I know zip about the video game, but I saw this last night (hey, it was filler between Margot At The Wedding and I’m Not There) and it’s the weirdest love interest plot line that I’ve ever seen. They don’t have sex (he specificlaly avoids it) and the only way you can really tell that he cares for her is that he saves her life and helps her get away. There’s an implied “happy ever after” ending where they might get together, but it’s not shown and is easily disregarded. I thought it was kind of refreshing myself.
While definitely my least favorite of the 4 movies I saw yesterday (the 4th was Enchanted), I enjoyed it. But then, I really like Timothy Olyphant, so just watching him was a treat. The show was sold out in a large theater, btw.
I heard the guy who modeled Hitman for the game was turned down for the movie role. Stupid fuckers.
Very well. They are hard, though. And you have to remember not to let the kill-everyone instinct from conventional FPSes take over–your goal is to attract as little attention as possible. Once you get to the point where you can kill a stage actor during a play (yes, you have to do that), you’re a badass.
I liked to kill him in his dressing room. It’s always good to leave that objective for last and see if you can’t take him out with the pistol from the balcony and hop out the front door to victory.
I think its cuz the movie is made from a branding point of view rather than from an artistic one. Same reason wrestling movies aren’t any good. Branding, branding, branding. All commerce and no art makes Johnny watch a dull movie.
The most recent game is really quite recent. The first one is showing its age, but I think the middle two (Silent Assassin and Contracts) stand up pretty well. At one point you could download free demos of two levels from Silent Assassin and one from Contracts - assuming they’re still available, you could see what they’re like. The levels in question are reasonably representative.
Oh come on, the most entertaining way to complete that one is to swap the prop pistol for a real one, then drop the chandelier on the other target when he runs down after realizing the guy was really shot.
There’s talk of a God of War movie in the works. I’m a huge fan of the games yet I’m underwhelmed by the idea of a movie. No one would ever be able to emulate Kratos, and furthermore, his badassery is of too great a magnitude to be contained in a live-action format.
I am a huge fan of the Metroid series, but I am still mature enough to know that a literal translation to film would mean a girl in a Robocop suit with no supporting cast, running around in The Cave, by the director of The Blair Witch Project and the scriptwriter of A Cry In The Wild. A non-literal translation would just end up being the 1998 Lost in Space movie. I don’t want to see either film.
An Idiomatic translation of a story from one medium to another requires aggressive adaptation. For film this means a skilled scriptwriter and a skilled director who are intimately familiar with the source material and medium AND know how to work hollywood. Oh, and adequate special effects to compensate for animated media not needing a pyrotechnics budget. The reason there are so few good video-game-to-film adaptations is not because no one really tries, but because they are incredibly difficult to make well, on every level. One of the reasons hitman was so quick to get adapted was that the setting and events are well-trodden ground for Hollywood; the obstacles were pared down to Hitman’s essential videogameness, and that alone was still enough to deal the film a heavy blow.
Once, just for kicks, me and some friends sat around pitching Tetris: The Movie to eachother. It was kind of like a live-action Creature Anime set in the house of Thir13een Ghosts. (Remember that shrinking room in TOYS?) It also starred Anthony Hopkins as the crazy russian inventor who had built the collapsing house.
I like lots of things about the Tomb Raider movie, mostly because it feels like they tried hard to make Lara’s character, and the way she handles each ‘puzzle’ and confrontation, pretty much an exact copy of how the game does it.
My biggest problems with it are the additional characters, who are just horrible to watch (all the bad guys, the extraneous and science fictional Father, her servant and assistant), and the stupid supernatural plot that doesn’t make a lick of sense. But, having said that, the performances and the supernatural elements used in the game are similarly cheesy.
So Pratchett is right - it’s so close to the game and not separated enough from it to be a good movie in its own right. But if you do separate it too much, then it no longer feel like the game, and so you’ll have complaints along the lines of “It’s a totally unrelated movie with just the brand name stuck on the front”.
Yeah, I thought it was good fun. Anyone who thinks there’s a love story in here is sadly mistaken…he injects her rather than sleep with her when she’s drunkenly crawling over him naked, for heaven’s sake, and no straight man without issues is gonna do that to her.
I liked the touch at the beginning where the woman in the bar is all over him, and walks away to read his book on understanding women. Hitman in a nutshell. And there is a nicely overcomplicated assassination deal (with T-Bag from Prison Break!). Solid movie, for the genre.
The best way to complete it is to dress up as the executioner, take the real gun and kill him yourself right on stage. Need to time it right with the music, though.
Edit: As for the Hitman thing, they set him up as someone interested but with no experience of women. He shouldn’t even have the book, really; he just doesn’t care about that kind of thing. Also he should’ve been older, but eh.
I saw Hitman and it was… ok. At first I had thought it was going to be based on the comic book lol. The trailers really emphasized the whole secret religious organization that bar codes lost youth and trains them to be assassins angle, so I thought the story would focus on that - but that was really a blip in the plot and didn’t seem to actually factor into the story at all (granted I was nodding off a bit during the last 15 minutes, maybe they addressed it then). He really could have just been a hitman without the elaborate and unused backstory. It was nice seeing Desmond from Lost as the lunatic brother of the main target.
I did like Tomb Raider and it’s sequel for some reason. Silent Hill was fairly cool. In general I think video game movies suffer for the same reason that all adaptations do.
I think that’s the problem. A video game with one single coherent plot is usually not going to have much room for the player to affect the course of the game through their actions, which makes it much less fun. But one single coherent plot is exactly what you need to make a movie.
Going the other way, making a video game based on a movie, usually doesn’t work that well either. I think the incompatibility between a good movie story and a good video game story is one of the reasons.
I think it’s entirely possible to make an excellent Warcraft (or World of Warcraft) movie. There’s enough backstory to make it work, and Warcraft III (and the upper levels of WoW), at least, already feels like a cinematic experience. Whether the rumored production that’s supposedly currently being organized is going to be an excellent Warcraft movie is another story entirely, of course.
That’s exactly what I need: more stupid Warcraft bullshit for my friends to beg me to spend money on. That shit must be like heroin, sex and chocolate cake all rolled up into one.
