“Guardians Of The Galaxy: The Universal Weapon” hits mobile platforms today. We talked to developer Aaron Norstad about how the game does – or doesn’t – connect to the movie.
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Travel All Around The World with Justin Bieber in his latest video, featuring rapper Ludacris. View post: New Video: Justin Bieber Featuring Ludacris, 'All Around The World'
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We finally have a real Resident Evil movie! It only took seven tries! (That might not sound good, but by video game movie standards it’s sensational.) The five live-action Milla Jovovich movies were fantastic, but about the only thing they shared with the games was a title. The directors of those features focused on making great action movies for the mass market they knew didn’t really care about the games. The CG-animated Resident Evil: Damnation is a great Resident Evil movie because it doesn’t care about the mass market; it’s so focused on the games and the gaming audience that it was released on the Xbox and PS3 dashboards a week before the DVD went on sale. This is Capcom’s second attempt at computer-generating a proper canon film. The first, Degeneration , was one of the worst movies ever made . Degeneration was true to its subject in the way that a hastily written homework essay is true to its subject: all the keywords are there but the author clearly didn’t care. The result is less exciting than a non-zombified corpse. Damnation is a huge improvement over its predecessor and a lot more fun, too. The movie doesn’t just understand the Resident Evil games, it understands the core problem that comes with making a movie based on a video game: Take away our ability to control the characters and the characters have to give back much more in return. They have to be interesting on their own. Damnation delivers everything Resident Evil game-franchise fans could want from a movie. The characters are much improved — not just graphically, but behaviorally. Fan-favorite Leon Kennedy isn’t just back, he’s graduated with a degree in advanced ass-kicking and has been promoted to Chief Buttkicker. No more pining after Ada Wong, shouting impotently at locked doors or running around after little girls. His first actions in this movie are going rogue, making sarcastic remarks about a fellow agent careless enough to be mortally wounded (while said agent is still alive and can hear him), then kicking a Licker’s ass so hard it scampers for safety while he chases it down. If you’re wondering who Ada Wong is, you now know the only minor issue in the movie. It is absolutely built for fans and assumes the audience will be excited to see these people. That said, the characters are so well developed that even a total newbie to the world of Domestic Bad will get with the program in short order. Leon establishes that he’s an ass-kicker by immediately kicking ass, while triple-agent Ada breezes into a room and immediately manipulates the hell out of an entire country. She then kicks ass, too. Even when events from the games are referenced, it’s never jarring, just brilliant for fans. The key reason Damnation works as a movie is that it dumps these revered gaming characters into an entirely new situation. Instead of yet another generically evil corporation/facility/whatever, we join a civil war in the Eastern Slav Republic, which (despite a excessively long narrative intro) is the perfect setting for this new story. With opposing sides struggling for revenge, independence, and oil money, we finally have believable motivations for people to use the most awful weapons imaginable. This new setting makes even the oldest tropes fresh; of course there’s another vast underground base, but this one has the single coolest elevator in movie history. And even when you arrive there you’re still trying to work out exactly who betrayed who. That was where Degeneration failed so badly. The plot was cut-and-pasted from the games: a new secret underground viral base, a new letter for the virus name, and a new character looking for lost relative/friend who’s clearly, obviously, blatantly implicated in the outbreak. That wasn’t an addition to the RE story, it was a unreasonable facsimile, replete with a search-and-replace script. You could almost hear the scriptwriter sighing “done” as he stopped typing. In Damnation, the characters might not be quite yet out of the uncanny valley, but they’ve climbed up the walls by punching their bare, badass fists into the rock with every step. It’s not realistic, but it’s not quite trying to be — think of it instead as a new kind of animation. The graphics are glorious, and though the producers are pretty blatant about showing off new special effects, at least they’re badass about it. For example, Ada Wong shows off the new fluid physics with a cup of tea that she uses to attack the President of a sovereign nation and her armed bodyguard . That is what we call “adequate justification.” Even when the graphics engine shows off shafts of light cutting through rooms, it’s only because the rooms have also torn apart by tank shells and at least two mutant murder machines. The filmmakers re-create the original Resident Evil 2 “drips from the hallway ceiling” scene just because they can. For the first time you believe that Lickers could actually kill men with guns, not just men with guns struggling with analog sticks. Mr. X is elevated beyond Tyrant to Terminator levels of brutality, with cinematic fights much more interesting than the boss battles found in the games. When Leon starts punching a monster in the face with a tank, you’re excited enough to start screaming in italics. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter. —
This week sees the release of Resident Evil: Retribution , the next installment in what has been dubbed the “most successful” of video game movie series, a shallow victory indeed. Considering that contemporary video games have become cinematic, employing many proven Hollywood techniques in their platforms, it means that once those properties are adapted for the screen you could end up with the proverbial serpent eating its own tail. In the case of Doom however you end up with something else; much like a document that has been photocopied from a fax of a forgery taken from a carbon-copy, what you end up with is an indecipherable mess. But first, let’s take a look at the original Resident Evil , itself an exercise in impotent storytelling. How about this for a synopsis: In Raccoon City a company known as The Umbrella Corporation owns a laboratory called The Hive, where a T-virus has been released and The Red Queen computer seals the building and kills the occupants to stop an outbreak. Uh-huh. Guess I won’t look for the words, “Adapted from the novel by Noel Coward.” The gist of that 2002 film was zombies vs. mercenaries, including Milla Jovovich, who wages battle while wearing a red cocktail dress, of course; this cheesecloth-thin plotline has somehow been stretched into a 5-picture movie arc. Just three years later came the far more shallow bout of movie making that is Doom — basically the same movie, only with Jovovich’s sexy freedom fighter replaced by the buff chunk-muscle Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Doom comes the closest to replicating the gaming experience on film. Literally little more than a chase-and-shoot action pic, you can guess exactly how this script was constructed. Imagine for a moment you are building your dream home and want to make sure to include all the elements you deem important. You begin by telling a contractor you want him to construct a fireplace. Upstairs you instruct him to install a Roman bath tub and a closet big enough to park a mini-Cooper, and then you suggest he add a walk-in humidor in the basement. You inspect the plans, and once satisfied that everything looks perfect you then tell him, “I love it! Now you can begin construction on the house.” The same type of logic is going on here; clearly they included the important elements of the game and later decided it might be cool to also come up with a script. Then decisions were made based on money. The original video games featured demon entities which could be costly to replicate — so in the film they became mutated Martian explorers, mostly filmed in the dark. But wait, how will the soldiers end up on Mars, responding to this outbreak? Before you can utter “screenplay shorthand,” a portal is placed in the Nevada desert where the mercenaries can enter and arrive on Mars as quickly as they are needed. Voila ! Amazingly this is all goofier than it sounds, yet told with a straight face, telling us this is as it should be. We start with a hard-opening as scientists run down futuristic corridors, fleeing from something unseen. When they try to get through a closing hatch a female has her arm severed by the door. This is not mindless vivisection, mind you; later The Rock will use the severed limb to gain access via bio-verification locks! Subtle intro in place, roll credits. The year is 2046, and during the colonization of Mars there has been an experiment where a 24th chromosome has been developed which will grant humans incredible physical gifts and the ability to regenerate quickly from wounds — unless you happen to mutate into a hideous homicidal creature. (There are some glitches, understand.) The facility is sealed up and a few scientists remain, so a group of Marines are located for the mission. “The Rock” plays Sarge, and he guides a team of clichés named Reaper, Goat, Duke, The Kid, and others. Once there Reaper is reintroduced to his estranged scientist sister who works at the facility, which creates some sibling tension but is also convenient as she can guide the Marines around the joint. Director Andrezj Bartkowiak (his actual name — I did not nod off and type that with my forehead) uses his skills to hide the less-than-impressive appearance of the creatures. Even though this takes place almost entirely on the Fourth Planet you would never know it, because the whole time is spent in labs and the steam tunnels of the facility with zero exterior shots. It’s like watching someone’s vacation movies spent at a beach house and everything takes place in the basement. What we do see of the creatures is a biological illogicality, since the beings tower over the humans, rather immense in size. Their caloric and protein intake would have to be far greater than the limited food source a couple dozen scientists would provide. (Why not clear everyone out and let them cannibalize to extinction? Because that would leave us with a very short film experience.) It is far more entertaining to send anonymous soldiers to a grisly end while also vividly destroying some monstrous Martians in gory detail. During this melee Sarge eventually discovers a trademark weapon from the game, the B-F-G (Big F-ing Gun.) This weapon provides plenty of psychological material to analyze; many N.O.W. members opposed to the N.R.A. will tell you the B.F.G. is only a representation of the male organ. To be honest, those ladies have a valid argument — this gun shoots a plasma-like substance, meaning the ammunition is not actually fired as much as it is… ejaculated . You have to be very secure in your masculinity to wield this particular phallic weapon. As the Marines are systematically dispatched by the zombie goliaths we eventually get treated to the centerpiece scene of the movie where we watch all the action from the POV of star (and future Judge Dredd) Karl Urban, with his weapon in view of the camera just like in the game. It’s a decent representation filled with flashy camera tricks and computer wizardry, like seeing the game on screen with much better graphic simulators delivering the visuals. Ultimately there is a visceral feeling to Doom — you want to be in the action, and then you want to partake. With all the viscera flying on screen you’ll check your shoes for plasma, and then you’ll check eBay for older gaming systems that will allow you to play a vintage version of Doom . Why let The Rock have all the fun shooting his load?! Read more Bad Movies We Love. Brad Slager has written about movies and entertainment for Film Threat, Mediaite, and is a columnist at CHUD.com . His less insightful impressions on entertainment can be found on Twitter .
Movieline would like to introduce The Player , a recurring feature in which we look at the crossroads where video games and moviemaking intersect. We’ll regularly be looking at games that inspire movies, movies that inspire games and a lot of fun stuff in between. For our first foray, Luke McKinley writes on Manos: The Hands of Fate , an excruciatingly bad 1965 micro-budget film that manages work well as a video game. “The game of the movie” is a worse curse than Cruciatus , and usually causes more pain. It’s such a guarantee of failure that even the Street Fighter movie game sucked, and that started with one of the greatest games of all time. They’re terrible because the studio has to acquire the license, and when any company spends most of its budget on lawyers, the lawyers are the only ones who get to have any fun. Once the rights are secured, there’s usually enough cash left in the kitty for a design team of two interns and a crayon. FreakZone Games found a way around this: Start with the worst movie of all time. That would be Manos: The Hands of Fate. (To watch the entire movie, if you dare, scroll down to the YouTube video below). This abomination was made when an insurance and fertilizer salesman named Harold P. Warren bet that he could make a horror movie for less than $20,000. He failed spectacularly. The results would have less painful — and more coherent — if he’d filmed himself drinking $20,000 worth of tequila. The actors are so bad that they can barely talk. One is so bad he can barely walk. John Reynolds, who played Torgo, handyman and henchman to the villainous “Master,” appeared to have taken his acting classes from electroshock therapy. Reynolds’attempts to look supernatural make his appearances look jerkier than an art student’s stop-motion film — and more tedious, too. It can take up to three minutes for him to cross a scene, and if you think the camera or actors do anything to distract from this you are wildly overestimating: a) their commitment to the project; b) their understanding of cinema, c) their baseline brain activity. Then there’s the movie’s title villain, The Master, played by Torn Neyman. At one point, he studies himself in the mirror and declares, “Yes, I am the face of horror.” That’s him in the poster with the fancy moustache. Scary, right? In addition to being widely recognized as one of the biggest stinkers in filmdom, Manos is also a testament to the healing power of laughter. The movie is now a cult favorite thanks largely to the crew behind Mystery Science Theater 3000, who mocked it to pieces in 1993 , and, on Aug. 16, mauled it a second time — this time, live — when they reunited under the name of Rifftrax . FreakZone took a similar approach. The video game version of Manos: The Hands of Fate is an homage to retro gaming and a satire of almost every other movie game ever made. It avoids sucking by wallowing in the cliches of video-game movie adaptations. And there are many. In the 1980s and ’90s, every movie franchise was turned into a platformer. Childish sword and sorcery tales, action movies, romantic dramas, tearjerkers about people in wheelchairs who were scared of heights — it didn’t matter. Manos, the game, improves upon the movie right from the get-go with better acting. It also reminds you of how evil games used to be before they started being built for the mediocre skills of broad movie-going audiences. In FreakZone’s Manos , it’s possible to die at the first jump. Tap A and misjudge the distance, and that’s it, you’re dead. (In Manos , the movie, the Master takes a good 20 minutes to get around to killing Torgo.) There are also invincible immortal enemies (who do nothing but float up and down), edge-of-the-block jumps for bonus items, and even curse-inducing sine-wave-flying enemies to knock you off platforms and trigger Castlevania flashbacks. The real glory of this game is proving that the internet is better for creativity than a whiteboard made of LSD. Hollywood spends more money to minimize risk than the Secret Service, and the gaming industry hasn’t just been taking notes. If you walked into a video game publisher in the ’90s and told them you wanted to make this game, they would have hired new security to escort you out of the building just so their regular security didn’t have to touch you. But now a few people with the right combination of skills and mental problems can build and sell a game like Manos: The Hands of Fate for a couple of bucks, and it’s fantastic. There’s a real chance the $1.99 I paid for the game will represent 50% of the publisher’s entire profit on the sale, but I’m still glad I gave it to them. That’s because with Manos: The Hands of Fate , FreakZone has achieved the impossible: It made a game that was better than the movie. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
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