The New York Times had an excellent piece on media convergence in the movie and video game industries this morning. It took a good, balanced look at the potential business impact of game studios being acquired by movie studios. The article contained one parenthetical that gave me pause, though:
But when studios have tried to exploit video games as movies in the past, they have had limited success. (Remember "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?" No one else does. Video games that are too violent or lack a good plot are hard to translate to the screen.)
Yes, Final Fantasy was a bomb and a sign of game-based movies' limited success. But Final Fantasy... too violent? I suppose the little cartoony characters attacking monsters with oversized swords is violent when compared to... I don't know, Tetris. But Final Fantasy is no Grand Theft Auto -- not by a longshot. And even though the Final Fantasy movie is a little more violent than the games it was based on, it still pales in comparison to the Tomb Raider franchise, which is cited later in the same paragraph as an example of game-based movie success.
Lacking in plot is another charge that should never be leveled against Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy games are filled with plot -- hours and hours of it, told through cut scenes, text boxes and voice acting. I suppose it's debatable whether Final Fantasy "lacks a good plot," (emphasis added) as the author writes here, but this editorializing is cutting it a little thin. Then again the Final Fantasy movie's action-packed sci-fi plot bears little resemblance to the swords-and-scorcery wanderings of the Final Fantasy games, so the game's plot seems to be of little consequence in this example.
If the author was looking for a violent, plotless game that was turned into a movie, there was always House of the Dead.
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The only Final Fantasy that I've played with a really bad plot was Final Fantasy V. One of the reasons that Final Fantasy games are famous is the writing. Maybe not the translating, though (you spoony bard!).
ReplyDeleteI found "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" to be a reasonable, but certainly not great, movie. It is certainly filled with hokey science/philosophy that will leave most viewers saying "Huh?" but I thought that it succeeded on more levels than it failed. I still enjoy watching it once every so often, and if you listen to some of the DVD commentary it will clear up a few points that might not be obvious from a straight viewing.
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, did the movie really have any connection with the games? I'll admit I'm mostly ignorant of Final Fantasy background, but I didn't feel I missed out on anything from having not played the games. As for the violence, what happens in the movie is primarily man vs. alien/ghost. Some human characters die horrible deaths, but there is also an angle of life-after-death to the whole thing, which mitigates the horror of death to some extent.
Frankly, to pick on this particular pair of movie/game productions seems awfully ill-advised. I'll vote with Kyle on "The House of the Dead" and also toss in "Resident Evil". ("RE" had gratuitous violence and partial nudity, not that there's anything wrong with that. Certainly hit just the mix I was looking for in a mindless action film. I just don't recommend it to the general public.)
jvm
Films based on videogames will only succeed if they are good films in the first place. Relying on a game IP in itself is not enough - a strong storyline, good acting, good script are all needed, like in all films, to make a hit.
ReplyDeleteI feel sometimes Hollywood forget this when making films from games.
Best game/movie moment ever: When Lui Kang and Sub-Zero stand off against each other in Mortal Kombat. You could cut the tension with a suitably blunt butter knife.
I think Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was as violent as 2001 a Space Odyssey and your average Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode. It was a good movie for what it was which is a sci-fi/horror movie. It was not based on the Final Fantasy game at all. The mistake Square Enix made was that they did not think the movie would do well on it’s own, so they tried to dupe gamers into going to see a movie that had nothing to do with the RPG. That was why the movie did so poorly; if they had marketed as a sci-fi movie from the makers of Final Fantasy then I think people would have gone to see it.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the New York Times posted an article on media convergence in the movie and video game industries this late in the game is ludicrous and way too late. Video games have been turned into movies for over five years now (Anyone remember The Mario Brothers?). Convenient that the one video game-based movie they decided to choose was one that has no plot affiliation to the games. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was an alternate story built purely for entertainment purposes to test the posibilities of Squaresoft (now converged and known as Square enix) to create movies as well as video games. The producers of the movie were not the producers of the most commonly enjoyed Role Playing video games made. Not to mention the fact that the story went through so much editing that it would be nearly impossible to create a stable storyline.
ReplyDeleteIt seems dishonorable to write an article on a subject without taking the time to do a bit of research. It suprises me to read that it was a writer of a well known paper such as the New York Times. But I suppose that is why I don't like to read movie reviews. Those highly trusted movie reviewers seem to not look into the point of many movies. In turn, giving the movies they do not understand a bad review.
Take Resident Evil: Apocolypse, for example. I've read great reviews of the movie. All giving it a wonderful praise to making such an amasing video game-based movie. However, the storyline and plot stray so far from the games in RE: A, that make it almost unworthy of the title "Resident Evil."