61 Frames Per Second

Pardon me, but might I bother you to turn your head while I spew vulgarities? The live-action Castlevania movie by Paul W.S. Anderson is going to be as stinking and putrid as a zombie's testicles. Yeah, as rotten as zombie testicles stewing like dumplings in a pool of sweat collected in the crotch of a pair of leather pants. And...the testicles are dangling. By, like, one scrap of skin.

One scrap of maggot-chewed skin.

We're used to this, right? It's the curse of video game-based movies to be absolutely no good. A friend of mine who's a huge Silent Hill fan convinced a non-gaming friend of mine to see the Silent Hill movie. Second friend saw the movie and still insists that first friend owes her eight bucks for making her see the stupidest film in the world.

But it's not as if the Silent Hill series is incapable of keeping even hardcore horror fans up all night. Why do games translate so badly into movies? Is it because directors (we're not even counting Uwe Boll) have no qualms about taking creative liberties with the source material--the lack of a whip for Simon Belmont's film being a perfect example?

That certainly can't be helping the problem. On the other hand, there are game-to-movie adaptations, mostly of Japanese origin, that are easily recognisable as their inspirations...but they still suck.

When Final Fantasy: Spirits Within soiled itself and died at the box office, Final Fantasy fans were so sure the reason lay in the butchering of the source material. Final Fantasy is about swords and monsters and chocobos; here was something with the name Final Fantasy that was little more than a generic science fiction flick.

Flash forward a handful of years to Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. It has Cloud! It has Tifa and Red XIII and Midgar! It's essentially a Final Fantasy VII movie!

Is it any good? Not really.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is the whipped and delicious fanservice every Final Fantasy fan craved, but it's an awkward piece of work with a jumbled plotline and boring battles. Final Fantasy VII ended mysteriously: we're not supposed to know if humankind survived Lifestream's onslaught or not. Looks like we did. Boy oh boy. Let's kung-fu fight.

Moreover (and admittedly through no fault of its own), Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children suffers from a terrible case of Know-It-All Fandom. That is to say, Final Fantasy VII has such a huge and significant fanbase that literally tens of thousands of fanfics exist for the game; fanfics written by authors who are convinced that they know what's best for the characters and get furiously angry if anything counters their "fanon" (canon+fandom). Cloud isn't supposed to be a loner emo who remains distant from Tifa. They're supposed to be married. They're supposed to have a million spiky-haired babies.

(Or Cloud is supposed to be up on Vincent, one or the other.)

Interestingly, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children came with a shorter animated film called Last Order. It was a little bit like Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core for the PSP in that it followed the life of Zack, Cloud's "shadow." It was also far better than Advent Children, possibly because it didn't go to strange and fabulous new places; it took an already-interesting part of Final Fantasy VII's story and expanded upon it.

In the same vein, I hold hope for Warren Ellis' animated Castlevania III: Dracual's Curse adaptation because it's a further telling of events from an established game. Nobody's going to make up their own continuity. Ellis is merely working with material that's already there and expanding upon it.

Further hope: The Dark Knight, a movie based on a comic book, is being taken very seriously and recieving excellent critiques. Not that long ago, a big budget movie based on nah-nah-nah-nah BAT-MAN or any comic book character would have been laughed at. If we stop farming out video game properties to directors who suck, we might see the same treatment for our digital favourites.