As news of David O Russell's
departure from the director's chair of
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune sends shockwaves through the internet, now seems like as good a time as any to look back on a few of the epic video game adaptations that never were... or at least haven't been yet. In the background, behind all the Uwe Boll adaptations and the notorious Bob Hoskins Super Mario Brothers movie, there have actually been a few projects which, at one time or another, threatened to be quite good.
Warning! One of the below has been completely made up for the sake of my own geekish amusement.Halo: Combat Evolved
The game: X-box first person shooter (FPS)
Halo: Combat Evolved has, since it's release a decade ago, spawned a multi-billion dollar industry - at one time being described as the biggest "entertainment property" in the history of the world ever. Halo sees you playing as the Master Chief, basically a silent warrior in a suit whom gamers can project themselves onto - with most of the talking is done by supporting characters and the various red shirts who die all around you. You are charged with winning a massive inter-galactic holy war, against fanatically religious aliens (it's worth remembering this game came out in 2001). The title comes from a mysterious world on which most of the action takes place, which is terraformed on the inside of a giant, mechanised "halo". In contrast with most "shooters", the Halo games have a lovely organic look, with lush green jungles, azure skies and bright purple alien spaceships.
What happened?: Perhaps the highest profile video game-to-movie project to have ever seen the bottom of a dustbin, Halo could have been a huge science fiction extravaganza to rival Avatar. Danny Boyle collaborator
Alex Garland (who has since gone on to write the video game Enslaved) was slated to write the screenplay and a host of big name filmmakers were linked with the production. Steven Spielberg was even credited with an interest at one time, though the most famous incarnation of the project saw Peter Jackson as producer and Neil Blomkamp as director, with the movie set to shoot in South Africa. Sound familiar? It should do: this Blomkamp/Jackson combo cut their losses when the plug was pulled and made
District 9 instead. Which I would chalk up as a big "win".
The Future?: Rumours of a Halo movie are a universal constant, like the Saw franchise and Bruce Forsyth, with fanboys eagerly awaiting even the vaguest scraps of information on the subject. But so far all they've got in return is a lacklustre, cheaply made anime movie:
Halo Legends. However, the fact of the matter remains that Halo is a huge money-spinner and - in a world where the board game Battleship is seen as a potential movie - it is surely a matter of
when not
if a feature film is produced. The only question mark is over its eventual quality.
Dream Director: For my money, the ideal Halo movie (ignoring Blomkamp, who would have been great) would be made by somebody like
Robert Zemeckis. Hear me out. I outright hate the most recent, ugly rotoscope animations done by Mr. Back to the Future. However, he has a number of qualities which might lend themselves to the material. Firstly, he's a technological innovator who would ensure that the film was state of the art and not a cheap cash-in. Secondly, he has the studio clout to exercise a bit of quality control over the project, but not the pure auteurist vision that would see him veer too far away from the source material. In short, Zemeckis would safely steer a high-quality, big-budget Halo movie home.
Bioshock
The game: I worked in a video game shop when the first Bioshock came out and was feverishly excited by it, up-selling it to every customer as they tried to buy the various brown and grey Nazi-murdering sims on the market. Yet most of them looked at me blankly when I told them what it was about - because it's a little mad. Bioshock is another FPS, only with much more imagination than is typically found in one hundred movies, video games or television series. You start the game sitting on a passenger plane which crashes into the ocean. As the only survivor, you swim away from the burning and quickly sinking fuselage and towards an island topped with a grand Art Deco lighthouse. There you get into a lift which takes you several miles under the sea and to the city of Rapture - a submerged civilization invented and, until recently, ruled by an eccentric billionaire - a mixture of Howard Hughes and Walt Disney. In Rapture science and capitalism have been allowed to run free of ethical concerns, and genetic engineering has allowed people to shoot fire from their fingertips or lift objects with telekinesis (or hack security cameras for some reason). It's all set in the 1950s. I know, I know - it all sounds convoluted, but you suspend your disbelief when you play it, your ears ringing with 50s pop tunes as you wield a Tommy gun against gigantic men in power-drill sporting diving suits. Seriously, it's really good.What happened?: The first rumours of a Bioshock movie suggested Rapture would be created utilising similar green screen techniques to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or 300, with
Gore Verbinski (of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies) set to direct from a screenplay by
John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator). Whether or not you were a fan of the Pirates franchise, Verbinski's name at least suggested that the project was being taken seriously and would probably be afforded a reasonable budget by Universal. However, like the Halo project before (and the Uncharted project subsequently), it wasn't long before the director bailed to work on
Rango. Initially Verbinski was still set to produce the movie, with 28 Weeks Later director
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo taking over directorial duties. But, predictably enough, the project was soon postponed indefinitely after the studio got cold feet about splashing cash on what, in all likelihood, would have been an 'R' rated movie (for reasons which will be clear to those who've played the game).
The Future?: Just the other day, the game's director Ken Levine said that he is still "in conversation" surrounding the development of a film. So here's hoping someone ambitious and exciting picks up the Bioshock ball and runs with it.
Dream Director: Ok, this is never, never, never going to happen, but I'd love to see
Darren Aronofsky tackle this material. At its heart Bioshock is about a man, Andrew Ryan - the founder of Rapture, destroyed by his obsessions. It's also immensely dark and twisted at its heart and, if somebody took the material seriously rather than simply seeing it as a potential revenue stream, there is more than enough meat on the bones of the story to make something truly special. We're more likely to get saddled with
Paul W.S. Anderson though. Such is life.
American McGee's Alice
The game: It's not really stood the test of time, but
American McGee's Alice, a macabre riff on Lewis Carroll's creation which invites parallels with a homicidal Tim Burton, caused quite a stir when it came out in 2000. Its graphical prowess, art design style and creepy atmosphere threatened to make the game an iconic cult classic (something which may yet be born out by the sequel being produced by Electronic Arts). In it, you play as Alice, whose family have been killed in a house fire and who is suffering deranged fantasies from her cell in an asylum. That sounds pretty heavy, but in terms of gameplay it was a pretty conventional third-person adventure game - more or less a platformer with bags of blood and a few scares.
What happened?: Soon after the game's release in 2000, horror legend
Wes Craven was signed up to turn the project into a feature film, with
John August then tasked with writing the screenplay for Dimension Films. August was then fresh from writing Doug Liman's Go, but has since become better known for his collaborations with Tim Burton which include Corpse Bride and Big Fish. The project limped on in pre-production, changing writers every now and again - with the last scribes known as being current Battleship writers
Erich and
Jon Hoeber. The Hoebers completed their version of the script in 2003 (three years after the film was announced) only for the project to then change hands between Dimension, Fox and Universal. Then the rights were apparently purchased by
Sarah Michelle Gellar who presumably saw it as a vehicle for her flagging feature film career. Gellar left the project officially in 2008. I doubt Wes Craven was still attached by this point, but no other director was ever firmly linked to the movie.
The Future?: With the game's sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, apparently due out this year, maybe renewed interest will shown by movie studios - though many may be put off by its superficial similarity to Tim Burton's own mega-successful take on the tale last year. If it does come up again however, I'd bet the farm that
Kristen Stewart is linked with the title role. Though hasn't the "creepy child" thing now been done to death by J-horror (Ringu) and video games (Fear) in the last ten years?
Dream Director: With Burton firmly out of the running, having made his own Alice movie, you'd have to say that Wes Craven would remain an interesting director for this material - which certainly has great pure-horror potential. But looking around for a more original choice... It definitely requires someone with a love of gore and an ability to get scares, but also someone with great visual flair. Am I insane in thinking the best choice would be
Guillermo Del Toro? And finally...
Shenmue
The game: Ever since it hit the shelves on SEGA's mighty Dreamcast back in 1999, the Yu Suzuki directed
Shenmue has been universally acknowledged as the greatest game ever made. In it you play Japanese martial artist (and part time capsule toy collector) Ryo Hazuki, who turns up at his dojo one morning to find a mysterious Chinaman named Lan Di has killed his father and stolen a mystical mirror. The game then involves going from door to door around suburban Japanese neighbourhoods tracking Mr. Di down, juggling this investigation with a part-time job as a fork lift truck operator at the local docks. It's here that Ryo gets increasingly obsessed with "looking for sailors" and eventually sets out for China on the next ship west, leaving his adopted pet kitten (above) behind in the care of an infant.
What happened?: After a fierce bidding war for the material, which saw
Harvey Weinstein pay SEGA an unprecedented $50 million for the North American distribution rights alone,
Josh Hartnett set to work impersonating Ryo's wooden, perpetually bewildered speech pattern as made famous by
Corey Marshall in the English language localisation of the game. Hartnett was also rumoured to have spent a small fortune attempting to collect every single Virtua Fighter character from the toy capsule machines on-set, as he aimed to get under the skin of the game's shy, borderline-simpleton protagonist. However, after
James Cameron pulled out of the project, along with executive producer
George Lucas, everyone decided it would be best to lay the whole idea to rest in the name of artistic integrity. The only time that has ever happened.
The Future?: SEGA die-hards still anxiously await the conclusion of the Shenmue saga in whatever form it may come - with many now hoping the story of Shenmue 3 may be told over a series of limited edition postal stamps. However, news on the film went completely dead and many began to wonder whether it had ever been rumoured at all, or whether it was all a beautiful dream.
Dream Director: Keanu Reeves would be my ideal Ryo Hazuki, having seemingly been the inspiration for the monotone, emotionless youth in the first place. However, with Reeves beginning to show his age, perhaps it should be made as an animation like A Scanner Darkly with
Richard Linklater taking the reins.
Anyway... know of any other great would-be video game adaptations, that got canned or possibly never even existed? We would certainly love to read about them below. Especially if they pertain to long forgotten, yet dearly loved, Dreamcast games. Jet Set Radio anyone?