If you head over to my Twitter feed, you'll find the latest batch of micro reviews for 1994's Street Fighter (http://twitter.com/#!/ShakeAndBakeJB)
Now as a film reviewer, I kind of pride myself on being able to to tolerate a lot of awful cinema. I'm also very much a child of the 80's and 90's and spent a lot of my youth in front of a massive 12-inch CRT playing the coolest fighting game on the SNES - Street Fighter II Turbo. It was amazing - and for a change, I'm not being sarcastic. Even by today's standards the cartoonish brilliance of the title means it still stands up as a classic. The game boasts a smorgasbord of colourful characters - all armed with a unique arsenal of special moves, the action was fast, the stories all interlinked and made sense, and there was that sadistic thrill you get when you land Ryu's heel on Sagat's face, hear a wince-inducing crunch and see his health bar take a hit.
Today, the likes of Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Virtua Fighter and the Soul series have all sprung up in competition to be king of the genre, but they all owe their success to good old SFII. Without the brightly coloured, high octane fisticuffs found therein, who knows what the beat-'em-up genre would be like now?
Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. My point is that Street Fighter II was (and still is) a groundbreaking incredible game and I should have watched the movie sooner. The truth is though, I didn't watch it on account of everybody and their dog telling me what a big steaming pile of shit it was. It wasn't a case of me avoiding it, it was a case of me not actively seeking it out - which I'm sure a lot of people have claimed about a number of actual must-see classics, only to be met with "You ain't seen Bad Boys 2?!" levels of incredulity from their peers.
Still, I always kinda wanted to see what all the (lack of) fuss was about. Almost as an endurance test, I knew that at some point I'd want to watch the film just to see if it is indeed as bad as they say it is. I also hoped it would fall into that brilliant 'so-bad-it's-good' category that features a ton of the films I proudly display in my DVD collection. One day, when walking through Sainsbury's to stock up on Mountain Dew and cashew nuts, I wandered to the DVD selection and finally saw it...for just £2. After sitting down and taking a good eight minutes to compose myself, I stuck it in my basket and legged it to the checkout. Racing home with all the enthusiasm of Charlie Bucket clutching his Golden Ticket, I finally allowed myself the opportunity to indulge in the *ahem* brilliance that is Street Fighter.
As I say, the reviews are up over on my Twitter feed and they're far from favourable. The film is bloody dreadful. However, I will say this - I wasn't bored and it was a darn sight better than the most recent live-action adaptation featuring Smallville's Kristin Kreuk as everybody's favourite lightning kicking Interpol hottie Chun-Li. It's definitely a 1/5 level film, but one I will probably watch again with a big grin on my face at how dire everything is.
Still, I've been thinking recently about how games can be adapted into movies (computer games that is. Not really relishing the idea of Guess Who? and Monopoly following the blueprint form board-game adaptations laid out by Clue). So far they've all be pretty awful but very recently, I saw a glimmer of hope in the form of a certain web series - Mortal Kombat Legacy. The series has been pretty incredible so far as its creator Kevin Tancharoen had his show greenlit off the back of his proof-of-concept short in which he re-imagined the MK universe in a realistic manner (Reptile being a serial killer with the rare skin disease harlequin-type icthyosis, Baraka as a psycho plastic surgeon who went nuts and filled down his teeth and implanted blades into his forearms etc.). The result was pretty impressive to say the least and it got me thinking about why game adaptations generally don't work and what exactly this thing did differently to make it a success. I don't want to sound like I've split the atom or anything but I'm a genius as I cracked it. If you're a budding filmmaker looking to adapt a game, then you may want to bear this next bit in mind in order to avoid creating a total stinker.
Adapting anything is always going to cause a certain amount grief from established fans of the source material. How many times have you heard, "Oh, it's good but the book is better"? I'll bet it's a lot. Now I think that the reason for this is that, when reading a book, you paint the picture in your mind of how that story would play out visually (hence Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton books being so popular with kids over the years). When someone else adapts that story and it differs to yours, it can be jarring. The result is that you condemn a piece of cinema/TV because somebody's vision was different to what yours would have been and, to you, they've interpreted it wrongly. Still, they don't get slammed anywhere near as much as game adaptations because your association with the source material is passive. You're simply a spectator tracking the action and not influencing in any way (unless it's one of those 'follow your adventure' type books or you're Bastian reading The Neverending Story). In the case of games, you're an active participant. You control the character and go on their narrative journey. This can take as little as a couple of hours, to a few days where you effectively ARE that character (hell, it can take years if you're particularly slow at playing some of them). As a result, whether you like it or not, you take a much more emotional investment in that character and when you pay good money to watch someone else take them on an adventure, it's just going to be tantamount to watching someone else play your game. Naturally then, you're much more likely to balk at the film/show as every move the characters make isn't done by you. As such, it simply feels odd. For that reason alone, it's very tough to do a decent game to film medium hop and have it adored by fans.
That's not to say its the only reason that game adaptations suck. Sometimes the transition between media doesn't allow for a palatable transition. For instance, the Super Mario Bros flick featured "Dinohattan" in place of the Mushroom Kingdom in a bid to try and bridge the gap between the real world and the cartoonish landscapes of the games. The result was bloody weird and in the end it fell flat on its fat Italian arse.
One of the other problems is that some games involve controlling multiple characters - each on a different quest. Play one of these games (such as Street Fighter or Tekken) for a good few hours and you'll eventually cover all of the stories involved within the game and get the complete picture. As I say though, that can take hours and hours. If you're conversely trying to ram 15 characters' stories into a 90 minute film, you're going to run into problems whereby no one relates to any character as they're not on screen long enough. It also means that storylines aren't fleshed out properly and everything seems just a little less epic than the source title that you no doubt spent a lot of time on. It ends up feeling like a a highly abridged and lengthy trailer for the game rather than a film its own right. For proof of this - check out the Mortal Kombat flicks. The first one wasn't great by any stretch - but it was fun, focused and offered a structured storyline (swiped from Enter the Dragon but that's neither here nor there). It also only followed a handful of heroes as they faced off against a few choice goons - meaning the story remained on a clear track and we're not hopping between characters every five minutes. And that's exactly where the sequel went wrong as they tried to ram in a roster of a million characters and still come out with a viable movie. No characters got the attention they probably deserved and the experience was shallow and underwhelming.
So that's where things have gone wrong over the years really. There've been a handful of decent ones but not really anything that's truly ace. Tomb Raider and Resident Evil film series have done okay in that they've generally veered away from the game's storylines (except the second Resi flick which was hands down the worst - shocker) and stuck a smoking hot leading lady front and centre - as such they remain watchable at the very least. It's a good quick-fix but hardly going to make your adaptation a classic is it?
In order to really do a game adaptation properly, you simply need to make some sacrifices. You're not just dealing with preconceptions, you're dealing with how other people do things. Some would play Grand Theft Auto IV and do everything by the book while others would fob off the main storyline to go killing hookers and ramming cop cars. Simply put, people play games differently and you can't please all of the people all of the time - so don't even try. It's important to remain respectful to the source and to take a few liberties with the filler bits of the story. Use the game as an outline and flesh it out properly. Effectively it has to be a good movie first and an adaptation second. Focus on characters that need focus and ignore the rest otherwise you'll end up overloading things. If you simply have to include a ton of characters, do them properly and do a series instead of a film. Don't hamper yourself for time - tell the story you want to tell but do it properly - just like the Mortal Kombat bloke did.
I'm not saying I can do a better job than the next guy, but I've seen enough that I can pick out common flaws. Hopefully others will realise this and in the next few years we'll start to see some genuinely good adaptations of games. Until then, I'll wait with baited breath for the announcement of a Metal Gear Solid film, hoping that whoever is in charge won't fuck it up too badly.
No comments:
Post a Comment