“The Pain of watching Max Payne”
The opening of “Max Payne” shows the inside of an ice laden lake enshrouded in shadows, with only a small ray of light piercing the dark blue waters. Mark Wahlberg is drowning, his body floating away into the darkness as he mutters a gloomy monologue in his trademark coarse voice. Surrounding him, chained to the bottom of the lake, dozens of dead bodies lie afloat, completing a beautiful visual metaphor concerning Payne’s pain. Even if his monologue is deprived of the lyrical punch associated with “Max Payne’s” text (a product of its “hard boiled” novel roots), the initial thought that comes to your mind was that perhaps they finally got one right… but then the movie starts proper and you realize it was just a hope-filled illusion. As characters swerve by the screen, uttering unspeakable dialogue in wooden, robotic fashion, you start waking up to the fact that, once again, no respect was given to the source material. As if the plot was built on the game’s synopsis by thick writers (Beau Thorne) who didn’t even bother to sit through the game, characters, events and sequences are constantly removed from context, remixed and dumbed down so that their substance can match the density of the paper in which they were written, all as to produce a horribly ludicrous plot-holed script. The stylization of the game’s script is completely absent, its metaphors and allegories lightened into literal pieces of producer-friendly Hollywood trash. Characters only manage to keep their name, having new (and absurd) trappings and back-stories, like Jack Lupino, here transformed into a guinea pig for a super-soldier experiment gone wrong, complete with the visual apparatus of a comic book character (all muscles, no hair, always naked from the waist up, filled with menacing tattoos), and what do you know, he also moves like a badass comic book villain, lurking from rooftops, spying on the innocent, jumping all the time, and screaming like a gorilla whenever he needs his fix of Valkyr. It almost looks like a lame camp joke on “Batman” or “Spiderman”, but no, the movie is actually trying to keep it ’serious’ for the masses. The lesson here, as in other adaptations (and yes, I’m looking at “Silent Hill”), is if you’re gonna translate a story from a game, might as well try to be faithful to it, because apparently, Hollywood writers commissioned to translate these adaptations can do a worse job then the allegedly mediocre videogame writers, and “Max Payne” is a text book example of this.
The actors, stuck with the horrible lines the idiotic writer penned, are usually as bad as he is (Mila Kunis and rapper boy Ludacris), and even when they aren’t (Mark Wahlberg and Beau Bridges), they can’t seem to deliver them with a straight face, as if they were conscious of the mediocrity of the whole affair. Needless to say, the director (John Moore) seems to have snoozed throughout the entire shooting, because he left some pretty awkward moments in actor performance go by the editing room untouched. Or maybe he was just too busy getting the stylized visual of the game right, because that at least, seems to be coherent with “Max Payne’s” aesthetic, even if the “chiaroscuro” effects have a CG-like quality that make it look a tad plastic. Worse even, is the attempt at using visuals and CG to further lighten the subtlety of some of the game’s themes, most notably, the Norse Mythology influences. As to make it perfectly clear that Valkyr junkies are mad, the movie actually shows scary and dark winged angels flying about, a foolish attempt to create tension in the audience. You’d think that such a crude undertaking of making the original work acceptable to no-brain masses would at least be able to amaze you with some dazzling John Woo shootouts, filled with explosions and broken sets… this is “Max Payne”, the shooter, right? Wrong. There are only a handful of action sequences, all so straightforward and forgettable, you’ll think why they even bothered putting them there. And of these, only one bullet time sequence… Yes, one. Not two, not three, just one. And you know what? It’s horrible, like everything else in this godforsaken movie. By the time you get to the ending, you’ll watch the intro again, now placed in context, and you’ll notice that it never was a metaphor or anything remotely deep. Max Payne was simply thrust by the bad guy into the lake to die (though only after carefully “explaining” the conspiracy to Max Payne, even if any spectator with half a neuron could figure it an hour before). And so, here is Max, surrounded by the victims of the big bad conspiracy, in the bottom of an icy lake, drowning… just like the movie. I, for once, hope it stays there. Unfortunately, the movie is open to a sequel (watch the after-credits sequence), and its box-office results are superb (it’s doing better than “W.”). And gamers still wonder why bad adaptations are made? It’s simple, people watch them and love them (gamers included), even when they’re pure waste of time and money, like “Max Payne” is. Thank God I don’t have to pay to go to the cinema.
“Semiotics and its Importance in Adaptations” and “Tomb Raider Review”
The semiotic language of games is different than the one in movies; normally, directors and writers of these adaptations either don’t fully understand one or the other (sometimes even both… *coff* Uwe Boll *coff*). Now, this is the primary condition for a successful transition from one means to the other; I mean, how can one even begin to think about adapting an artistic means to another without understanding the language each one of them uses? Just imagine taking a book filled with meaningful metaphors and translate it into a movie without taking into account the same metaphors; most of the book’s hidden meanings would be lost. What’s happening in most game-to-movie adaptations is similar to this. Either the director/writer didn’t play the game or didn’t understand its drive or focus (example: “Resident Evil”), or they played it, but simply don’t know how to convey that into a correct and interesting cinematic language (example: “Final Fantasy: Advent Children”).
Take for instance, “Tomb Raider”; what was convened in the movie? Basically that there is this rich Lara Croft babe, that is an athletic, voluptuous chick that can shoot like Neo, jump higher and farther than the established Olympic records and that does a living by exploring tombs filled with ancient “magical” artifacts that hold the most powerful hidden secrets of extinct civilizations. Was “Tomb Raider” really about this? Well, in part, it was, at least when it came to the games backdrop and small uninteresting cutscenes. But I don’t believe that was the main focus of the game. If you ask me, “Tomb Raider” was all about creating a sense of immersion in an unknown and mystic scenario and the exploration of large ancient ruins, filled with beautiful architectural details and strange enigmatic puzzles. Now look at the movie again, was any of this in the movie? No! Why? Because the screenwriters only understood “Tomb Raider” from a simplistic cinematic point of view; the only narrative they saw in “Tomb Raider” was the one imbued in the idiotic plot and action part of the game. Why? They just don’t understand how narrative is conveyed in games, period. Everything in the adaptation stinks, from the poor choice of scenarios to the action oriented nature of the movie, not forgetting the horrible rock and roll soundtrack (in opposed to the game’s classical arrangements that augmented the tension and ambiance of the tombs). You could argument that the sense of exploration would be hard to convey in the movie; but hey, that was the main focus of the game: if you can’t convey that, then don’t even bother adapting it.
And this happens in almost every adaptation: where’s the sense of isolation, dread and horror in “Resident Evil”? Remember Milla Jovovich roundhouse-kicking dogs? C’mon, is it that hard to understand that’s not scary? Where’s the dark mysticism in “Alone in the Dark”? I’ll tell you where, it’s lying in the slaughterhouse after it was butchered by Uwe Boll’s horror/sci-fi scenarios filled with daylight (it’s a game about darkness, how hard can it be to understand that?) and his macho-soldier armies armed with heavy machine guns that blow everything to shreds (were there armies in the game… NO!). Where are the Ha-Do-Kens in “Street Fighter”? Oh, that blue myst that comes out of Ryu’s hands at the end of the movie IS a Ha-Do-Ken… I’d never have guessed, maybe I’m just dumb…
[More ranting about adaptations coming soon...]
“Game-to-Movie adaptations – why they fail miserably…“
Last week, my “Study and Development of Games” teacher talked about movie-to-game adaptations. His words were something like: “It [Movie Adaptations] doesn’t work because it’s hard to please the fans that already know the story, while at the same time, pleasing the audience that knows nothing about the game. You can’t overexposure the plot for the first public, and underexpose for the other.” Now, later this week, I saw Uwe Boll’s “Alone in the Dark”, which is the worst movie I ever seen, bar none, game-adaptation or not. Since then I’ve been analyzing all the reasons why game-to-movie adaptations fail. Because, let’s face it, they always fail, always. To this day there isn’t a single adaptation that I consider to be a half-good movie (and I’ve seen pretty much all of the supposedly “good” ones); maybe my cinema-critic background makes me too demanding, but I can’t see any movie based game that can actually be held on its own as a good movie experience. So, from now on, in this topic I’ll be exploring the reasons I think make unsuccessful game-to-movie transitions. Besides that, I’ll review some of the transitions… and don’t expect for me to be sympathetic or to have any pity on those pieces of cinematic garbage, just because they came from good games; I will thoroughly dissect every adaptation until its smelly, putrefied guts are all out in the open, so that anyone can understand how bad they really, really are.
