What the hell is Uwe Boll playing at, and how in the hell is he getting funding to create the poor drivel that he currently is? For anyone who has played games in the last few years, or understands the marketplace you’ll know very well that the Companies are intelligent enough and are producing some really engaging and rich gaming experiences, to the very point that in some games there is almost a movie experience. So how come we are being faced with such offerings as House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark?
Well you could understand it if we were back in time playing Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat and went to see those respective movies, at the time the games weren’t that deep an experience and the movies followed suit. What’s the excuse now? The games are of a very high quality and with a much richer and wider experience and movie production has moved on so much with special effects, a film quality production can now be made on computers.
The Games industry is strong enough to be able to command what happens with their movie options, just look at Id and the history of the Doom production for evidence of that or to Squaresoft for creating their own film company and making Final Fantasy, why don’t they hold open their options and pull the plug when the film industry offer them a midas touch Director, or a poorly written script?
Then there’s the Studios themselves, why do they keep giving money to these poor, half attempts at movies? It’s not that they are blind to what can be done, they have seen the success of such films as Tomb Raider and in comparison to some of these recent attempts it was a success whatever some might think, or look to the comic adaptations to see the good that can be created out of the bad, Spiderman and the (we all know it will be) return to form of Batman. They know that if properly treated they can win the original audience over and grab a whole new audience too, and there they have a ready made script and audience just waiting for them.
So what do they do? Ruin it, totally. You are not making a game when you take a game adaptation to the screen, so why use a game geek who is a hopeless director? Just treat it like any other movie production and get a decent team in to give it a proper treatment. Better still, get a game geek who is a very good Director – Sam Raimi as prime example of a geek comic book lover who did the whole Spidey name proud. Just because the idea is already plotted out making it cheap at the conceptual stage, doesn’t mean that you should go and make the rest of it on the cheap.
Okay maybe the choices for movies to date haven’t been too good, and I could be harshly judging Mr Boll on the evidence of what he’s done to date when we’re still looking at Far Cry, Bloodrayne and Hunter: The Reckoning for completion, these could be good. Really, they could be. Then again.
