Home
sign up| features / game column |
 content by: editor |
 games: game movies
Are games movies always going to be crap? Uwe Boll is a name that should strike fear into the hearts of anybody with an interest in games and movies. This is the man who is determined to keep videogame movies in a ghetto of execrable dross. I still haven't forgiven him for his House Of The Dead. In a genre of bad movies, it was easily the worst.Now he's mangled the granddaddy of survival horror games, Alone In The Dark. And he already has three other games movies in production. Or, more accurately, he's developing three more movies that are set to despoil the videogame names they've taken. Sadly, this includes Far Cry, a magnificent PC game (which is looking like it'll have a decent console incarnation) that should have provided ample material for a striking movie. So are games movies always going to be crap?  House Of The Dead film & House Of The Dead game I'm not holding out much hope for the big-screen outing for Doom either (UK release 19 August 05), a mid-budget Hollywood flick directed by the man behind duff Steven Segal vehicle Exit Wounds. A better bet may be the Silent Hill movie, due out next year. Surely it would have been better in the directorial hands of a Japanese or Korean with a track record in supernatural scares. Still, at least Frenchman Christophe Gans (Brotherhood Of The Wolf) and Canadian Roger Avary (former Tarantino script collaborator and director of The Rules Of Attraction) seem to be taking the project seriously and engaging with fan anxieties. Avary has emphasized how much he's been playing the games, and while he says he's not “obsessed” with them, he says Gans is. “It's going to be a fantastic filmic experience. Christophe is too obsessed with it for it not to be. Have faith.”  Silent Hill 3 & Doom 2 Other games whose licenses seem to be in the hands of filmmakers include Metroid, Onimusha, Deus Ex, Driver, Devil May Cry, Half-Life and even Dead Or Alive, amusingly. One particularly significant piece of news – or the loose internet spiel that passes for it – is a Halo movie. If ever a game franchise needed to be taken very, very seriously - because of the sheer number of fans that would be outraged were it screwed up, Uwe Boll-style - it's Halo. Apparently, Alex Garland is working with Microsoft and Bungie, the game’s developers, to write a script, which will then be offered to a studio as part of a package. Although Garland's novels, The Beach and The Tesseract, weren't adapted into great films (from screenplays by other parties), 28 Days Later, which he wrote, is one of the better genre films of recent years. And as Garland is a renowned gamer, this project shows promise.
Daniel Etherington
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
related info
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
see also
 half-life 2games #080  halo 2games #079 latest gaming columns  kotor iigames #090  games previewgames #089  project zero iigames #088  world of warcraftgames #087  csigames #086 books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
useful links
access 1000s of articles
