Do movies based on video games suck?

Ugh....get rid of Shawn Levy and maybe it has a chance?

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Suspect's Reviews

Not sure if this is supposed to be interpreted as Fassbender being too good for the movie or him just being the wrong person for the job.

In any case, I did see Assassin's Creed and can confirm that the negative reviews have it right.

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A lot of video game movies are. One of the earlier posts had it correct that in order to get the film to appeal to a larger audience some keys points of the plot or the core of the movie will be changed, or the movie is changed because the video game does not have that much to go off of. See movies like Super Mario Bros, Doom, and the like. And even movies that many have enjoyed are at best a mixed bag. I dig the hell out of the first Mortal Kombat movie, but many hate it because it was PG-13 and not a hard R to mirror the violence in the video games.

But another reason I think is most of the really good director's in Hollywood just don't respect the original material. And a lot of it comes from many people seeing video games as just a form of entertainment and not an art form. As such the big name directors will stay away, and video game fans will have to settle for WS Anderson or at worst Uwe Boll.

Every so often we get something good though. I did like the Silent Hill movie.

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I think it was just the lore they tried to cram in throughout the entire thing, not really the handling of the plot, which was very straight forward, good vs evil, save the world, etc. That was simple enough. I don't feel like they explained the world very well as again, I think they weren't very careful when they assumed something that's so jammed packed as Warcraft would be accessible to everyone, especially as much as they tried to please the fans with everything they've got. I'm not saying someone can't like this movies on it's own merits. But for me, the stuff that seemed like nothing but fan service wasn't enough for me to enjoy.

I don't know how I feel about Levy as the director of Uncharted. It doesn't get me pumped, though. I like some of his stuff I've watched of his well enough as throwaway family entertainment, but nothing that I've seen of his just screams he's right for the job. At best he's a second rate Zemeckis, at worst he's just, well, bad. It'll probably be a good looking movie, but that's about it.

While Western videogame movies have been mostly pretty bad (although I enjoyed Resident Evil 2, Hitman and Doom). There are great anime series based on Japanese computer games. Such as Clannad Afterstory and Fate Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works.

Haven't watched Warcraft yet although I plan to watch it (it's Ducan Jones and Warcraft!)

The reason is that Japanese computer games include the genre of visual novel which is a type of game that's essentially a novel where you choose the dialogue trees. This type of material is much more readily adaptable to film than Western videogames which are based on gameplay and not writing and so are not well suited for adaptation for a narrative medium like film.

Yet there are some western videogames with good story like Starcraft it's not a story suited for a movie.

I personally would love to see Sleeping Dogs as a movie. Having played the game, I can envision this as a Hong Kong action thriller with someone like either Andrew Lau (the Infernal Affairs trilogy) or Johnnie To (Running Out of Time, Drug War), or even Ringo Lam directing and having a Asian/Asian-American cast do quite well. There have been some short films based on the video game around but I would love to see this as a feature film done Hong Kong-style.

Yeah!
Ringo Lam should call Chow Yun-Fat and kick more asses together with this adaptation!
Or maybe John Woo should direct! I miss the cops and triads movies by Mr. Woo...

Angry Birds (2016)

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assassin's creed is the prove of what kind of movies are there in the industry !

Gameplay doesn't lend itself to storytelling because it involves a lot of repetition. In the Legend of Zelda, you explore dungeons. In Super Mario, you jump on enemies. In Mortal Kombat, you mash buttons. Even if there is variety, you're doing the same thing throughout the game. And that's fine because part of the fun of gaming is learning, and you learn through trial and error.

Movies, as stories, are more dynamic and less personal. You can't experiment or get a Game Over in a movie. It has to be right the first time. Since games involve trial and error, movies based on games would lack what we enjoy about the games: challenge.

The game I think would have the most success being turned into a movie is the Metal Gear Solid series, largely because they already have such long cutscenes. But a Metal Gear Solid movie, in order to advance the plot, would have to forego the long, drawn out sneaking battles (essentially cutting out the part of MGS that everybody knows and loves) or include it in the film, which would be boring.

I like Fassbender - I do. And I dont think he is too good for the part, I just think for lack of a better explanation, he doesnt look/fit the part. I realize that they made a ton of these in recent years, with no doubt different characters for the Animus, but I started years ago the first AC when there was only one, and Ive slowly been playing my way through them all (I stall at some for a year or more), and Im still on A2 with Ezio. Fassbender is awesome, but Desmond/Altair/Ezio, he is not. To me, the trailers looked awesome, but FASSBENDER himself was the shark-jump or immersion breaker. I get that he's a different player (i.e. not Desmond), but it just isnt working for me.

I might like the move, tho - I've havent see it yet. And I will.

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I disagree about the MGS stealth being cut out. An imaginative director and creative cutting could create a tense and suspenseful sequence of events.

Silent Hill came close to be a good movie.

Resident Evil series went way overboard, and I agree with the other poster that said that the problem is that they invent new stories for the characters instead of sticking to the source material [I'm alrigh with changes, as long as they make sense].

However there was a recent movie that I kind of liked it, although not based on any video game, but it does take a lot from them [specially Shin Megami Tensei] and Anime: Garm Wars - The last druid.

Story wise it's pretty sh*** but the 3rd act is very VERY good [and you'll see what I mean whern I say it takes from video games such as Shin Megami Tensei]

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I disagree. Most movies are based on books. Books also take hours to read, and yet it's possible to make great movies out of them. Just look at the LOTR series. Everybody said, at the time, that it's impossible to make those books into a movie. It was done very well first in the animated form, and then as a live-action movie.

Video games could translate into great movies much the same way. It would require actual effort, though, and directors obviously think that nobody beyond the fan base of the game is going to see the movie and they are going to go see it because they are the fan base, so they don't really have to try to make money.

So what happens is that almost nobody beyond the fan base goes to see the movie (the rest of the people are discouraged by poor reviews) and the studio earns just enough money to justify pushing out such movies.

It's a vicious circle. We don't get good video game movies because studios don't respect the genre and the audience doesn't respect the genre because it consists of poorly made movies.

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I think comic book movies and TV shows have broken that trend tho, right? They really get very intense in the drama scale, and they'be drawn huge audiences to them.

I NEED them to a Greg Rucka Lazurus series TV show.

I just want the Mass Effect movie (if it's ever made) to be good. That's all. I don't think I'm asking for much.

But we already have a live-action Mass Effect, it was called Babylon 5.

Seriously though, if you've seen B5, Farscape and Battlestar Galactica, you've seen Mass Effect. There's nothing in the ME franchise that hasn't already been done by a TV series, conceptually it's little more than an homage to those shows. Don't get me wrong, I love Mass Effect, but a film version is unnecessary.

Yeah, most of them... well pretty much all of them if we're being honest. I'm confident we'll get a good video game based movie eventually.