No Right Answer: Worst Video Game to Movie Redux

[ValiusEvil]

Well as a Final Fantasy fan I know one thing and that is a lot of games have one or two key points to them... No game continues the story outside of the FFX and the FFXIII games. However even in those games this kind of fits...

Final Fantasy has Anti-Religion elements...
And a lot of time if there is no Religion there is a gyha reference... Gya being the spirit of a world...
(side not... may have screwed up the spelling on gyha)

 

[Rad Party God]

No House of The Dead or Far Cry?, not even a mention of Alone in The Dark or Postal? (or anything by Uwe Boll for that matter).

For Shame.

EDIT: Damn, I was already ninja'd.

Double EDIT: I think that might be an interesting debate by itself, "the worst Uwe Boll film".

 

[Canadamus Prime]

No mention of all the product placement in Spirits Within? The interesting thing about Spirits Within is that Square was planning to start a whole film division with Spirits Within being their first major project. And since Spirits Within was such a disaster it was also their only major project as Square kiboshed that idea immediately afterwards.

 

[iblis666]

this was no contest, The Legend of Chun-Li was just a bad movie while spirits within was a solid animated scifi movie for the time. The only reason that spirits within was even considered a bad movie is that square decided to tack on the name final fantasy. When you take on the FF name one expects a few FF elements beyond a chocobo pin, a guy named cid, and gaia. What we expected was magic(preferably with a black, white, or red mage), maybe a few more references to earlier games, and a real freaking villian like kefka or sepheroth.

btw anyone beside me really like street fighter? i mean it was so bad that it was good again and Raúl Juliá's overacting as bison as well as trying to stay true to the source material was just over the top and fun.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I have to say Final Fantasy was the worst. There was nothing linking it to the source material. Rather than having a complicated story on a fantastically made up world with all manner of strange monsters, they set it on Earth, with ghosts.

 

[Seracen]

I am one of the few folks who LIKED the Final Fantasy movie. However, I must also add that I wasn't expecting it to be anything like Final Fantasy, as I'd only played FF8 up to that point, and knew the movie would have no magic or anything.

I fully believe the film would have been a breakout project for the company if it simply had disavowed the "FF" moniker. IMO, it was a case of brand recognition working AGAINST a project that was NEVER INTENDED to resemble its source material in any way.

As an FF movie, however, it sucked horribly. I just don't see it as one. In my mind, "The Spirits Within" is just another movie that came out around the same time as "Titan AE" and "Heavy Metal 2000," (I may be misremembering the timeline) constituting some of the best sci-fi animations to rock my summer.

Of course, I'm also one of those people who finds charming appeal in plenty of otherwise TERRIBLE 80's and 90's films (such as Johnny Mnemonic).

Chun Li's movie can go straight to hell though. Van Damme's movie wasn't much better, but at least it had a bikini-clad Kylie Minogue in it. Actually, my movie theater had it listed as "Chung Lee," and I am inclined to call this travesty of a knock-off by that name.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Neal McDonough was in a Street Fighter movie!?

 

[snekadid]

I like DOOM & the first Mortal Kombat, but one of the best and most game-accurate adaptation I've seen is Hitman, starring Timothy Oliphant.

mortal kombat was meh.... Hitman was a good movie...... DOOM?! are you freaking high!?

If I had to vote for my favorite video game to movie transition, I'd have to say Resident Evil.
They used the universe well without just copy pasting the games. Then for each sequel they went further and further from the game and while the story got weirder, its still better than the games gotten and at least the movies are entertaining, unlike the last few games.

Prior to ... 1998's Blade, did we see any good [comicbook] movies?

There was 4: Superman, Batman, The Crow & The Mask?

I will concede all but Superman, those movies are absolute garbage. Flying backwards around the planet makes you go back in time and brings people back to life, yet they kinda remember that they died? The movie was barely ok before that, after that I didn't think it could get worse, I WAS WRONG! Amnesia kisses, more reversing time, only this time to make it so that none of it EVER HAPPENED, if only we could have done that in the real world for the movie itself. 3 & 4 are just horrible horrible jokes, though 4 was so bad that it started becoming decent in a so bad its good way.

God, after watching all of them, I wanted to hit everyone that complained that Superman returns was a bad movie that ruined the superman series. SERIOUSLY?! The best lex luthor ever(I love you Kevin Spacey, never leave me), a call back to the only interesting aspect of the first movie(lex's real estate business) and they didn't even reuse scenes from the previous movies.

Sorry, that rants been brewing for awhile. What were we talking about again? O yea, good comic book movies prior to blade..... well the obvious answer is Howard the Duck >

 

[theApoc]

The best adaptation in recent years is Doom. Not a great movie by any means, but it did the one thing most movies like this fail to do, it used the source material as the foundation as well as the color. It told its own story but used the core elements and some of the window dressing from the game. To me that is what pretty much every other movie like this fails to do.

I beg to disagree. They had the simplest job in the world: make a movie about a guy shooting demons from Hell on Mars and they didn't. Yeah, they had Karl Urban and Wayne Johnson and it sitll didn't save the flick.

Mortal Kombat is the only good VG adaptation so far.

I was a movie about shooting demons from hell on Mars... What else did you want LOL.

 

[RealRT]

The best adaptation in recent years is Doom. Not a great movie by any means, but it did the one thing most movies like this fail to do, it used the source material as the foundation as well as the color. It told its own story but used the core elements and some of the window dressing from the game. To me that is what pretty much every other movie like this fails to do.

I beg to disagree. They had the simplest job in the world: make a movie about a guy shooting demons from Hell on Mars and they didn't. Yeah, they had Karl Urban and Wayne Johnson and it sitll didn't save the flick.

Mortal Kombat is the only good VG adaptation so far.

I was a movie about shooting demons from hell on Mars... What else did you want LOL.

Only, you know, without any demons. It had monsters created through gene engineering, not demons from hell.

 

[Lightknight]

"Has to hurt the franchise"? That qualification rules out nearly every movie adapated from a game. I would scratch that as any kind of requirement and just make it an additional point.

I think House of the Dead was pretty darn bad. Maybe Double Dragon's movie.

Line from House of the Dead:

?You created them so you could be immortal! Why??

?To live forever!?

 

[Arnoxthe1]

I realy get the feeling i'm the only one who generally enjoyed "spirits within".
On the other side, i never played a final fantasy game (the closest was Mystic Quest legend on the SNES), so for me it was just an animated scifi movie.

I am one of the few folks who LIKED the Final Fantasy movie. However, I must also add that I wasn't expecting it to be anything like Final Fantasy, as I'd only played FF8 up to that point, and knew the movie would have no magic or anything.

I fully believe the film would have been a breakout project for the company if it simply had disavowed the "FF" moniker. IMO, it was a case of brand recognition working AGAINST a project that was NEVER INTENDED to resemble its source material in any way.

As an FF movie, however, it sucked horribly. I just don't see it as one. In my mind, "The Spirits Within" is just another movie that came out around the same time as "Titan AE" and "Heavy Metal 2000," (I may be misremembering the timeline) constituting some of the best sci-fi animations to rock my summer.

FF: TSW Fan checking in as well.

And yeah, compared to Doom 3, the Doom movie was terrible. I actually find it a little funny that it was more entertaining watching someone PLAY Doom 3 than it was to watch the movie. To be fair though, even if Doom 3 didn't have much plot to it (didn't have much to work with to begin with), I thought the plot it did have and a lot of the characters were rather entertaining, some of the levels in the game were really awesome, and the general aesthetic design did look really good.

 

[samuraiweasel]

Hmmmmm.....i loved The Spirits Within.....

DISCLAIMER: Never played Final Fantasy in any form.

 

[Nicole Maronn]

If I had to pick, I'd go with Final Fantasy: Spirits Within. Legend of Chun-Li, to me at least, is a tolerable bad movie. It's goofy, it's dumb, but I've seen worse...much worse (**cough** The Item **cough**). Spirits Within wins this due to the fact I remember very vividly going to see it in theaters when it first came out when I was in high school. My two guy friends and I where (and still am) big video game nerds and all of us had high hopes. At the time, I was just starting to get into FF and when I was watching it, I had to keep asking them if the film was even related to the series! Needless to say, the only saving grace in that movie was the CGI; I just watched it recently on TV not too long ago and the graphics still hold up.

 

[lastjustice]

Spirits with in was pretty but that was about it. (same could be said of FF 8 heh.)It was just mostly weird and boring. The majority of the pieces they needed were found off camera right at the beginning. It felt like some bad script for a game square rejected and made a movie instead.

 

[Breywood]

I realy get the feeling i'm the only one who generally enjoyed "spirits within".
On the other side, i never played a final fantasy game (the closest was Mystic Quest legend on the SNES), so for me it was just an animated scifi movie.

No, you are not alone. I also enjoyed it. While I realize that intentionally naming it Final Fantasy was a mistake because everyone was expecting their favorite FF characters to somehow evolve into characters with 3D personalities, overall, I felt it stood decent ground when compared to many other Hollywood movies.

 

[porpoise hork]

For me I very much liked FF Spirits Within. I contribute this to the fact that I have never played any of the games so I had nothing to base the movie on from the FF universe. So I went in as this is just another SciFi movie that happened to to have a above average story and incredible CGI considering when it was made.

The Legend of Chun-Li on the other hand? I'm a fan of bad movie night and even this fell below what I would count as acceptable for that.

 

[Vigormortis]

Both arguments are invalidated simply by the existence of Uwe Boll films. Most notably, House of the Dead.

Not only was it poorly written, scripted, directed, edited, scored, and acted, it was just poorly filmed. I mean, for fucks sake, there are scenes where you can see the springs boards used to launch zombies onto screen, scenes where actors switch/change roles or costumes between cuts, etc, etc. The list goes on.

That, and you get shit like this:

The movie was so bad I think it gave me cancer, diabetes, and polio.