Arcade dire: the past, present and future of video game movies
It is a question that has echoed down the ages ever since Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo strapped on metal jump-boots for Super Mario Bros in May 1993: will there ever be a good video game movie? The short but dispiriting history of gaming IP being repurposed for the big screen is like a high-score table filled entirely with clunkers, from the cheeseball flexing of Van Damme in Street Fighter to the constipated gothic grimace of Marky Mark's Max Payne. To make things worse, the whole sub-genre will forever be dragged down by slapdash cash-in king Uwe Boll and his unforgivably amateurish efforts at adapting games like Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and Far Cry. (Not even the mighty Jason Statham as a hardnut ploughman could salvage Boll's aggressively banal medieval epic In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.)
Some of these early disasters could be written off as the growing pains of working out how best to combine the strengths of two similar but divergent art forms. But in recent years, gaming movies have had some serious investment and actual talent thrown at them - like the slick but soulless Aaron Paul vehicle Need For Speed, or Duncan Jones's monolithic passion project Warcraft - and yet have still struggled to make any critical or commercial headway. It is bewildering. Even by the law of averages, surely one of these films should be good? What makes it even more vexing is that comic book movies - based on a cheerfully disreputable art form that was being attacked for corrupting young minds for decades before games replaced it as the public's preferred scapegoat for social ills - are now absolutely dominant at the box office. When will video game movies have their surprise Iron Man moment, or even a Tim Burton/Batman-style breakthrough?
In the space of just a month, three major video game (or at least game-adjacent) movies are coming out in the UK and US, an interesting cluster of releases that provide a snapshot of how far things have progressed. First came Tomb Raider, an attempt that - on paper at least - felt the most likely to hit the bullseye. Here was a video game movie that seemed like a genuine collaboration between the film-makers and the creative talent behind the source material. From the prestige casting of Alicia Vikander to the earthy, sun-bleached colour palette, the movie hewed so closely to to the current era of Tomb Raider games - centred on a younger Lara learning the arrow-twanging, baddie-choking ropes - that at times it seemed almost indistinguishable, right down to the red icepick on the poster. While there was no faulting the effort, the end result (as Oli noted in his recent review) was strangely lacking: Croft unoriginal, if you like.
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