There is a lot of videogames having a movie version, and it's very rarely a success. But what are, more precisely, the reasons of this "curse" ? Why an adaptation of a game in a movie ends 9 times on 10 in a disappointed result, and even a mediocre one ?
In December 2016 was released Assassin's Creed, from the famous saga by Ubisoft. With a pretty mixed welcome, the movie relatively well went out there, including well-playing actors and a kind of loyalty to the universe of the saga. Unfortunately, it's not the case for all this kind of movies. Bad director, bad actors, disrespect to the gamers' community, badly mastered or non-existent references (even forced for those who pretend at least), it has a lot to say on the ton of failures we have seen these last years.
Uwe Boll, the one who hangs out
This brave guy (pronounce "Oovey Bowl") isn't known by everyone, but he's the king, I should say the emperor, of the mediocre adaptations. German director, Uwe Boll has first got down with the directing of House of the Dead in 2003. As a reminder, the game is a first person rail-shooter in a zombies universe, released on arch. Needless to say that the movie is an incredible turkey, and a commercial failure from its release. Thanks to a particular German financial system, Uwe Boll had picked up enough money to give life to more and more monstruosities : Alone in the dark, Bloodrayne, Postal... We can say that if we doesn't necessarily know his name, we know his work. So if we talk about curse, this man is for 70% the reason. But that's not all.
Videogame and cinema : two not necessarily compatible arts
Nowadays, there are a lot of people who think that videogame is an art, as music or cinema. And this is exactly what Hollywood's masterminds think they have understood : a new game aera appears for them, giving them new targets who are those young geeks, lost in their virtual world. Only here, the community of gamers is not this group of retarded imagined by those cinema's leaders. Videogame players are, as any enthusiast, clever people, who know what they're talking about and who know to appreciate the work made by a developer's team. Casual gamers, Call of Duty's campers or Metal Gear Solid's spies, each gamer has his expectations. And so, any game cannot be transformed in any movie. Videogames are made by interactions proposed to the gamers, who are actors of the action, while cinema take us as viewers. We don't ask the question anymore : a Hitman movie is bad because we don't want to watch him killing 47 people, but we prefer to think by ourselves, pad or mouse in hand, about the way we'll committ the murder. In the case of Assassin's Creed, the movie is good enough to not make us bored. But if we talk about a movie as bad as the Super Mario Bros movie, it becomes very funny. The game hasn't got scenario, and the decorative elements are there to give instinct to players (mushrooms make us jump on them, boxes makes us break them). So when Rocky Morton decided to realise the movie, he should have remember that no one wants to watch Mario and Luigi run after badly-made Goombas and hear another story about saving a princess. Mario is a game, very well-made, and it has to stay like this, as many of the other works.
Adapting a game which is already worth a movie?
Who has never asked himself, playing Uncharted or Thelas of us, "it could make a great movie !" ? It's okay : this kind of game is made like a movie. But one more time, it's a movie where we are the main actor. From one side, the game is good enough to make us follow our heroes like in a movie, et from another side, we don't undergo, we live them and we are the reason of them - we cause them. We prefer watch a boss dying after a fight against him, and not just watch the hero fighting him. Yes, it's only true if we talk about a videogame adapted in a movie : watching the Avengers fighting Loki is always pleasant, simply because their story has to be shown. And on the contrary, watching Nathan Drake climbing in a movie would be frustrating, because we did it before as players.
Finally, if videogames adapted in movies are very often, failures, it's simply because we can't do what we want with every fields, even the most pleasant. It's not because you like ketchup and cauliflower that the two mixed will give a good result. Even Silent Hill, seen as a good adaptation, has this little "lack of acting" for the viewer. Let's hope someday, we'll find a solution !
