This is an installment of Game Cred: a series about video games to tie in with our latest Zine.
Ross Weaver explores the origins of video game movie adaptations, including Super Mario Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), Mortal Kombat (1995), Silent Hill (2006), and Resident Evil (2002), for Film Cred’s series on video games — Game Cred!
Transcript:
The video game movie first dropped on the scene with an acid-dipped bomb-omb of a movie, Super Mario Bros., in 1993. The movie depicts the Mario brothers played by Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, and John Leguizamo as Luigi Mario. The Brooklyn-born brothers of bathymetry are on just another job when they witness a kidnapping, and the ensuing chase takes them through a portal into another dimension. The brothers arrive in a kind of vast underground city run by King Koopa, played by Dennis Hopper, where most of the movie is set as they attempt to rescue the kidnapped princess Daisy.
At the time and still today the film’s dialogue is regarded as less than stellar. Many of the special effects didn’t age too well, and the story itself is a little out there. Nintendo allegedly didn’t have a whole lot of concern or guidance for the crew making this movie, and so they were sort of left up to their own devices when crafting this film. And since this type of thing had never really been done before, much of what resulted during the process was a, shall we say, process of discovery.
Now, for all the good points that the movie has going for it (and believe me, I love this movie) the whole thing comes across very much as a kind of disjointed fever dream. The movie’s making, by all accounts, was plagued by having too many changes to its script and not enough guidance from above. As the Guardian put it in a 2018 article, the movie “has slipped into cinematic legend for all the wrong reasons.”
Super Mario Bros. was followed up in 1994 by another video game movie from an already-large franchise, Street Fighter. This movie took on the form of a more typical action movie you might see made in the late 70s or 1980’s but with the more polished production techniques of the mid 90’s on display. The film features great performances by Jean Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia and the rest of the up-and-coming stars of the cast, and yet still the movie seemed to fail to live up to critics’ and fans’ hopes at the time of what a Street Fighter movie really should be.
Despite what appears by all accounts to have been a competent production and cast and crew, there were external factors that made making the movie difficult. The filming location of Bangkok was very hot and humid during filming, making everything that much tougher. Raul Julia was diagnosed with cancer and was in the midst of that and treatment for it while delivering his stellar performance as M Bison. And while shooting in Thailand they had to deal with a potential coup at one point, prompting a series of 1 am boat rides down a river to filming locations for a time due to safety concerns.
Critics weren’t impressed with the film in the end, as the Guardian tells us in an article about its making, “it was derided as another ludicrous cash-in tossed at impressionable kids by cynical Hollywood execs.” However, Street Fighter did make out to be more financially successful than Mario had been. And despite the critics’ opinions at the time, people still today fondly recall Raul Julia’s famous “Tuesday” speech as Bison. Overall, I like to compare Street Fighter as its makers did to Bond films of the early 70s, with large casts of characters, huge set pieces, way too many pyrotechnics and long fight sequences, and lots of cheesy lines. There’s also a kind of Seven Samurai thing going on in the end as well here. Some of the special effects may not hold up as well today, but the choreography in the fight scenes certainly does. This movie was littered with talent and in my eyes was a success.
Then in 1995, Mortal Kombat came out. It seems at this point Hollywood had started to figure out what works, as this movie too was financially successful. The formula had really started to take shape, and the action-with-a-dash-of-comedy angle became an almost permanent fixture of many video game movies from here. That may be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you feel about cheesy action flicks. The casts of these movies rarely again featured a big A-lister as a draw like Van Damme, instead focusing on newer or lesser-known actors who could fit their role more to a T.
These first three movies were not the only movies that influenced the formation of the video game movie genre, but I think it’s fair to say they were probably the three most influential. And all three movies share a lot of features that to this day some audience members may or may not like: they use comedy and aren’t afraid to be tongue-in-cheek, they are typically action-adventure films that fit an already existing mold, and are typically filled out with less-than-A-list casts with more budget being given to effects.
This type of movie might already sound familiar to some of you. And due to the limited genre offerings at the time, the video game movie seemed destined to just be another sub-genre of action/adventure popcorn flick—which is not to say that’s a bad thing, as the popcorn flick has been a successful business model for moviemaking when done right since at least the 1970’s. Some of my favorite movies are popcorn flicks. But that doesn’t change the fact, though, that by and large there’s still a kind of perception in the air about video game franchise movies, bringing to my mind the general consensus of the 1994 critics speaking of Street Fighter as a “cash grab.” Were they being unfair? Were the critics wrong? Let’s take a closer look at some other video game movies and see if our perspective doesn’t shift a little.
First of all I want to be clear: I’m not here to define what is and is not art. What I want to look at is the process of these films’ lives, from their conception, to the shooting and production stage, all the way to their cinematic premieres and general and critical receptions. A new movie coming on the scene of an already-existing franchise being made by a team of filmmakers new to said franchise is always going to present some challenges, and those challenges multiply when the movie has to exist within the bounds of the audience’s expectations of these kinds of franchise films.
My favorite video game movie is Silent Hill, the 2006 film by director Christophe Gans, who also made another film I like a lot, Le Pacte Des Loups or The Brotherhood of the Wolf. Silent Hill was at its launch and is still today subject to much of the same criticism other video game movies typically receive. I remember being struck by the visuals in this movie when I first saw it in theaters, achieved both through excellent cinematography and extremely realistic special effects work. I really felt the town of Silent Hill come alive as the movie made its way into that ash-strewn setting.
The characters Alessa and Pyramid Head from the respective games Silent Hill 1 and 2 are both here present in the same shared movie universe. The film itself sticks more closely to the first game’s story but is itself “non-canon” and serves as a retelling of the first game’s events with different characters as an alternate timeline in the overall franchise.
There is a quote from Masahiro Ito, Pyramid Head’s creator and illustrator, which stated that Pyramid Head’s symbolic purpose is that he represents James’ inner angel in the context of that game’s struggle. Pyramid Head is basically trying to scare James into doing the right thing, in a sense in Silent Hill 2. Now, since James isn’t a character here in the Silent Hill movie… you kinda see the problem. Alessa herself has ties to Silent Hill 1’s plot that also don’t necessarily translate exactly 1-to-1 over to the film, but she also has a kind of franchise-spanning existence, making appearances in several other Silent Hill games. Now, that’s not to say that the makers of the film weren’t well aware of these facts — I’m sure they were. It kinda just comes down to artistic choices and, like most things, personal taste as to whether or not you think this was good or not.
And Pyramid Head and Alessa still serve a purpose in the narrative of the Silent Hill movie, and I think it’s fine to see a franchise adapt an already-existing character, setting, or symbol to a new situation. It can kind of serve as an epistemological tool for examining similarities and differences in the respective narratives, according to how the adaptation is presented and contextualized differently. But also, that’s a lot of subtlety in a narrative for a franchise that’s already notorious for its generally opaque ideas behind all its sights and sounds. The nurses, Pyramid Head, Alessa, the eternally burning town, the ashy haze in the air, the two worlds aspect — all of these things may have had specific meanings in their first usage, but that doesn’t preclude them from having meaning in other narratives. In fact I think a symbol’s ability to transcend its original context and land somewhere foreign and still retain some of its own meaning is a good thing.
And it’s for all these reasons that I still really, really love Silent Hill. Christophe Gans is a filmmaker I’ve watched a few films from and I can’t say he’s bad at what he does, and he didn’t fumble the ball or any such thing when he was making Silent Hill. He clearly had a vision for what he saw as his own version of this franchise, pulling his own context around these already existing characters and settings to make something unique that might add just a little bit to the franchise as a whole for those who watch.
But what about beyond just an audience member’s own individual perspective, then? Video game movies are notorious for not having much of an impact on the greater franchise universes they come from, as the implications of having a video game series continue its story primarily through a film before jumping back to the video game world are expensive, to say the least. This is not something easily done with just one movie and a few games to establish a foundation, although that is how things started. There is an exception to this kind of ad-hoc rule I’m laying out here, though: in the Super Mario Bros. movie, the plumber duo is for the first time given the last name of Mario, making them Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, and the Mario games today still do recognize their last names as Mario.
Most of the time a video game movie amounts to the canon equivalent of a spin-off, never really being that important in the overall scheme of things. And let’s be honest, who wants to have to watch a whole movie before just playing a game they thought looked cool? Games don’t really need barriers like that to their entry, as that’s just bad business and making bad player experiences. And so that leaves game movies as not much more than one-off indulgences most times, easy to paint as something just meant to be a “cash grab” and market a game further.
And indeed, video game movies aren’t typically cheap to make. Video games themselves are an inherently effects-driven format, so it stands to reason a video game movie’s budget might need to make some extra room for effects. And then there’s the issue of casting talent that matches the already-established characters, then getting all the folks you normally need to make a film, and finally somehow making all that work together in one cohesive production to make a movie that fits in with the already-existing games. It’s by no means an easy task compared to a brand new, let’s call it more open film where there are no pre-existing properties or audience expectations there needing to be fit or catered to in any way.
And many of these problems aren’t unique to video game movies, either. Comic book adaptations follow many of these same kind of general traits and trends, as do some other subgenres of film like horror. And a lot of the problems those types of films have are also the problems found in video game movies. The tendency is towards delivering on a stable formula, promising the same thing and delivering it time and again, rebooting and sequeling these franchises into the billion dollar range and beyond but not making much artistic headway, one could say.
Take the Resident Evil movies. The films have a certain reputation amongst general audiences, for better and for worse, and despite all that noise around the franchise it has found its way into the billion dollar club over all its entries. When you go to see a Resident Evil movie, you largely know what you’re getting. And this isn’t meant as a slight at Paul WS Anderson, the director of these films — I think he’s great, too. It’s a testament to the formula and the craftsmanship that these movies are able to deliver to audiences again and again, and that’s going by the dollar amounts of course. I like to think that the work Mortal Kombat did in ’95 helped Resident Evil find its niche and really get in our veins, so to speak.
The real problem with making a video game movie is obvious, to me, right there in the words I just spoke: movies aren’t a video game. They aren’t controlled by an individual or individuals, they’re controlled by the movie makers and the projectionist and the standards for movie viewing across the world. Those standards don’t apply to video games in the same way, and so video game movies are left with the problem of answering the question, “How does a film play with its audience?”
Of course a good film anticipates how its audience will react to a moment and can play off of that, and indeed what is a film but a long series of playing off of reaction after reaction to build to the film’s end? But there’s only one path, really, in a film, whereas in a video game the input from a player can make its own “story” about the individual’s play more than the common story elements across multiple players and playthroughs of a game. Every time you watch a movie, it’s going to start the same and end the same, and that leaves a lot of work to be done to “play” with the audience. I don’t know if the film format itself has really evolved its language to a point where this is even possible — but I think it’s really exciting to think about the possibilities!
This is similar to the problem filmmakers have when adapting other formats to their own. Sometimes a book’s words just can’t be made into a moving picture that can be staged and acted out. You can put words on a screen, but you certainly can’t translate the entirety of a book’s ability to inspire the reader’s own imagination through just that text alone in the same way that a book in a person’s hand can. And a film really shouldn’t try to do that, anyways.
Even so, though, there is a role for experimental film here in all of this evolution, I believe. It may indeed take some filmmaker who’s just been given a big enough blank check to make something like a film that plays with its audience. It’s like Lynch said when making The Return, “we never get a chance to go dreamy!” And really, let’s look back at the Super Mario Bros. movie. The film certainly went dreamy, if you ask me, and all indications are that Nintendo themselves didn’t really give the filmmakers any strict direction on how the script should or shouldn’t look, and perhaps that’s why the movie turned out to be such a fever dream. But — what a dream!
Other genres have had these kinds of growing pains in the past, in any case. Horror is a genre that, if you were to compare sectional views of it say in 1950, 1970, 1990, and today, you’d see four very different looking genres. The horror of today is able to do a lot that they couldn’t really pull off in the 50’s or 70’s, even some of the better CGI today would have been difficult if not impossible in the 90’s even with the mastery of mixing practical and computer effects that was around at the time. Video games themselves really only started becoming a thing with the Atari in the 70’s, and after that platform died it wasn’t until the 80’s that Nintendo saw its rise to fame. The first Mario movie came in 1993, so we really haven’t seen even thirty years of this genre yet. Maybe it just needs a little more time?
