Does a Good Video Game Movie Exist?

 

I was reminded this afternoon of the existence of the new Mario movie, a movie I refused to see on principle because it was made by actual trash-lords Illumination.  You cannot convince me that a movie made by the people who are responsible for The Minions existing are able to create something entertaining when the film they are creating only seems to serve as fanwank for children to excitedly point at and go "I KNOW THAT REFERENCE!"

In fact, I can't think of a single video game movie that I have seen that is even remotely acceptable.  Silent Hill might be one that comes sort of close but the story is so fucked in that film and the Pyramid Head cameo so uncerimoniously shoe-horned in that it falls short.  Maybe if it wasn't called Silent Hill it would be a sort of slightly above average horror movie but slap that brand recognition and it becomes unbearably stupid.  Advent Children may also come close but I've not seen that movie in many many years and the only thing I do remember is the fight choreography and the antagonists were constantly asking where their mother was like a lost child in a supermarket.  In an example of one I've not seen I have been told by people who's opinions I don't really take seriously in the first place that the Uncharted movie is pretty good but Uncharted was already ripping off a movie (Indiana Jones) in the first place so turning it into a movie again feels a bit daft.

I don't even understand this obsession with wanting games to have movie adaptations anyway.  The idea that I get from people is that having a movie come out for a game somehow legitimizes gaming, or at the very least that title, as a "proper" artistic medium but that's bollocks.  Who gives a fuck what stuffy old film makers think of gaming, why do people care about their validation so much?  The alternitive is that people just want to mindlessly consume more crap pumped out by a thing that they like which is equally, if not more sad.  I understand wanting a movie adaptation of a book, having the things written on the page that exist only in text brough to life on a big screen.  It's fun to see if how you envisioned the events in a book play out the same way on the screen.  But gaming is already a visual medium, gaming already has titles like Metal Gear that are basically like really long movies anyway but where YOU get to control all the cool gun-fighty and sneaky bits, you don't need a movie.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe the adaptations of games I have seen thus far have just been bad picks.  Maybe Uncharted is great, maybe Five Nights at Freddies is the best horror film ever made (lol), maybe the Uwe Boll House of the Dead movie isn't complete gutter trash (double lol).  So to test this idea, I will spend the rest of 2024 watching as many video game adaptions as I can, both movies and TV shows.  There's an Onimusha show that dropped on Netflix kinda recently actually so maybe I'll start there.  Also there's movies and a series, I think, of Persona which is basically already an anime anyway so maybe that can't go too wrong either.

I'll probably come back here and write a little blog post about each one as I watch them so watch this space, my quest for a good video game movie/TV adaptation begins today