It’s a truth universally acknowledged that films based on video games will be terrible. This has been the way of things since the first video game movies, starting with the critical and financial flop Super Mario Bros. in 1993, which many have labelled as one of the worst films ever made. The following year saw the release of Double Dragon and Street Fighter, which boast Rotten Tomatoes scores of 8% and 11% respectively – not the most auspicious beginning to an industry that now looks to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars with each new venture. But why are these films so maligned when the games that spawn them are so cherished by fans?
For some films, the answer is obvious. As the first video game movies demonstrate, the games selected for feature films are not always ones with solid stories and characters to fall back on. Back in the day that wasn’t so much of a choice – many of the games popular in the 90s had paper thin stories that were more of an afterthought than anything and the characters were often just reskinned versions of each other with only the barest hint of a personality. Instead, the focus was on gameplay, something which couldn’t be carried over into film.
As a result, the movies had to create entirely new stories while incorporating names and aesthetics from the games on which they were based, usually resulting a strange mishmash of ideas lifted wholesale from the game and completely unrelated story threads. Super Mario Bros. for example, has the core cast of characters from the games – Mario, Luigi, (Princess) Daisy, King Koopa, and Toad – and largely concerns saving the princess from the primary antagonist, but all of this happens within the context of a multi-dimensional universe that is threatening to merge New York with ‘Dinohattan’ and unleash vaguely-humanoid dinosaurs onto the unsuspecting humans. The story has no basis in the games that came before it beyond ‘save the damsel in distress’ and a few shared names. The product that’s left is something that doesn’t really satisfy fans of the game, as it draws so little on the source material they love, while also relying on too much on carry-overs to tell a story that will entertain viewers who didn’t play the games.
This isn’t a problem that’s gone away either – as The Angry Birds Movie from 2016 with its 44% Rotten Tomatoes has shown us, film producers are more than happy to jump on a gaming bandwagon if they think there might be profit in it, even when there is nothing in the source material to draw a comprehensive narrative from. (That being said, the sequel, The Angry Birds Movie 2, which was released just prior to writing this article, is currently the best-reviewed film based on a video game according to Rotten Tomatoes, so maybe the trend is starting to improve).
For more recent films, the reasons behind their failure get a little more complex than just insufficient time and money being spent on a decent script. Films like Assassin’s Creed (2016) and Tomb Raider (2018) should have, in theory, been genuinely great bits of cinema: they’re both based off a well-loved and extensive game series, there is plenty of material to draw from both in terms of characters and storylines, and they both have the potential for very cinematic sequences. For all of that, however, they’re currently sitting with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 18% and 52% respectively, with only slightly higher audience scores (43% and 55%). So why is that? Surely there was enough source material to create a more successful movie than these managed to.
Well, both films make the same error right off the bat and it cripples them within about five minutes of screen time. One of the core issues involved in condensing a video game into a two hour movie is that games can involve stories that take 20 or 30 hours to tell – there simply isn’t enough time in the film to include all the elements of a game’s story without cutting out huge parts of it. That means that when it comes to the final cut of a film, screen time is at a premium and only the most important aspects of the story can remain. Unfortunately, neither Assassin’s Creed nor Tomb Raider appear to subscribe to this philosophy.
Tomb Raider is the worst offender, with a whopping 24 whole minutes of screen time spent following Lara around her day to day life in London to seemingly no end. All that the viewer really gets from this opening is that Lara’s father went missing many years ago and she refuses to accept he’s dead, Ana has stepped into the role of Lara’s guardian in her father’s absence, and Lara has had some boxing training, setting her up for her fights later in the movie. It could also be argued that the bike chase scene reveals how resourceful and smart Lara is, but that’s something consistently shown through the rest of the film too, and so it isn’t needed here. When the entire film only clocks in at 117 minutes, this is a ridiculous percentage of the runtime to waste on mostly useless filler. The same information could be condensed down into a couple of minutes, if that, or even cut out entirely without impacting the plot at all.
Because of this ludicrous waste, the adventure the film centres around doesn’t get going until the second act, and the primary antagonist isn’t introduced for a full 40 minutes of movie time. As a result, the actual story of the movie is left to be vastly underdeveloped because there simply isn’t enough time left to get the viewer invested in it. That isn’t helped by the predictable plot points that are presented as ground-breaking twists – anyone who has seen a movie before is going to know that Lara’s father is alive and she’ll find him on the island, before he heroically sacrifices himself to save her. When you know how the film will end ten minutes in, something’s gone wrong.
Assassin’s Creed has a similar problem, although to a much lesser extent. The film opens with a relatively short scene of a young Cal attempting some daredevil tricks, discovering his mother’s murder, and blaming his father, before immediately cutting to adult Cal’s supposed execution and the introduction of Abstergo. This is interspersed with the introduction of the ‘past’ storyline, following the assassins in Andalusia and establishing Aguilar as the protagonist of that side of the narrative.
Within a couple of minutes of screen time, Alan Rikken has been set up as the villain, the protagonist has been introduced in a way that demonstrates his personality and motivations, and the actual story is kicking off. In theory, this should be a good opening – it’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s standard for this type of film and it’s a hundred miles better than Tomb Raider’s drawn-out approach.
The main problem here is that it’s unnecessary. Cal’s backstory with his parents is completely irrelevant to the plot, and only reappears later during a scene where Cal meets his father again and is spurred into destroying the assassins. As that plot thread goes absolutely nowhere and Cal ends up siding with the assassins after all, that’s a substantial amount of runtime that is more or less wasted. What’s worse is that this is a part of the story that isn’t in the first Assassin’s Creed game – while the early games’ protagonist, Desmond, does have his backstory filled in later on, the first game limits itself to telling the player that he was a bartender and Abstergo kidnapped him to force him into the Animus. The developers knew that the primary draw of the game wasn’t Desmond’s story – he was simply an avatar through which the player could experience the Middle East in ancient times where the true story lay.
Which then leads into Assassin’s Creed’s next problem: it’s trying to juggle two stories. Not only does that put further pressure on the very limited runtime, with two sets of characters to be introduced and explored, it means that neither story can really be allowed the space to breathe. The action scenes in particular are a notable downfall of the film’s structure, with well-choreographed fights that should have been incredible being cut to death by jumping back and forth between past and present, as though the audience is in any doubt about what’s happening when they can’t see both timelines simultaneously. The result is that interesting fights that should have been one of the core parts of the movie are genuinely uncomfortable to watch because each shot only lasts for a second or two. The viewer can’t get invested in Aguilar because we never get enough time with him to bond with the character and a large portion of Cal’s screen time is relegated to him being unnecessarily angry at the people around him or strapped into the Animus. By the time the credits role, most viewers aren’t going to feel any real attachment to either of the film’s storylines.
Tomb Raider, strangely, has the same issue, although in a different way. Instead of directly trying to tell two different stories in parallel, the film attempts to mesh the stories of the first two games in the rebooted series, Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015) with little success. The film involves two characters with the same names as antagonists from the first game, and it’s set up to be an origin story of sorts for Lara, but most of the rest of the story is cut from the second game, with a couple of new elements thrown in. This creates several problems, one of which is that by combining unrelated plots, the script is left with some gaping holes that the film never addresses.
The most notable of these is a hangover from the first game. In that story, Lara and co. are trapped on an island because an ancient queen, Himiko, is able to summon intense storms whenever anyone tries to leave. It’s a neat way of enriching the plot, whilst also removing the need for players to ask why the group doesn’t just leave an island that is so obviously cursed, particularly when people start dying. In the film, the ancient queen is also called Himiko, but it turns out that instead of being able to control storms, she was infected by and immune to a plague that would kill anyone she touched. To save her people, she sealed herself away to die instead of continuing to inflict her illness on them. The reveal that Himiko wasn’t the villain the film had thus far made her out to be was a genuinely interesting twist, irrelevant as it may have been to the story, but it leads us back to the question so neatly answered in the game: ‘Why don’t they just leave the island?’
Without mystical storm powers, there shouldn’t be anything keeping them there. The primary villain, Mathias (which is the name of the antagonist from the first game, working for the company that was the antagonist in the second game, confusingly), is being kept there by higher ups in Trinity, and he in turn captures Lara and her friend. But Lara’s father is free on the island by the time the story starts – was there truly no way for him to leave in the years he has been trapped there? At the very least, it feels as though he should have been able to send a message to the daughter he so clearly cares about.
For both Assassin’s Creed and Tomb Raider then, it appears that the films have been made much worse by needless plot points and production decisions – writers in Hollywood are clearly able to produce better scripts than either of these two movies got, so how did this happen? In the end, it all comes down to the intended audience. For a production studio, there’s a significant financial incentive to create films that attract the broadest viewing audience possible – the more people the film targets, the more people are going to come and see it. That means that they can’t make a film based on a video game that’s only going to make sense and appeal to fans of the game without slashing their sales figures; it needs to be able to stand alone so that non-gamers aren’t going to be immediately turned off.
At the same time, films based on pre-existing material, be it games, TV shows, or books, already have a built-in fan based that is going to be interested in seeing the film. For production companies, it’s essentially free sales without much need for targeted marketing, but it’s also a limitation. If the film strays too far from the source material, fans aren’t going to be happy (films like The Last Airbender are prime examples of this) and that’s going to hurt sales. Moreover, if the film is just a 2 hour summation of a game with nothing new, anyone who has played the game is quickly going to get bored because they’ve already seen everything the film has to offer from the comfort of their own home.
So producers are left with the quandary of how to make the film unique enough to appeal to non-gamers, while remaining similar enough to the source material to appeal to fans, while not remaining so similar there’s nothing new or interesting for said fans. It’s an impossible balance, and it’s no real wonder that so many video game films completely miss the mark when it comes to juggling so many different factors.
One thing that is worth noting is that Assassin’s Creed did have the right idea when it came to this, even if the execution was sorely lacking. The nature of the games’ mythos is such that the film could have involved any collection of people not in the games (which it mostly did) and could take place at a completely new point in history. By focusing on a whole new group of never-before seen assassins in a period of history not touched on by the games, the film was able to take enough of the mythos and themes of the game to please fans, while telling a comprehensive, brand new story that could appeal to any audience. In many ways, this is the optimal approach to video game films and it’s truly a shame that it turned out the jumbled mess that it did.
All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that all video game films moving forwards will be bad – far from it. As the gaming industry grows and more people start getting involved in the medium, it’s likely that we’ll see many more films drawing on popular games and hopefully learning how to adapt them in a way that’s satisfying for everyone. For everyone’s collective horror at the Sonic the Hedgehog trailer, we were also treated to the delight of Pokémon Detective Pikachu – fingers crossed that 2020’s Monster Hunter and Uncharted will follow in the yellow mouse’s tiny footsteps. The important lesson is to learn from what’s come before: there are clear faults in almost all video game films that should be relatively simple to remedy with a bit of clever writing. You’ve just got to learn from your mistakes.
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