Friday, May 9, 2008

Bioshock Film Coming From "Pirates" Director

Yep, it's another game-to-film adaptation, only this time it's a franchise people actually care about, helmed by a director who isn't Uwe Boll. You know Gore Verbinski from the Pirates of the Caribbean films and also The Ring. He's not a bad choice.

So will it turn out to be good? I doubt it, but it depends on what they do with it.

If they try in any way shape or form to translate the story from the game into movie form, it will fail horribly. First of all, both endings to the game were terrible. Secondly, 75% of the story was told through the audio recordings you find throughout the game. That isn't going to make for very exciting cinema.

What they really need to do is come up with an original story that takes place in Rapture, because let's face it, Rapture is what made Bioshock cool. Not the characters, not the immediate story you played out. It was the whole concept of a secret city under the sea.

This is the problem with game adaptations though: they want to incorporate everything about the game into the movie, but when you start out with prerequisites like that, the script is going to suffer.

Film-to-game adaptations work best when the game isn't directly based on a film. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is a perfect example. It wasn't just good for a game based on a movie, it was a great game, period. It was actually much better than the movie it was based on. The same would be true in reverse if anyone would actually try it.

Make a film that fits into the canon established in the game, not one that just retells the same basic story but rearranges everything to work better as a film. That's just a disservice to everyone. Fans will be pissed off about things that were changed and newcomers are getting a half-assed story because it is built around trying to incorporate as much from the game as possible instead of simply weaving an interesting tale.

The worst part is, bad movies just give games a bad name. A game movie should make people want to go out and play the game. Instead, most (if not all) of them make people want to avoid it.

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