The Adaptation

Lord of the Rings did it rather successfully, Scott Pilgrim also to some extent, and lets not forget Harry Potter. But lets not kid ourselves people, the adaptation of a book, or dare I say video game, to the silver screen has its difficulties and most of the time Hollywood finds a way to cheapen it or just all around fuck it up (Prince of Persia, Doom, etc.).


I recently watched a video about Uncharted: Drake's Deception on G4 and Morgan Webb said something great. To summarize she said Uncharted (the movie) is going to suck. It's a movie based on a video game and that's a guarantee these days, so we should just not care about how they are going to handle the story or change it or the actors or anything about it. I think she's right. There was a lot of hype built up heading into Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and of course it was a let down. Is there any way to fix this? PoP had the creator of Sands of Time (the game) help write the script, which would be my first suggestion for making a good game movie, but apparently that's not enough. I don't really know how a decent video game movie could be made beyond everyone from the development team working on the film. In fact, just have Naughty Dog make the Uncharted movie and I'm sure it would be better than any known film company making it. Still, Uncharted is a difficult example. The games already are of movie quality and incredibly immersive, something that would be difficult to transfer to the silver screen.

As for books, well that's something that is incredibly difficult to master, but can be done and has been done, I believe anyway. The hard part here, and to the same extent with video games, is length. Books are long, at least the ones you want to turn into movies are, and games are usually 20-40 hours. How exactly is anyone supposed to cram that down into 2 hours? You're going to lose a huge chunk of stuff, and the trick is with books is to learn what to cut and learn what to change so that the heart of what's there doesn't change and the message still gets across. There are many fans to the Harry Potter series that I'm sure would be at war with one another, some thinking that the various directors and writers have gotten things as well as they could and others would probably decry the bastardization of their beloved series. I'm not a hardcore fan so I can't really speak to all that, but I think for a seven book series, where each book got longer, the story has been told remarkably well. No major supporting characters were lost completely (compared to Tom Freaking Bombadil) and the intensity is definitely still there.

I hate to only use HP as my example here, so let's look at the opposite with The Bourne Identity. Have you read the book? Probably not. I have. I read the book after the movie came out and let me tell you, the similarities begin with the character of Jason Bourne, and a few other characters, Treadstone, Europe, and that's about it. A lot of stuff gets switched, turned around and the book ends in New York City, where Ultimatum ends. This happens more often than not when it comes to words-to-film transformation. But, I still consider both great works. The movie is great and the book is great, they are just separate and different entities. So maybe Matt Damon and Jason Bourne aren't really good examples for the opposite case of a book going to movie, but from what I hear, there are plenty examples out there to choose from.

So maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm over critical of this adaptation problem, but I'm sure there are those of you who would agree, and those of you who would say "the comic book is better than the movie". As a movie buff, a guy who will go see most movies even if the review isn't so great (for the guilty pleasure), I know I will be going to see Uncharted and probably most going-to-be-terrible game movies.

How do you feel about adaptations?

Dream on.

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Also, the reverse holds true for video game movies and movie video games, they are going to suck. Period. I haven't read many movie books so I can't really comment there, but I can only assume the same goes for those as it goes for movie video games. How to deal with both of those? Avoidance. And bonfires.

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