Five Great Movies About Videogames
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
Really sad to report that only one of those films is available streaming on Netflix, and it's WarGames. Great movie, I've seen it recently. The others I haven't and I was really looking forward to watching them, but I'll have to wait for them by mail. SUCKS. I'll just have to watch WarGames and The Matrix back-to-back and fill the rest of the time with some TF2, which is enough hero-fulfillment for me by any measure.
Did you know that Movie Bob also does a series called "The Game Overthinker" on another website [http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/]? Don't pity the man, it looks like he's got his plate full with both of his passions. I figured I'd mention it so Bob doesn't have to.TheRocketeer said:
I've seen all of those except eXistenZ. I was thinking about checking it out, but then someone brought up Naked Lunch. That movie made me scratch my head and wish I was doing something else. So maybe I'll just stick to the others. Three, that I loved and still watch.
You know, The Neverending Story and The Last Starfighter came out the same year? When I think of the movies of my childhood, those two pop up first.
You know, The Neverending Story and The Last Starfighter came out the same year? When I think of the movies of my childhood, those two pop up first.
Please understand, I don't mean to imply what he's doing is silly or in any way not awesome, or that he would be doing the column at all on this site if he didn't have some kind of knowledge or appreciation of gaming, which, in hindsight, I took for granted without any real hard proof. But his video series and column really do fail to jibe with the whole rest of the site, and I'm certain that it isn't doing him any favors as far as viewer- and readership is concerned. Which is a shame.300lb. Samoan said:
And no, I didn't know he did that other series, but I'll certainly check that out. Thanks!
Not necessarily. The Resident Evil movies were brilliant, as long as you don't try to fit them into the canon of the games. Which is silly anyway because they are specifically set in an alternate continuity. But yeah, the Resident Evil movies were great. And I really enjoyed Final Fantasy: Advent Children, though admittedly that wasn't based on a game per se, but rather it was an extension of the story and a sequel of sorts. And aside from being waist deep in the river that flows through the Uncanny Valley, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was also quite good.uppitycracker said:
My point is, that films based on games aren't necessarily bad. People turn around and say they are because they draw too many parallels between films and games, and gamers maintain that films based on their favourite games can't be good because the mediums of telling the story are completely different. But if you just take an objective viewpoint and stop comparing the different ways of telling the story, then films based on games are generally at the very least not that bad.
Although Uwe Boll is still a crap film-maker.
Trust me when I say, I look at game adaptations with an unbiased view. Unfortunately, everything I've seen has been nothing but crap so far. The first Resident Evil film was okay at best. I couldn't even begin to compare it to the games, because I could never get a handle on the mechanics enough to ever enjoy them. What I saw was a mediocre story, that eventually spiraled into a poor attempt at a series. The second RE film was by far the worst, with the third taking the story into such a ridiculous direction, I don't plan on wasting my time with another one, despite how many naked Mila's they can fit into it.Trivun said:
The Final Fantasy: Advent Children movie I never actually saw, but I will say the Spirits Within was a decent story, if you don't look at it as a Final Fantasy movie. I guess my point is, where they've tried to take the actual concepts (not just use the names for a completely different, unrelated story) from video games, it has fallen flat. Max Payne was a joke, Hitman was alright, but looks like it should have been a Michael Bay film and really had very little to do with the Hitman games, much less a story about an anonymous assassin, and hell even the Super Mario Bros. movie way back when was more of a joke than anything.
The problem with these movies, in my eyes, is the direction taken of "Lets make this more Hollywood". Kinda hard to expect them to do something different, I know, but one thing about gaming is that the stories are not your typical Hollywood cut-out stories, which is part of what is so compelling about them. If they could remove these elements that every single Hollywood movie seems to require, then I think we'd see quite a bit more success.
Oh, and I wholeheartedly agree with your Uwe Boll comment. That practically goes without saying
Perhaps I'm just a fan boy or on drugs but the Silent Hill movie wasn't terrible to me... It was actually quite good and captured the atmosphere of Silent Hill.
Then again the movies mentioned were before my time so I'm just a young whippersnapper.
Then again the movies mentioned were before my time so I'm just a young whippersnapper.
I just watched eXistenZ and I really liked it. Some of the writing and execution felt a bit off, but you could explain that as it being set in a game with poor writing and execution. It's a great art film, but I can understand why people don't like it. I prefer it to The Last Starfighter, personally. Jude Law's in-game Canadian accent was priceless.More Fun To Compute said:
I'm not a big fan of Jude Law but what I did like was how at the start of the film I was thinking his accent was Mary Poppins terrible then at the end he was using a normal accent.In Limbo said:
