The 2018 Tomb Raider movie starring Alicia Vikander is a walking paradox, in that the game it’s based on, the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, is better at being a movie than the movie is at being an adaptation of the game. I don’t mean any faux-cinematic “press X to pay respects”-isms endemic to certain other properties, so much as a focus on lush, epic, heart-pounding setpieces.
Consider the island of Yamatai: in the game, it’s a vibrant and expansive island, the man-made constructions dating from several different eras: the original Edo Japanese settlements, temples and tombs, the shipwrecks of many eras past, the World War II-era Japanese encampments and the more modern cultist shanty-dwellings, all wrapped up around, over, under and inside each other, making the whole thing feel like a truly deep, lived-in place with so much history about it.
To my eyes, Yamatai in the game is a masterpiece of world design that feels fantastical yet very real. You can get an exceptional feel of it just by playing the game, even if you neglect to pick up the smorgasbord of artifacts that lend greater depth to the world, lore and plot.
In the film, we really don’t see much of that at all. There’s quite a nice peril setpiece involving a rickety old WWII-era plane, some rushing rapids and a distressingly crappy parachute, but for the most part we just sort of see several dig sites and Himiko’s tomb itself. Yamatai in the film doesn’t feel very expansive, or lived-in, or lush or really all that interesting, sorry to say. It’s just sort of there.
Part of it is that your experience with the game world – in all three modern Tomb Raiders – can be enriched greatly by optional lore pickups that grant both experience toward practical leveling and interesting historical info about the setting. The tight focus-economy of film compared to the player-driven gaming experience lends itself more to being very choosy about what ends up on the big screen.
But part of it also stems from a fundamental element of the script itself (and this may or may not be a foundational flaw depending on if you loved the game’s take on Yamatai, as I did): while the game lets in very shortly before the island crash, the film takes the entire first act before we actually reach the island, spent doing things that aren’t especially Tomb Raidy, including a whole action setpiece across London streets that has way more in common with Premium Rush (not throwing shade; Premium Rush is a great, adrenaline-fueled Joseph Gordon Levitt deep cut that you should really check out).
And this isn’t inherently bad; it’s just, as they say, a choice. One that ended up leaving a bit to be desired, considering how hollow Yamatai feels in the film compared to the game once we finally get there. (Space is at a premium in this film as it runs under two hours; it isn’t like Peter Jackson’s King Kong where he can be as indulgent as he wants on the front-end and still have tons of cool Skull Island scenes to show us because his film is super-long.)
I suppose what I’m saying is that everything about the Vikander-led film feels, ironically, scaled-down for the big screen. That does extend to the big reveal about Queen Himiko, who in the game is a sorceress so obsessed with immortality that she would choose handmaidens to pass her spirit into from generation to generation, until the last reincarnation rite was thwarted long ago. In the film, it’s quite different, more small-scale than obscene reincarnation rituals.
Now, I do like how the movie provided us an alternate take on Himiko’s myth as an evil queen who spead death like a curse wherever she went: once they get through the traps in Himiko’s tomb, they find out that Himiko was in fact an immune carrier of a lethal disease contagious to the touch: quite literally spreading death by the touch of her hand.
Even though I prefer the way the games build up their supernatural mysteries, I really appreciate the idea of a historical plague-carrier being mythologized in legend as an all-powerful bringer of death. It’s easily the coolest part of the film, along with the tomb-raiding sequence that both precedes and follows it.
It also flips the script on the whole “evil death queen” thing from the game: in the movie, Himiko was never evil, but noble and heroic, exiling and sacrificing herself to keep the plague in her body from ever reaching the world and causing a deadly pandemic. (wouldn’t that just be a nightmare?) But really, the film’s take did end up tripping into being more impactful retroactively, because hey, that can happen. I mean, the film’s plague involves the afflicted turning into Rage Virus-type aggros, but.
Because yeah, there’s only one tomb-raiding setpiece in the movie, but they did it well. I’m of two minds on that, because on one hand it’s endemic of the ‘source material spinal compression’ trope that so many lesser adaptations suffer from, where after dangling the thing you came to see just out of reach for the entire movie, finally they give it to you for a minority of the runtime because you didn’t think you really deserved a whole movie actually fixating on the best stuff from the source material, did you?
(Just pointing it out that it’s continually remarkable how the Sonic movie actually ended up really, really good despite trying its hardest to keep doing that exact thing. Go see it if you haven’t. And its sequel ended up even better!)
But on the other hand, it’s a really, really good sequence. So there’s always that. And I like that they gave these insane traps an actual in-universe reason to exist. Also, compared to the game, and considering how largely sanitized the film version is (compare the game’s rivers of blood and countless rotted corpses on pikes to the film’s unrealistically bloodless violence), the way movie Mathias dies is disgusting and gross as hell. I love it.
But it does bring me to the question, what’s with video game movie adaptations in an age of cinematic video games? I tend to think there are actually a number of very good video game movies out now, where the microgenre was once near-universally slapped at. And this is sort of ironic, because so many games nowadays employ such cinematic fixings that we even talk about elements of them with language once reserved for film, IE, God Of War 2018 employing a single moving camera throughout the entire journey and working all its blocking and framing around that.
Before looking at commonalities of the successful adaptations, can I just say that the first Sonic movie is an absolute cosmic anomaly? It goes well out of its way to do everything “wrong” by the definition of ‘source material spinal compression’: giving us an Eggman who looks and acts nothing like him until his literal last scene; setting the film on Earth instead of on the wacky and wild fantasy worlds of the Sonic universe except for the very first scene, as though to tease you about what you’re not getting; a gross joke that nobody wanted about Sonic having chili-dog sharts; it’s the halfway point before he does a classic spin-dash, etc, etc.
And yet the Sonic movie is just so good. The characters and dialogue are charming as heck; that “Eggman who looks and acts nothing like Eggman” turned out to be a performance that is peak Jim Carrey in a post-peak-Jim-Carrey world and is more than we deserved but exactly what we didn’t know we needed; the Earth road-trip bonding that the movie absolutely shouldn’t have been about feels genuine and heartfelt. Okay so Sonic was going to look like a grubby little gremlin jumpscaring you straight out of the uncanny valley before the entire internet shouted them down into re-doing almost every single VFX shot in the film to fix it, but the end product is what counts here. And the sequel actually delivers on more of the things you’d actually want from a Sonic movie, while retaining the sense that the person writing this was exactly insane enough.
But as for what makes a good video game film, a part of it is just so obvious: passion for the source material. Compared to when filmmakers in the 90s saw the hot trends and rushed to make movies that may or may not have had much to do with the source material. Sometimes it sort of worked out – I know that first Mortal Kombat film has its defenders for just being good cheesy fun – but there’s no denying that it pales in comparison to the care put into every pore of both the Mortal Kombat: Legacy webseries (season 3 when? Ever? Never? Aww) and the more recent feature-length adaptation.
If you have a physical copy of that 2021 film, you can go into the bonus features and see the talent on both sides of the camera talking about how much Mortal Kombat means to them, how they grew up with the games in the 90s and how they’re really passionate about doing justice to the characters they played as in the arcades.
It’s a taut film when I and a lot of other people probably would have been perfectly fine with watching a lot more of it, so it’s a good job there’s a follow-up currently in production. The film is bookended with Scorpion, played to vengeful perfection by Hiroyuki Sanada, yet giving him to us in the intro and not again until the climax feels less like taking away the thing we want, and more like building it up till exactly the right moment. The film is gloriously brutal and gruesome in ways that the Paul Anderson picture couldn’t be while vying for its mass-appeal PG-13 rating, and that’s another thing – if you’re planning on doing justice to the source material, Mortal Kombat needs that visceral brutality.
To swing back around to our original point here, Mortal Kombat is an interesting example of both ‘simplistic gameplay’ and ‘cinematic gameplay’. Even back in the early days, MK always had a flair for the dramatic, being directly inspired by martial arts cinema like Enter The Dragon. But recent games have become so epic in scope, so cinematic in their plot direction, that the 2021 Mortal Kombat movie opted to actually compress and ‘scale down for the big screen’, bringing us yet another take on the original Enter The Dragon-style tournament.
One great example of how they had to compress the lore for the big screen is, in the Mortal Kombat games, it is revealed to Scorpion in Mortal Kombat X that Sub-Zero was never the one who killed his family and clan, and Hanzo revenges them on the true murderer after making peace with Sub-Zero and the Lin Kuei. In this film, Sub-Zero is just straight-up one of the bad guys, rather than if they’d tried to pack in an extra subplot that the games themselves took ten entries to get to (not being especially plot-centric entities till like the ninth one, though prior to that Deception did have quite a robust story mode).
I won’t pull a Tomb Raider and say that the games are better at being movies than the movie is at being an adaptation of the games, because unlike the 2018 Tomb Raider, MK 2021 does utilize the economy of its runtime to pack the back end with more fan service than a convention. And granted, the animated MK films have gone quite a bit further adapting the more cosmic, large-scale elements of the source material.
I’ve already talked about how the second Silent Hill film stumbled, but I still love the first film, which bleeds with love and respect for the wondrously haunting game series. The creature effects do their absolute damndest to capture the off-kilter, uncanny vibe from the games, and far more of those monsters are done using practical effects than you might think.
As far as whether the first Silent Hill movie has to compress a whole series’ worth of lore, it really doesn’t – so many of these games are self-contained stories with the connective thread of the cursed, eldritch town itself, so by loosely adapting just one of those stories, they’re able to avoid ‘big screen lore spinal compression’.
The music in the first film is entirely culled from the games, which is a nice touch. Allegedly the film was originally submitted without the ‘real world’ subplot with Sean Bean at all, until the studio balked and sent it back saying, ‘there are no men!’, forcing them to add that subplot. Which, one, it’s interesting that that was a thing at all, and two, it really shows how dedicated they were to making a great cinematic tribute to Silent Hill and not an overly ‘Hollywood-ized’ version, because that subplot, taking place in the real world, is the only part of the real world we see after they enter the town proper. Granted, I do think that Bean’s role does improve the film on its own merits regardless.
At the end of the day I think that’s really the common denominator, and it’s so, so simple. Respect and love for the source material, rather than seeing the sales trends and making a video game movie without really respecting the why of what draws people to it. I do remember a time when the whole idea of video game movies was considered basically cursed, and here in 2022 it’s absolutely not unreasonable to have high hopes when your favourite game series makes its film debut.
Heck, that Super Mario Brothers movie coming up seems to have a lot going for it, with colourful animation and a sense of humour that pairs delightfully with Mario’s absurd world. Rather than having to pare something down for the screen because the epic content from the games would be too much for a single movie, this looks like it could be a fun, colourful movie that matches the fun, colourful games.
If this film pulls it off, decades after Mario became the OG example of a video game movie where the suits saw what was selling and crapped out a film that had bugger-all to do with what people actually liked about the games and their world, then this is going to feel like everything’s coming full-circle, a real redemption tour for not just Mario in cinema, but symbolically for video game movies as a whole.
All along here, we’ve been talking about how the landscape of video game movies has shifted from suits making ill-fitting decisions for the franchise based on coked-out nonsense, such as casting big names as characters that don’t resemble them in the slightest, to new generations of filmmakers who grew up with these games and want to give them films that pair beautifully with the IP. So surely the studio worked with Nintendo closely to ensure that the games’ countless fans could feel at home with everything from the film’s world design to the…
Voice…
Talents…?
(Update from 2023: as satisfying as it initially felt to end like that at a time when everyone and their cat was dabbing on the terrible Super Prattio voice work in the teasers, it didn’t feel right to leave it like that now that it’s turned out that Illumination’s Mario Bros movie really is everything it should be and more, plus Pratt is perfectly acceptable in the finished movie and they just used all these bad early takes in the trailers. But why, though? That’s like if Illumination put out trailers for the Sing movies that only used weird early scratch takes where everyone is off key. Anyway, Mario movie is stellar, see it if you haven’t.)