“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.
