Five Rules For Making Videogame Movies That Work

Gus Mastrapa helps Hollywood adapt games for the big screen.

You don't need to be Roger Ebert to know that cinematic adaptations of videogames are mostly garbage. That hasn't stopped some of the biggest guns in Hollywood at throwing their hats into the ring. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer has a Prince of Persia movie in the works starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Microsoft and Peter Jackson very nearly got a Halo feature off the ground. And Bret Ratner, best known for the Rush Hour flicks, has been flapping his gums for the past month or so about bringing Guitar Hero and God of War to the big screen. Meanwhile, the whipping boy of two entertainment industries, Uwe Boll, has been cranking out videogame movies by the boatload. Here's the scariest part: Through trial and error Boll has actually learned a thing or two about his craft - he's getting bigger. But will all those fancy-pants Hollywood jerks be smart enough to learn the rules that Boll has already figured out?

Rule 1: Adapt Games That Nobody Cares About  

Here's your No. 1 reason why it'll be a long time before we see a Halo movie. There are too many people invested in Master Chief and his silly cosplay hijinks. Microsoft has already sunk millions into the idea of making the picture, and they've learned after working with the best of the best that'll it'll take hundreds of millions more to make the movie happen the way it ought to. The fans will still *****. And to make matters worse, only a handful of women will buy tickets. Better to adapt a barely beloved property like Prince of Persia or do like Boll did and **** with Postal. Not a single tear was shed by Postal fans over Uwe's adaptation. Hell, he probably made improvements.  

Rule 2: Know Your World  

Silent Hill was a modest success because it came pretty darn close to capturing the surreal feel of Konami's survival/horror series. Games like Guitar Hero are an awful idea because they don't exist in an already realized universe. Best to tap games with distinct styles and try to recreated them as closely as possible. The Dwayne Johnson vehicle Doom strayed way too far from id's aesthetic and wound up coming off as a dull Alien clone. It's no coincidence that everybody's favorite part of the flick was the part with Pinky: the only time that awful movie really stuck to the program.  

Rule 3: Make the No-Brainers  

Videogames regularly swipe from movies. The easiest way to succeed with videogame movies is to tap the stories the genres that already worked like gangbusters in theaters. Japanese trash auteur Takashi Miike turned out a decent adaptation of Sega's Yakuza, a game steeped in 40 years of Japanese mobster movies. The Call of Duty series would make an awesome series of ongoing war movies. A game like God of War is a terrible idea, because the series is all about action - the kind of martial sword slinging that American pictures suck at. There's no blueprint for a working movie about a wannabe deity that goes on a deity killing spree. Movies about assassins and dirty cops, on the other hand, are a known quantity. Try those first.  

Rule 4: Come Up With A Story  

Most games don't really have stories, they have reasons to fight. Movies need more motivation. I hate to harp on God of War, but there are just so many reasons why this picture won't work. Kratos has a pretty damn good reason to do what he's doing in his games: revenge. But revenge plays out different in movies than it does in games. In a revenge picture, like Kill Bill, Old Boy or even Gladiator, there's a lot of set up. It takes a lot of standing around and talking to set up the great moments of retribution. Imagine how those scenes will play out in a picture like God of War, with some guy in white body paint standing around, *****ing about his dead wife. It's gonna look ridiculous.  

Rule 5: Make Sense  

It's understandable that every feature length picture based on Final Fantasy has been completely unintelligible. They were utterly true to the spirit of the unintelligible games they were based on. That's why games like Halo are so hard to tackle - their worlds are so mired in silly lore the uninitiated need Cliff's Notes to stay up to speed. The only exception to this rule is Silent Hill, a movie that made too much sense. Japanese survival/horror games and J-horror pictures milk most of their scares from they ways the break the rules of reality. They're all hopelessly indebted to David Lynch's Freudian freak-outs. Silent Hill would have been a better picture if it had been just a hair more bizarre. But that's the exception that proves the rule. The rest of the time videogame movies should keep all the backstory to a minimum and just keep it simple.    

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