Let’s face the facts; the Hollywood machine has started to churn out tons of adaptations and remakes. There are hardly any unique and new ideas on the table, and when there are, they get scrutinized and destroyed Sucker Punch style. Meanwhile the video game industry is still exploring, and even embracing new ideas and IP’s; giving them chances when needed. Granted both industries believe in name brands and easy money, but the video game companies seem more inclined to take chances on something different.
Another aspect to explore is the creativity. The recent movie Battle: Los Angeles featured aliens, soldiers, and a ton of visual effects that were supposed to be something ground breaking. However, after watching the movie you can’t help but feel a little let down. I could write a book on everything I hated about the film, but one thing really stuck out to me: these ground breaking aliens were nothing more than Terminators with slight changes to make them...well... not Terminators. Plus the environment was nothing more than a little debris ridden LA with very few shots of the city actually being destroyed. There was nothing special about this film at all, and the film makers didn’t think nearly as big as they needed to.
LA should have been totally destroyed. According to the story, this was the last stand along the coast as the aliens have taken over the other major cities. Yet they only sent in a few troops on the shores? They had no need for the buildings, yet a majority of them were standing and unharmed. The movie cut to a shot of the buildings on fire, but that’s literally all we got in terms of destruction. The filmmakers also couldn’t make up their mind on rather or not the city has been evacuated. People were running on the beaches, yet when the army showed up not even an hour later the entire city was completely empty. We didn’t see how brutal these aliens were, we didn’t see what the aliens were doing to make us so scared, we just didn’t care because nothing was happening that made us think. We were simply expected to base our thoughts of these aliens based off previous films covering the same aspect.
Meanwhile Crysis 2 dives deep into the same scenario but takes everything a step further. The aliens attacking are much more developed with tentacles hanging out. Drones role through the city, and the vehicles are much more thought out. The soldiers fighting the aliens were even yelling names like “Squids” when killing them and the sound effects were much more unique. New York, much like LA, is being devastated by the attacks; an Earthquake rumbles through the city, and the ground is by no means an even plain as streets break into pieces. The best part of the game is the epic scale of everything going on around you. A massive ship will smash into a building overhead and explode into pieces and you are left to go discover what it was and take samples. Massive sky scrapers will literally crumble and collapse onto one another, and you are left to look up at them from ground level. Not once did we see anything of this scale in Battle LA.
This is where the gameplay aspects give video games an upper hand. Would the earthquake effect still be thought of if it didn’t shake the FPS view around making it hard to shoot? Would the ship crash like it did if the developers didn’t need to expand on gameplay? Maybe, maybe not. Other aspects work their way into the story telling experience as well. You are left to sneak around a majority of your enemies, as alerting them is almost always ending in death with swarms of enemies rushing at you. So you have to think about strategy, how can you get their attention and run another way, making the sneaking all the more important instead of violence.
Video games also allow more hours to a specific story, given it more time to adapt. For example when you go to a theater you expect to get a 2 hour experience. Anything longer and those not-so comfy seats start to take a toll on you. Meanwhile when you pick up a video game, you expect nothing less than 6 hours in a single player experience. Gameplay elements can be added to help develop aspects of a story more efficiently which add time to the development of the story. You make the decisions, you discover new things, you find side quests to help develop the backstory of the major point. Take Resistance for example. A movie would follow Nathan Hale as he fights off the Chimera and saves the world. However in the game you discover intel documents that explain viewpoints from other soldiers, and you find Chimera markings in every level. It's these things that give the story greater depth, but can't work in a film.
Take into account Sucker Punch. A girl gets put into a mental hospital shortly after witnessing something no girl should witness. Shortly after being put into this hospital she creates this elaborate plan to escape, and with this plan comes imagination to help her get through these tough times. These imagination sequences are the one weakness of the film, as not many people get the meaning behind them and how they work with the film (most of these people being reviewers that don’t really touch video games which was the crowd Zach Snyder was trying to attract). Instead movie reviewers wanted to see your basic escape plan plot and execution. None of these dream sequences had meaning unless you really paid attention, and even then they were hard to pick up.
How would Sucker Punch be if it were a game? Far more developed and better told than a 2 hour movie could ever allow. You could take the role of Baby Doll, the main girl in Sucker Punch, and get put into this hospital and figure your way out. Discover secrets, explore the places and not get caught, see things you are not supposed to see. You can actually feel the tense situation of nearly being caught. You can enjoy the sexiness of her dancing by pressing the correct buttons. You can make your own decisions to kill or not kill someone threatening the other girls or your ultimate goal. When you mess up you can feel the pain and anguish it causes. Yet all of this was nothing more than keys needed for a basic film premise.
When these imagination sequences kick in you can find more meaning behind them, find more symbols, and the better you do on these levels the better your dance is and the easier it is to escape in the Asylum world. All throughout, the player would be learning the true meaning behind the whole story, the central theme: that you are capable of anything you set your mind to. To set yourself free. An idea given to me by our own editor was each imagination sequence could be a new genre of a game. Perhaps you have a few FPS levels when she puts herself in the middle of a robot war. An RPG element when finding certain objects and battling the Dragon. A action adventure title in other area’s. Each sequence could be a new genre, something that hasn’t necessarily been done before.
These same aspects are the exact reasons why video games are not transferred well to movies. You have the Hollywood formula that will likely not change anytime soon trying to compete with the ever evolving game industry. Why do I say that? How many of same movie have we seen in the past year alone for each genre? It’s the same thing with a new environment. It’s a proven formula that works, so why change it. Meanwhile video games are still exploring and being creative. Bioshock changed the entire game universe for their upcoming follow-up title, Bioshock: Infinite. Resistance is following a new lead character, and FPS titles in general are always adding in new powers and gameplay elements that go beyond merely shooting a gun. The fact is Hollywood is scared to explore. Scared that if they ruin something it will never be brought back to life, and scared that if every release isn’t a major hit, their pockets will pay the price.
Storytelling aspects play a role in this as well. While movies like Sucker Punch try to play a bigger role behind the scenes and add meaning, they don't seem to work. There were many subtle things that ended up being tied together near the end of the movie; the music, the thoughts, the visual keys, it became a lot deeper than most people gave credit for. Before I go on, by no means am I saying the movie crowd is dumb. But it is safe to say that many people get caught up with visuals, and when those visuals don’t exactly tell the story they get lost. How many of them tuned out almost immediately after every single action sequence in Sucker Punch? They didn’t see Baby Doll naked so they were not interested, thus they miss out on key parts of the story.
With video games, everything has meaning. Similar to animation they start with a blank slate. Why add something, why put something in detail, if it isn’t needed? Everything you do has a consequence, everything you see has a meaning behind it, and game writers always tie in emotional objects for a game. Some games such as Heavy Rain can even output multiple endings based on what you do throughout the title.
Obviously movies have to pick one route and stay with it, they can’t exactly let you decide where to go. However, that doesn’t mean they cannot tie in circumstances and make you a part of the movie. We don’t have to go as far as Cloverfield and make the camera a character, but we can do things such as Sucker Punch or Inception. People that love these films love them because its entirely up to you to figure out the true meaning behind the film. Was it a dream, was it an insane asylum, and were they even real? It’s extremely hard to do this.
Being this is my first major article here, I want to finish off by emphasizing that I am not against the film industry. I am a screenwriter and a movie enthusiast, but also a gamer. Simply stated, the basic structure of your core Hollywood film may need to be re-worked for some of the bigger budgeted films. That way we are not let down with more subpar films. Perhaps we can look into how Films can learn from video games soon!
