies for so long, they figure that their methods are the most effective, they know all there is to know about making movies, and that the computer geeks who make video games should shut up and be thankful that they're getting mentioned as being the source material in the first place.  It should also be pointed out that that arrogance also extends to the screenwriters.  For every Robert Rodriguez or Clive Barker who can exert the will to keep their scripts more or less intact, there's a faceless multitude of writers who aren't so lucky.  Reading through various books on screenwriting, one gets the impression that as long as you change the title and the names of the characters on a consistent basis, one could literally send the same script out year after year and get paid for it, even if it never gets produced.

Somebody in the Peanut Gallery is probably shouting, "What do you know about screenplays?  You just write about video games!  You don't even work on games, man!"  The fact that one has not been employed in the industry does not mean one knows nothing about the craft, a point which Hollywood consistently seems to overlook.  When I was younger, it occurred to me that video games, particularly big gnarly ones like Baldur's Gate and the hordes of imitators to follow, would require scripts for the dialog pieces, so learning about screenwriting struck me as a useful skill to pick up.  As cinematic sequences became more common, it occurred to me that learning more about film making would also serve me in good stead, and being a film buff didn't hurt either.  (TL;DR - I'm not talking through my hat on this.)

So what would make future adaptations better?  I have a few thoughts on some projects that are currently in the works.

Splinter Cell

• This one already has a strike against it as Tom Hardy being cast as Sam Fisher.  The producers may think they can "James Bond" their way through this, with future films having different actors being Sam Fisher, but the fact that Sam Fisher is not as well known as James Bond, and is certainly not as iconic the same way as James Bond means this is going to be a tough sell to audiences from the start.
• Another tough sell is the backstory of Sam Fisher and Third Echelon.  In the real world, the NSA is not terribly well thought of right now, and the idea that an agency which is primarily comprised of codebreakers and SIGINT listeners having a direct action arm which operates under the principle of "The Fifth Freedom" will go over about as successfully as a lead balloon.  If there's some Hollywood exec thinking, "But we can use this as a vehicle to help reform the NSA's image!", they need to put down the blow.  The NSA likely would not be providing a lot of technical assistance for this film.
• It's difficult to see how this one turns out well, but the smartest direction that I can think of from a story perspective is to treat it almost like a heist movie.  Play up the stealthy aspects, the gadgets, the lone operative/cat burglar slipping in and out without leaving a single trace that they were there.  Weirdly enough, I'd think David Mamet might almost be perfect for this as a director and maybe as a script doctor.  Watch Heist and Spartan if you don't believe me.

The Last of Us

• This one was pretty cinematic to begin with, so that's a plus right there.  Neil Druckmann being involved with the script is a bigger plus.  Since he worked on the game, he probably has a better idea than 99% of the scriptwriters in Hollywood how to condense the game's story down to a reasonable running time for film.
• There are some fans who will demand "purity" by casting Troy Baker as Joel and Ashley Johnson as Ellie.  That is never going to happen.  Both Naughty Dog and Sony would be wise to resist the calls of fanboys more vocal than anything useful and cast the roles appropriately.  (For myself, I always figured Josh Brolin might make a good Joel, though I can also see Ethan Hawke in the role)
• If you take the amount of cinematics that are in the game presently, using those as a guide and cutting out scenes that really are not necessary, you've got a pretty good rough cut of what the movie might be like.  As much fun as it is to play up the infected and the threat they represent, make it more about the people, especially the monsters that look like people.

Tom Clancy's The Division

• First off, drop the reference to Tom Clancy from the title.  It may be tempting, but the last couple of movies based off Tom Clancy's books or characters died ignominiously at the box office (Looking at you, Chris Pine).  It works (vaguely) for a game.  For a movie, no.
• The fact that Jake Gyllenhall and Jessica Chastain are attached to this project leaves me with some mixed feelings.  On the one hand, Chastain has some history playing in the spy thriller genre and she absolutely nails the "halls of power" angle of it.  On the other hand, Gyllenhall has been kind of hit or miss, particularly in military or paramilitary roles, though he does play "normal kinda guy" pretty well.  Giving us a taste of what their characters are like right before the call-up is probably a good idea.  Outside of that, while these are the two biggest names involved, going the ensemble route (much like Black Hawk Down or Zero Dark Thirty) might be a better way to go, since it not only takes the pressure of carrying the movie off Gyllenhall and Chastain's shoulders, it also gives more chances to tell more stories within a larger narrative.  Might be a much better idea in light of the mixed reviews on Assassin's Creed.
• There's been bugger all in terms of what the story is going to be.  My instinct would be to tell the story of what happened to the First Wave instead of following the story beats from the game.  This serves three purposes.  First, it gives fans of the game some highly desired backstory that has, so far, only been revealed in snippets.  Second, it acts as an acid test for the general audience pool.  From what players of the game know, the story of the First Wave ended in tragedy and betrayal.  Can general audiences take that story with the caveat that there is more story to come?  Much as it might rankle some, I can picture a post-credits sequence where the call-up for the Second Wave starts happening, much like the intro cinematic for the game.  Finally, it gives Ubisoft's film division and whoever they go with a sequel opportunity to try again with a new cast and a different focus if it turns out that this one didn't do so hot.

Ultimately, slavish devotion to the source material is no better than complete disregard for the source material if there isn't a fundamentally sound movie beneath it all.  If I can cut out any and all references to a game property, and it's still a bad movie, the game property isn't the problem.