Weekly Dip: The Core Problem with Video Game Adaptations

There's been little movement in the Box Office rankings this week. Despite the presence of new blood entering the arena the estalbished players have continued to cominate.

1. Deadpool & Wolverine (Weekend Gross £8 million)
2. Despicable Me 4 (Weekend Gross £2.6 million)
3. Twisters (Weekend Gross £1.2 million)
4. Inside Out 2 (Weekend Gross £939,000)
5. Longlegs (Weekend Gross £570,000)

Yes, despite the alleged charms of Zachary Levi in Harold and the Purple Crayon the Box Office reamins as static as ever. With Deadpool and Wolverine continuing to dominate while the other contenders duked it out among the family and adult film demographics. Likely fearing death by irrelevance most major studios are still holding back their releases. With the only fresh blood being the aforementioned Harold and the undeniably niche animation Kensuke's Kingdom. 

All that is set to change this friday though with the appearence of M. Night Shamylan's latest thriller Trap, romantic fare in the adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us and the subject of this week's column Borderlands. Despite a stacked cast and more marketing than you can shake a stick at the video game adaptation has already drawn fierce criticsm from preview screenings. However it raises the much more interesting question of why video games have had such a challenging history when it comes to adaptation.

The Core Problem with Video Game Adaptations 

Adapting the popular video game franchise Borderlands into a feature film should have been the easiest win of the year. Set on the wasteland planet of Pandora the games story is deliberately broad, you're a vault hunter looking for a treasure vault, in order to create a framework for fighting your way through hordes of bandits, mutants and monsters with a variety of colourful weapons and abilities. So logically, if you want to adapt it you grab some of the game's more distinct characters and have them fight their way through a seies of action setpieces with the same broad goal. Easy right?

Well no, for starters the characters you pick to help the film have to be enjoyable enough for an audience to invest in their fate. Not necessarily likable or compelling, we just have to enjoy watching them do their thing. Keanu Reeves has scowled his way through four John Wick movies on the flimliest of tragic back stories simply because the sheer speactacle of his ability is draw enough. With Borderlands director Eli Roth seems to have stuck to the paper-thin characterisation of the original game, the only modification being to fit the...let's say interesting casting choices. So the usually stoic Roland becomes yet another explosive Kevin Hart performance, Cate Blanchett's siren Lilith does little more than scowl and pose than an animated action figure.

So you can't enjoy watching the characters regardless of how good the actual action is. And by all accounts the action is not even that good. Roth, famous for small-scale horror films, directs his action incoherently in a blaze of imemorable set pieces. This is the one thing Borderlands needed to get right, no one was expecting Citizen Kane levels of storytelling. What they were expecting was a big screen version of the anarchic, colourful action of the games. Characters engaging in consequence-free violence against a series of unique and increasingly deranged psychopaths. To not even manage that demonstrates a serious failure to grapple with even the most basic elements of the source material.

Roth, of course is not alone in this. Hollywood has been mangling video games from the very beginning. Super Mario Bros (1993) relocated the bright, simplistic world of the games to a grimy 80s dystopian underworld. The Hitman adaptation ignored the core mechanic of invisibly manouvering through elbaorate locations to set up complicate, untraceable assasinations. The Resident Evil films largely set up it's own, increasingly insane internal cannon seperate from the events or characters of the games. Time and time again films seem much more interested in reworking games into more familiar genre films than nailing why the source material is so successful.

This is not to say that the essential mechanics need to always be translated to film. A theoretical Bioshock film shouldn't stop every twenty minutes to watch the lead playing Pipe Mania. But it should convey the feeling of a lone being trapped in a place driven mad by Objectivist philosophy while relying on the product of that very philosophy to survive. Not easy stuff, granted, but then why are you making a Bioshock film and not Rando McJack's Undersea Shootout? 

I don't expect any of this to make a blind bit of difference to the bigwigs in Hollywood who, at their most cynical, view video games as another reliable IP to mine. But on the off chance that the directors, writers and actors tasked with bringing these projects to life actually give a shit, I hope they understand that what they should be adapting, first and foremost, is the experience.

A Borderlands game should feel like the frantic, comical experience of trying to survive on Pandora, a Portal game should feel like trying to navigate your way to freedom via portals, a Legend of Zelda game should make you feel like a lost hero building up your skills and arsenal until you're ready to fight Gannondorf. 

Video Game adaptations will never by one-to-one translations. That's the nature of adaptation. But the very least the creative teams could do is try to capture the essence of what players love about the games they play.