Tag: Video Game Movies

TOP TEN TUESDAY: BEST VIDEO GAME MOVIES

We all love video games. It only makes sense to take some of our favorite digital characters and/or stories, and put them on the big screen. With the release of RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE in 3D, we here at WAMG are celebrating with our favorite movies based off of video games. They might not all be Oscar Winners, but they have certainly entertained us at one time or another… plus, who doesn’t like ass-kickin chicks! (Relax… This is a girl writing this! I can say chick!)

We are going to start this off a little differently. There are a ton of really bad video game based movies, so instead of an HONORABLE MENTION, we are going to dive into our list with a…

DISHONORABLE MENTION: MAX PAYNE

Oh… Mark Wahlberg, as much as I like you, this movie was a big bust! This film had the potential to be awesome, but instead it was tedious and boring. Their first mistake was rating a violent video game based movie PG-13 rather than spicing it up and going for an R rating. Plus, they didn’t even follow basic plot lines from the games. They basically borrowed scenery and a title. BARF!

10. SUPER MARIO BROS.

Is it award winning? No. Is it entertaining, fun and incredibly cheesy? Hell-to-the-YES! Bob Hoskins John Leguizamo play the classic NES Kings Mario and Luigi who are on a mission to save the Princess from King Koopa. Sure, it’s not the most believable movie ever made, but neither is the video game. Two plumbers fighting mushroom looking guys and killer turtles to save a princess??? Don’t think I’ve heard this on the local news in a while! Take it for what it’s worth… a comical flick made about a nostalgic game.

09. POKEMON THE FIRST MOVIE

Aka MewTwo’s Counterattack, POKEMON THE FIRST MOVIE was the first theatrical release in the POKEMON franchise. Pokemon was unbelievably popular when the film was released in 1999 and it was a box office hit worldwide. Any parent of a kid at the time can attest to this phenomenon seeing as we had Pokemon trading cards, games, and anime videos all over the place. Pikachu along with the Pokémon – Bulbasaur, Charizard, Squirtle, Pidgeotto, Geodude, Onix, Vulpix, Zubat, Staryu, Goldeen, Psyduck, and Togepi – and their human trainers, Ash Ketchum, Misty and Brock brave a storm while enroute to an island to battle for the title of “World’s Greatest Pokémon Master.” First released in 1996 in Japan for the Game Boy, kids and adults alike were enamoured by the magical powers of the Poke-balls and battles of the Pokemon vs the villains.

08. LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE

Angelina Jolie is back as the vixen of video games in the second installment of the Tomb Raider franchise. I cannot think of a single actress that could have fulfilled the idolized role of Lara Croft better. Let’s face it, Lara Croft is a gamers wet dream! In the search for Pandora’s Box, which is found to really exist in this installment, Croft is on a mission to keep a billionaire villain from obtaining the container, which could wipe out civilization as we know it. That’s a big job… which means a ton of action and adventure!

07. DOOM

Dwayne Johnson is just plain likeable. Although this film has been dubbed by gamers as “Resident Evil in space”, this film has plenty of action and adventure to go around. They could have taken a little more of a horror angle rather than just action, but the film still lives up to the shooting game. Plus, they included the zombies. I like zombies.

06. RESIDENT EVIL

Alice is the reason that we are all here, on this fun filled Top Ten journey. The first of four films, Milla Jovovich dives in as the heroine Alice, who is turned into an experiment after “the virus” takes over. Jovovich is mesmerizing in this film, and certainly takes charge with her action scenes.I really enjoyed watching her fight off the evil dogs… and man, does red dress sees some serious bloodshed!

05. MORTAL KOMBAT

I was actually quite shocked to hear that they were making a Mortal Kombat movie back in the day, but I think they did a pretty good job of taking a standard fighting game with no real story line and turning it into a movie. It’s not a fantastic movie, but we are comparing it strictly against other video game movies, and this one does a decent job. For an arcade game turned movie, they made an entertaining adaptation.

04. RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION

Alice is back, in my favorite to date installment of the Resident Evil franchise. She is on her own, but joins other survivors in the Nevada desert to takt down the Umbrella Corporation. The scenery and colors in this film are stunning. Although I think I would cry if Las Vegas was actually destroyed, it was a cool backdrop for the action. Alice kicks some serious “undead” ass!

03. FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRIT WITHIN

This is the only one on our list that is not live-action. Although this movie failed at the box office, the film itself is a futuristic adventure. This was not exactly what die-hard FF fans were looking for, but it did well with sci-fi fans. Plus, the animation is stunning.

02. SILENT HILL

If you like crazy creatures, than this is the film for you. Silent Hill is jam packed with gore and some pretty impressive animation. Sure, some parts are a little drawn out, but the scenes and creatures were almost identical to the ones in the game. This is probably the closest movie made in comparison to the video game that is is based on. They even get the weird camera angles right!

01. LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER

And WAMG crowns as their #1 Best Video Game Movie none other than Angelina Jolie’s high-flying LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER. From 2001, video game adventurer Lara Croft comes to life in the movie where she races against time to recover powerful ancient artifacts before the bad guys can. With Jolie as the mythic Croft, this hardcore fighter literally comes alive on the screen and this exciting adaptation is definitely aligned to the Tomb Raider video game series. While some critics thought it silly goofiness, we gamers didn’t think so and TOMB RAIDER became a huge box office success.

So readers, what film did we leave off the list? Any beefs on who we included? We can take it, so have at it and please leave your pithy quips below.

Top Ten Tuesday: Greatest Video Game Movies That Will Never Happen

toptengamemovies

One of our faithful readers wanted to do a top ten list on the greatest video game movies that will never happen, so we let him. Check it out below:

Over the past decade or so the video game movie has become the butt of every nerd movie joke in the world. Thanks to people like Uwe Boll and to a lesser degree Paul W.S. Anderson the video game movie has a reputation of always coming out as garbage. Movies like the Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, Dead or Alive and the last two Resident Evil movie make me wonder if a video game movie will really impress me in the future. For a while it seemed that the new Prince of Persia and BioShock films would be the genres saviors but now with BioShock on life support Prince of Persia is our last hope.

But I still have dreams for the genre. There are still movies I want to see happen and this is my list of top 10 dream movies adapted from video games. Most of these are far too ambitious and would never happen, but I can still dream. Here they are.

10.) Sonic the Hedgehog

Everyone’s favorite memories of Sonic have to be from the 16-bit era, but when it started to move towards the 3D world his franchise fell apart. But visually and story telling wise it definitely moved towards being much more cinematic. The question is what kind of movie do you make. The obvious choice would be a CGI film out of Japan that’s simply been redubbed for an American audience, but personally I’d like to see a film that follows a story a little closer to Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast which takes place on Earth where Humans live side by side with animals like Sonic.

To see the movie done in a very colorful style akin to Speed Racer would be perfect. Over the top chase scenes done at the speed of sound with the Evil Doctor Robotnik (Eggman in Japan) chasing our heroes using his insane vehicles and robots. The plot would be a simple Robotnik wants the chaos emeralds to power his strange egg inspired death bringing weapon and of course has to stop through Sonic’s world in order to get it. Sonic and crew will tangle with him and his robotic minions and I’m sure it’d be a bombastic feast for the eyes.

9.) Street Fighter

But Kent, they’ve already made two Street Fighter movies. No they haven’t. They have NOT made a movie using these characters that is about Street Fighting. What’s really strange is that Jean Claude Van Damme made the closest movie to Street Fighter, but it wasn’t Street Fighter… it was Blood Sport. Street Fighter should be a movie about a fighting tournament full of interesting characters and insane action, and none of the movies to date have done that. They’ve made overly complicated stories about characters who sort of resemble the characters from the game, but aren’t those characters.

I don’t want realism or a war story. I want Ken and Ryu throwing fireballs, Chun-Li doing a spinning bird kick. I want Tiger Uppercuts and I want the main characters to be everyone’s favorite fighters, Ryu and Ken. It’s not hard to do! But for some reason studios will step in and bastardize this franchise every way they can. The casting is always way off, the storyline of characters is never right and the action is boring. They really need to pull in more anime influences and Hong Kong fighting films to get this right.

8.) Resident Evil

Again people will say that we already have this franchise, but not many people know the entire history behind how this series came to be. At one time the godfather of the zombie classic, George Romero had written and was set to direct an interpretation of Resident Evil that is so close to the video game that he actually pulled moments and lines from the game itself. The screenplay is easy to find online and you can see just how close we were to the first truly great video game movie. Romero’s involvement early in the series actually lead to him directing commercials for the second game in the series.

Romero loved the game and had mentioned numerous times that he’d played through, recorded it and would play it back and study it. Sadly the studio and Capcom just didn’t like his script, or it wasn’t what they were going for, so it was dropped in favor of what we ended up getting instead. I still hold a little bit of hope that Romero might one day get to direct his original version of Resident Evil and make the first really great video game movie.

7.) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

This is a hard one to even talk about. While Knights of the Old Republic got it’s start as the Bioware PC and Xbox RPG it’s since moved on to comics and now it’s become The Old Republic and will launch as a huge MMO some time next year. At E3 the new trailer for the upcoming MMO blew everyone away and reminded us all of how amazing the prequels really could have been. If you asked anyone before 1999 what they thought the Star Wars Prequels would be like, their answer wouldn’t be anything close to what we got, but luckily their answer wouldn’t be far off from Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). For many gamers KOTOR was a return to Star Wars greatness. It had everything we wanted out of a good Star Wars adventure and a lot of mystery to boot. It was action packed, epic, had a great villain and amazing plot twists and in the end I don’t know a single person that didn’t go back and play it again just to see all the different ways you could play the adventure out.

I’d love to see Fox and Lucasfilm team up for one or two last movies under the KOTOR banner. Maybe based off the games, or based off the comics. Either way it’s a Star Wars universe that’s new and familiar at the same time and is free of a whiney Darth Vader screaming “NOOOOOooooooooo.”

6.) Kingdom Hearts

I don’t know how this would happen but considering it’s a video game based off several movie franchises I think it deserves some kind of movie. Being able to adventure from Disney world to world was a blast in the game and I’d love to see an interpretation where all of these worlds coexist and where they’re all aware of each other as stories. It’s kind of a strange idea. I’d love to see it done with a mixture of live action and animation kind of like Who Framed Roger Rabbit but I could see certain parts of it being really jarring. Maybe the animation studio behind Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children could do it in cooperation with Disney.

Either way this could be pull in fans from all across all different kinds of places. Whether you’re a Disney fan, a Square Enix fan, a Final Fantasy fan or just a fan of anime and video games, I think you’d be into this movie if it were to ever get made.

5.) Metroid

Metroid is an action packed gaming franchise and now Team Ninja is making “Other M” with Nintendo it’s going to be reinvented yet again. Samus has because one of the all time great video game characters and a film about one of her adventures in another world full of strange aliens and a classic battle with memorable villain Ridley could really be a treat to see.

Of course the plot is good, the character of Samus is a great heroine but without a good production team it’s doomed. I’d want Weta working on the sets and suits and some one like James Cameron producing. With the most recent games it has taken on a space marine kind of feel, so Cameron is a natural choice.

4.) Starcraft

This is such a no-brainer that I almost don’t need to bother. Three alien races battling it out for supremacy in the future? Oh I’m so in. Obviously inspired by many films including Aliens and Starship Troopers. The game is one of the most played games in the world and is still played in competitive fashion today over 10 years later. Adapting this to a movie would be incredibly easy to do and it’d be a blast to see. A hard R rated space marine adventure with large bugs, alien species and all out chaos… mmmmm, I love the smell of firebats in the morning. The sheer scope of this could franchise could spawn several sequels. Out of all the video games on my list, this is easily the most logical.

3.) MegaMan

The Blue Bomber has a long history in the video game community. Crossing genres and platforms, MegaMan has seeded himself as the greatest third party video game character of all time. This could be one action packed amazingly great movie. Picture the blue bomber slamming through eight enemies only to fight Doctor Wiley in an amazing finale that blows your mind. I’d love for a huge colorful fun action film featuring all the great villains from Gutsman, Cutsman, Crashman and the rest. I’d love to see it as a Crank style movie where MegaMan never slows down for a second and just rushes from one obstacle to the next across town until he reaches Wiley.

I honestly don’t know how I’d like this movie to be made though. MegaMan has always been a boy despite the title. If you animate it in CGI then it’s just going to look like AstroBoy, but blue. I’d like to see MegaMan be more of a man, and look a bit more like MegaMan X. Here’s hoping they get right on this though. I think the world needs more BlueBomber!

2.) Legend of Zelda

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the most asked for video game movie of all time. Now with Lord of the Rings proving that fantasy films can be incredibly action packed, violent and bad ass, it’s only a matter of time before some one gets it through their thick skull that Legend of Zelda could be the best fantasy movie ever made. The setting is amazing, the characters are diverse and interesting and the monsters are genius. It already has the second best video game score ever made, so why not just get to it?

Of course Weta needs to be involved at every turn and Shigeru Miyamoto should actually direct it. Finally put a voice to Link that’s more than just grunts. Make him into a real character for once. I’d love to see what Miyamoto could do if given the chance to direct a real film.

1.) StarFox

While Legend of Zelda may be the most requested video game movie of all time, StarFox would be the one I’d want to see the most. But I have a very specific way I’d want this film to be made. I do not want CGI involved with the creation of the characters what so ever. I want full body puppets done by the Jim Henson Company! The original design of Fox for all the marketing and box art was actually a puppet, and they made one for all four main characters. It was pretty cool, but sadly the design has slipped quite a while since then. Who wouldn’t love what is basically Ninja Turtles in Space? Remember the Ninja Turtles movies? The Jim Henson Company made the original suits for all four turtles in the first two films and they still hold up. The articulation in the faces, the quality of the build on them all, it was top notch. Now two decades later I can honestly say that I’d be blown away by whatever they’d come up with.

While he may not be a company favorite Star Fox is one of Nintendo’s best franchises and could lend itself to an amazing series of films that are fun, action packed, and unlike anything anyone’s seen before.

That’s my list but there are honorable mentions

MadWorld, Metal Gear Solid, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (because it’s better than what we got).