Heavy Rain Movie Snares Deadwood Writer
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
Of all the games, I think Heavy Rain is the most inappropriate one to make into a movie because what made it stood out was the special connection you had to the characters that a non-interactive medium cannot achieve. Yes, you can very much root for the main character in a film (or the other way around) but you will never think you ARE the main character. This fact was the major thing that made Heavy Rain such an emotional experience and, knowing a thing or two about making films, I doubt this is possible to translate.
Guys, guys, quite railing on the idea just because the game was like a movie. You ever think that people who don't game would like to see this story? Hell can't be a worse thriller than the Tourist...
Great, considering hollywood this is going to turn out horrible.
Blake will be nice
Norman will be addicted to cocaine
ethan won't feel emotions
Shaun and jason won't be in it and will instead be girls named Amy and Fiona
The origami killer will kill his victims by putting them into a well which fills up with batter.
The movie shall we called
Heavy rain : The Origami Baker
Blake will be nice
Norman will be addicted to cocaine
ethan won't feel emotions
Shaun and jason won't be in it and will instead be girls named Amy and Fiona
The origami killer will kill his victims by putting them into a well which fills up with batter.
The movie shall we called
Heavy rain : The Origami Baker
Thats the only game thats viable for a film adaptation in my books. Its still bound to be shit, because, all game/movie adapations are shit. The writers only seem to pay attention to the cutscenes not the narrative gameplay. Imagine if they made Bioshock a movie?
They haven't figured out games tell stories via a medium of actual gameplay.
They haven't figured out games tell stories via a medium of actual gameplay.
By what standards? I'll admit Heavy Rain had potential in a few places and that it speaks a lot of the system they developed that they could represent so many different types of activities and tasks, but where it started out interesting--exploring roles that gamers don't normally play in games--it quickly degenerated into a big, long series of quick-time action sequences as soon as the real story started picking up.Eri said:
In terms of its characters it couldn't focus on one out of the four protagonists long enough to bring much of a sense of development to any of them without a good deal of hand-waving. They couldn't be bothered to explain Ethan Mars's blackouts or strange coincidental visions of the Origami Killer's victims. They couldn't be bothered to come up with some kind of conclusion to Norman's tension with the police or explain what his drug problem was about. They couldn't even be bothered to explain why Madison Paige was there without tacking her backstory on as DLC, so her presence comes off as a huge, overly convenient coincidence, and she comes off as not having a character arc.
In terms of its drama and suspense it cheats to achieve most of it, concealing exactly what first-year textbooks on writing tell you not to in the interest of blowing the player's mind with a false twist. It's not good drama, it's insulting and patronizing. People who've played the game, you know what I'm talking about. The pacing, meanwhile, is absolutely awful, with none of the characters able to advance any farther in the mystery of the Origami Killer than one another at any given time; thus, all of them repeatedly discover the same clues scene after scene until they're caught up to the same point with one another. It doesn't help that they're all tied to the current state of advancement in Ethan's scenes and therefore the writers had to contrive a string of clues that would conveniently line up with exactly the same time line.
In terms of being a personalized interactive story Heavy Rain doesn't have enough of a sense of consistency to make sense as one. Two of the characters can die at various points in the story, but the other two--no matter how much you might try--absolutely are not allowed to die because they're too important to the plot. The sense of personalization melts down quickly as the game eventually stops exploring the characters and their relationships with one another entirely in favor of an endless stream of action sequences. It even outright slaps the player in the face with bad endings, suggesting that the game isn't motivated by personalization and interpretation but by success and failure states that Quantic Dream felt obligated to put in so that they could still call this a "game," which I find very patronizing.
In terms of its sense of realism and restraint... come on. The finale of the main ending involves Norman in a fist-fight with the Killer on a conveyor belt about five stories off the ground at some kind of garbage dump/warehouse. There's a scene where Ethan has to navigate an abandoned power plant that's somehow still on, the transformers are discharging so much that they'd be on the verge of exploding, and somehow nobody in the entire city notices this even though it would be drawing power like a ************. Norman gets in a fight at a different junkyard with a seemingly invincible ex con. Ethan even gets shot in the stomach in one version of the ending, and he shows up partway through the final fight with no problems. It's a step up from the Matrixy junk that happened in Fahrenheit, but the action scenes in Heavy Rain--with as many of them as there are--would be a bit much in an action movie. I wouldn't buy this crap in Lethal Weapon. I wouldn't buy this if I were watching Terminator!
Finally, the research that Cage put into writing this game was just piss poor. He clearly has no idea what the United States look like, and he frequently gets basic psychological disorders wrong, confusing dissociative personality disorder with schizophrenia. This wouldn't be a big deal if he didn't put this false information into the mouth of a psychiatrist in an establishing scene. The real blows come from the way he portrays police, however, spoon-feeding us some of the dumbest, most one-dimensional and cliche cops I've seen in a work of fiction; it could only be fiction because I know for a fact that they fire police officers over way smaller transgressions of police brutality than Lt. Blake's actions in this game. Meanwhile there's all this weird out-of-place sci-fi gadgetry laying around so that Cage didn't have to research proper investigation procedures and could hand-wave clues into the characters' hands. Some of it was cool, some of it you could argue had symbolic value, but--again--the game couldn't focus on this aspect enough to give it any sort of payoff or weight for any of the characters or for the player.
This isn't just "not perfect," it's not competent, or even acceptable. Aside from the fact that I can list a dozen psychological thrillers this doesn't measure up to, people in my screenwriting classes in college were held to higher standards than this. Television writers are held to higher standards than this for bad episodes of police procedurals. The rest of the game industry? I don't give them a pass for bad writing; hell, I rip into Bioware every once in a while and there's almost no studio more honored for their writing in this business. Why should I treat David Cage and his game any differently from how I treat them? Why should he and Quantic Dream get a free pass?
Because this is thrilling and new and the game industry has never produced something like this? No, because I grew up in the '80's and '90's and I remember FMV games, quite a few of which were more focused and more entertaining than this--and they sucked.
Because they had the pretension to make a "mature and adult" drama in the interactive medium? No, they have to actually put forth the effort to make a good one, especially since I have so little stock in the "film envy" philosophy that drove this game's creation and marketing in the first place.
They need to convince me that they aren't consummately full of shit--and they so didn't manage it with this game.
They kind of did with the trophies, one was called the Perfect Ending. I believe that the film will be that one. Also, they could use some work on some of the plot holes. Some of the things didn't make sense when you went back and looked at them again._Janny_ said:
Why the hell would we need a Heavy Rain movie? And no, I'm not giving the answer you'd think I'd give.
One of the main points of Heavy Rain was to make your own choices with different outcomes, and making it into one long, linear movie just makes it a standard thriller. You know, just like every other attempt at making a video game into a movie.
Sometimes you need to be a little pretentious to move forward.
Make that of what you will, but personally I greatly enjoyed Heavy Rain for it's uniqueness and presentation, aswell as it's story despite some flaws in it. Few developers have the balls to go with something like this, and I'm glad that Quantic Dream took the risk otherwise people, like you, wouldn't be motivated to do something better.
One of the main points of Heavy Rain was to make your own choices with different outcomes, and making it into one long, linear movie just makes it a standard thriller. You know, just like every other attempt at making a video game into a movie.
I'm going to skip most of that, and present you with this;NickCaligo42 said:
Sometimes you need to be a little pretentious to move forward.
Make that of what you will, but personally I greatly enjoyed Heavy Rain for it's uniqueness and presentation, aswell as it's story despite some flaws in it. Few developers have the balls to go with something like this, and I'm glad that Quantic Dream took the risk otherwise people, like you, wouldn't be motivated to do something better.
Really hope they put the plot lines the developers couldn't fit in the game into the film. The stuff that gives Madison backstory and explains why the hell Ethan kept waking up in the middle of a street.
*Sigh* David Cage, you were pretentious enough to call Heavy Rain an experience so unique it wasn't even a game any more, and now you're pretentious enough to think HR can actually survive as a film. Your foolery normally amuses me, but not now man, not now...
*Gasp* TENDO! 'Sup dawg?tendo82 said:
...Jumplion said:
You are a smooth ************. If only Quantic Dream had a guy like you heading up their PR.
So, great. We'll get a movie where the only female character exists to fuck the protagonist and get a drill stuffed up her cooze, where the serial killer can break causality and lies to the audience in his own internal monologue, and local police can somehow dismiss a federal agent from an ongoing investigation simply because he's doing his job.
I'm sure it will be box office gold. David Cage you've done it again.
I'm sure it will be box office gold. David Cage you've done it again.
Who says I'm not?NickCaligo42 said:
But in all seriousness, I do understand why some people dislike the game, buuuuuuuuut personally not much of it bothers me. Don't get me wrong, there are some serious flaws, particularly in some aspects of the story (though I think they are more inconsistencies rather than plot holes), and it's just as great that you have the balls to criticize a developer as harshly as you did.
Though, I thought the twist ending was great, slap to the face that I didn't see coming, and I think it's a perfect example of using the player against him/herslef.
...why? That's my only question.
Why make a movie based on a game that's mostly cinematic?
It's the same thing with the Uncharted movie.
Why make a movie based on a game that's mostly cinematic?
It's the same thing with the Uncharted movie.
That would be a much more effective twist than any of the ones in this game. No, I think you work for someone more clever. Consequently, do you have any job openings?Jumplion said:Who says I'm not?
I can partially agree with that.Jumplion said:
The forced romance angle, the half-realized angles between the different characters, the bad research? The unsatisfactory endings that occur if you don't push ALL of the characters through (Norman you can argue about)? Yeah, those I'll call clumsy inconsistencies or design shortsights more than straight-up plot holes, and often times in a work as experimental as this I think that you have to expect those. They just get a lot more upsetting to me than they should when the developer talks as big a talk as Cage did leading up to this.
The most glaring problems in the script, though, actually arise out of important establishing scenes that were in the script but got cut out. Originally it was meant to be a straight-up rehash of Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, with Ethan and the Killer sharing a mental link established for vague reasons at the time that Ethan's son Jason died; hence his premonitions of the killer's victims whenever he has black-outs and the strange, unexplained alternate endings where the killer pulls a gun on him.
The scenes actually got made as I understand it, but Quantic Dream canned them when they picked up the pretension to a "serious and adult drama" and realized that the paranormal junk wasn't really necessary or helpful in telling this story. As such everything having to do with Ethan's black-outs gets dropped halfway through the story and we end up left wondering if he ever actually got better.
Madison's backstory also got canned in a similar way; she's supposed to be an obsessive freak who breaks into famous serial killers' apartments and goes through their shit in researching her books, and that's why she really gets involved with Ethan. Without that, the idea of her trying to get close to the killer through him just sort of comes out of left field.
I think it would've been awesome IF it were executed properly. It's not an altogether unreasonable twist for this mystery; it makes sense, is legitimately surprising, isn't without foundation, and REALLY brings new perspective to the player's actions, making it a worthwhile experiment at the very least. The clues were there but they sort of blended in alongside the general inconsistencies and lack of restraint, and I don't think people picked up on what they were doing with set design; the way the dusty old office reflects his inability to leave the past behind and whatnot. Alongside all the other environments in the game it just comes off as the only one that seems remotely realistic other than Ethan's second house.Jumplion said:
Meanwhile the cheats they had to do in order to make that work were absurd and ruined it for me, but of all the story arcs in this game that one in particular was more like having a perfectly decent cake ruined by the addition of ketchup filling rather than a total catastrophic failure. It came off as having stronger beats and a better-developed character than all the other ones, and a little bit more polish on the script could have really made it shine and almost make up for all the other problems.
Yeah, I remember that, it's a shame they had to take some of those scenes out. I think they totally could have pulled off the "mental link" with Ethan and the killer, but instead of it being some psychic link it would just be Ethan having a schizo-moment or something, maybe him having claustrophobia or something. That would have been interesting, but whatyougonnado?NickCaligo42 said:
I thought the twist was well done, personally;
I like how when you're burning the evidence, it flashes back to all the scenes where you were getting them. It makes you look back and think "How could I/he do that?", and the fact that I hadn't gotten all the pieces of evidence on my first play through actually made me feel relieved and think "Yeah, you sonuva *****, you ain't getting away with this."
Though, I'm probably being a bit too sentimental with this, but I thought it was very well done personally
Though, I'm probably being a bit too sentimental with this, but I thought it was very well done personally
Overall, I can see your complaints, but they didn't really bother me. Heavy Rain is an interesting game, and even if the game was universally panned I would still be grateful of it's existence. It's not like this game will make people go "Oh, this game was successful doing this particular thing, let's do the exact same thing as them!", people (like you) will naturally look to improve upon areas that they think need improvement, and therefore better games will come from it.
