Robert here. There has been a flurry of video game movie news this week. On Monday it was announced that new Spider-Man (or Spider-Boy, as it were) Tom Holland had been cast as a young Nathan Drake in the long gestating Uncharted movie.
We also got news that the Resident Evil film series which ended just this spring already on the reboot track. Not just a reboot but they're threatening an entire second hexalogy. (Does Resident Evil need 12 films?) Meanwhile, the latest Tomb Raider reboot staring Oscar winner Alicia Vikander is trucking right along towards its March 2018 bow.
Movies based on video games have long been a profitable cash grab for studios, but they have a reputation for being bad to abysmal quality wise. Does this latest trio of features have any hope...
The problem with video game movies has always been translating what makes playing the games thrilling onto the big screen. Video games, for all of their strong characters and compelling missions, tend to focus more on environmental storytelling than actual plot. The original Tomb Raider and Resident Evil games, both released in the OG Playstation days, had narratives that were uncovered only after hours of walking down hallways and corridors, gunning down enemies, and finding the occasional diary entry or mystical item to add texture to the world. This makes for a compelling hands on experience, but watching an actor do the same on screen for two hours does not a great film make.
To work around that the movie version of those franchises added more plot and in doing so lost the atmosphere that made the games they were based off of special. It turned Resident Evil into an overly complicated amnesia drama and Tomb Raider into a lukewarm techno-update of Indian Jones, and left both fans and critics disappointed.
Storytelling in video games has made huge leaps forward in the more recent gaming eras, in part thanks to technological advances and the rising of their image as actual art rather than mindless distraction. FMV cutscenes now merge seamlessly with gameplay and world class actors provide voice over and motion capture performances. Games like Uncharted and the recent Tomb Raider reboot (which the new movie will be based on) are driven by rich plots supported by compelling gameplay. Characters fill the levels, there are twists and story heavy sections. The latest Resident Evil entry plays like an interactive hybrid of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead. I may be naïve, but I believe that will help produce movies that are more faithful to what makes the games they are based on compelling while actually being, you know, good.
Do you have faith in this new crop of video game movies? How could a video game movie break the mold?