AB2012: […] In reality, it's often some of those quiet lonely periods (that make boring TV shows) that add more to the ambience of a video game that's supposed to be in an abandoned setting than the actual action sequences. Wandering around alone in Rapture or SOMA springs to mind of being alone in an abandoned undersea facility. Likewise, if there's only around 36mins of audio logs, then to pad that out they'll add 900% more "drama" which usually involves extreme ret-conning of characters, etc. […]
That's just a poor use of the medium, then.
Just as Jackson's
Hobbit trilogy had little in common with Tolkien's source material, apart from the rudiments like plot and many fewer characters —— as befits the medium of action movies in comparison to the written books —— so too a movie of a game should fork from the source material and elaborate some alternative plot that is more interesting (in a movie
mise en scêne) than the game from which it sprang. I don't know many successful
films that have crossed over from a game, but there must be a few —— what did the better ones do
right? What about all the Milla Jovovich franchise? What about Dwayne Johnson is
Doom?
(Seriously,
Angry Birds Movie 2 has the second highest Rotten Tomatoes score (!) I thought this review site was a better yardstick.):
Darvond: The thing is, a lot of System Shock is already told visually, and as I've pointed out, you can get the whole thing across in about 30 minutes of audio.
As I said, it is a mistake to make a movie that is some sort of direct transliteration of the game.
It can be done. We did enjoy the first (Timothy Olyphant)
Hitman film, for instance. (From the Rotten Tomatoes summary: "Critics Consensus: Hitman features the unfortunate combination of excessive violence, incoherent plot, and inane dialogue." I diagree, but
de gustibus non disputandum est.)
AB2012: That's probably a far more realistic prediction. :-) The problem is these all end up the same : They take a 20hr game and in order to fit the movie / TV format they remove all the "boring parts" and focus on the action / drama. […]
That is
Sturgeon's Law writ large.
As Oscar Wilde said,
talent borrows and genius steals; it is not surprising that iterations create, eventually, a fitter and more evolved diegetic suite of tropes in our epistemic commons.¹ So, it is likely that about one of the ten retcons will actually be an improvement on the ideas from any given game. (The writer of the screenplay for
Batman versus Superman is a philosophy major who used classical Greek mythology: it's Hades against Apollo.)
OTOH, We just watched the latest permutation of
Ghost in the Shell —— the movie with Scarlett Johansson —— and were unexpectedly impressed. What impressed me most was that it had improved on the original film (itself originally from a different medium: manga) that I had enjoyed when it first released. This is the third version of this particular transhuman story, thus from a third auteur incorporating some of the ideas from the previous two (I never read the graphic novel that came out between the original animated movie and this last one.)
For another example, I can think of the television series
Dark Shadows that was mediocre until the Dan Curtis brought in a new character in the third season: a vampire —— Barnabas Collins —— to create what became a cult teenage soap. Oh, and it was successful mainly due to an epic story.
[…] The series reached its peak in popularity during a storyline set in the year 1897, broadcast from March 1969. By the end of May, Dark Shadows was ABC's most popular soap opera, and by late 1969 it was reaching between 7 and 9 million viewers on any given day, and ranking 11th out of a total 15 daytime dramas in that time period.
In November 1969, after nine months of some of Dark Shadows' most intricate, intelligent storylines, the 1897 storyline came to an end. […]
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¹ The public domain pool of ideas from which everyone uses for their fashionable comments. It was
Hrishikesh Joshi (2021) who first identified the division of cognitive labor and gave us this term. (
Ecce! A self-referential [Hofstadter] strange loop.)
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edit:
Expanded and improved analogies, fixed the typo that was keeping me awake (suite, not suit) and removed the anecdote for which I could find no reference about Dan Curtis not watching the show.
Also added reply to subsequent comment. AND fixed another hyperlink title garbled by Gog forum software.