This is our first installment in Game Cred: a collection of essays about video games to tie in with our latest Zine.
The two purposes of a video game movie or show are that it has to be good in its own right, and it needs to generate some form of interest in the source material. Now, when it comes to video game adaptations, the only franchise that has managed to successfully direct interest to the game that gave birth to it is Pokémon, which aired the anime series in 1997 and its first feature film in 1998. Hollywood has been trying to do the same since 1993’s Super Mario Bros. — they’ve failed spectacularly. And while an argument can be made that, for example, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil franchise has managed to be a financial hit, its overall quality leaves much to be desired. So, why does this keep happening? Is there any way to fix it? Well, the answers to both lie in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010).
Yes, it’s true that the feature film directed by Edgar Wright and written by Michael Bacall and Wright is based on the Bryan Lee O’Malley graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim. However, there are two things that need to be considered, with one being more important than the other. The first one is that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (partially or completely) led to the creation of a video game which was released along with the movie and met with hugely positive reviews, continuing to garner new fans. The second (and more important) one is that from an auditory, visual, and narrative standpoint, the movie manages to not only pay homages to the world of gaming, thereby reminding gamers why they love this form of art and entertainment, but it also attempts to attract those who haven’t played a game in their life.
Let’s talk about the auditory aspects first. There’s no denying that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a sound design heaven. Created by sound designer James Boyle, it is replete with notes from various arcade games, console games, and more, which are sometimes accentuated or downplayed by Nigel Godrich’s eccentric score. Surprisingly, most of the sound effects are diegetic due to Young Neil’s (Johnny Simmons) love for handheld console games, and are beautifully matched with the twist, turns, and reactions in Scott (Michael Cera), Kim (Alison Pill), and Stephen’s (Mark Webber) conversation scenes. Additionally, it has some vocal cues that bleed out of the Ninja Ninja Revolution game in the movie and into the lives of the characters, which oscillates between being diegetic and non-diegetic. On the surface, all this can look like over-the-top stylistic flourishes because O’Malley’s graphic novel series has a lot of game-based references. In actuality, it subtly acclimatizes a non-gamer to an environment that is brimming with such sounds that are usually made from scratch to give players an immersive experience.
With the visuals, Wright, along with cinematographer Bill Pope, editors Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss, and its production design, VFX, and SFX teams throw a lot at the screen. However, since all of it sticks, it’s worth examining what exactly they are throwing and why.
The Universal title card echoes the 8-bit full-motion videos that used to play before a lot of console and PC games. The visual effects during the battle of the bands, the bass battle between Scott and Todd (Brandon Routh), the amp vs amp battle between the Sex Bob-Ombs and the Katayanagi Twins (Shota Saito and Keita Saito), and the final fight sequence at the Chaos Theatre feature musical notes coming out of the instruments and audio spectrum visualizers. They are reminiscent of various music rhythm games such as the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series, where players are required to hit the notes via their keyboard or controller in order to score points, thereby allowing the player to emulate the feeling of handling multiple musical instruments — ones that they might not get to play in real life since each of those instruments are much more expensive than a single video game.
Speaking of emulating things that someone may not master in real life: the fight sequences. They are framed in the style of classic fighting games such as Mortal Kombat, Super Smash Bros., Tekken, Street Fighter, etc., using “versus” and “KO” signs to signal the commencement or end of a fight, slow-motion sequences to heighten the impact of a punch or a kick by using complex motion rigs and VFX, combos to earn extra points, and topped off with enemies being reduced to coins after their defeat. The transition from a seemingly normal conversation scene to one of these set pieces is edited to show the audience what it feels like to turn from an ordinary human being into a master of Karate, Kung Fu, and Jiu-jitsu all at once in the world of gaming. If that is not apparent in every single fight, Wright makes his intentions clear in the Roxy (Mae Whitman) versus Scott brawl, which is evidently a frame-for-frame recreation of the introduction to Ninja Gaiden, with Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) literally controlling Scott’s moves.
Furthermore, while the jumps from one location to another are lifted pretty accurately from the comics, in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, they are edited in a way to mimic the concept of fast travel, which is a video game mechanic that’s commonly used to move around in open world titles. Other game-related features that show up in the movie are health meters, character stats, in-game rewards like the swords of love and self-respect, and characters being covered with a red filter to indicate pain. While the pee meter might have seemed ridiculous then, nowadays, it can be seen in many simulation games such as Planet Coaster and Rollercoaster Tycoon which involve monitoring large crowds in a park where non-playable characters do need to pee after having some soft drinks. Lastly, where most movies alter their aspect ratio for either thematic purposes or to sell the emotional value of a scene, Wright does the same in order to give off the feeling of entering and exiting a cut scene, i.e. non-interactive moments in a video game that interrupt gameplay for a myriad of narrative reasons.
The ‘why’ behind all this is quite straightforward. Wright doesn’t want the audience to get an idea of what it feels like to play just one kind of video game. He wants the audience to have a taste of almost everything that’s on the menu in the world of video games. Role-playing games, simulators, modern games, arcade games, console games; you name it and he has it. And then he tops all of that with the storytelling.
The biggest issue with video game films is that, for some reason or other, they are too afraid to adapt the characters properly, lean into the game’s mechanics and rules, and finally, follow its style of progressing the story. They extract the narrative from the video game and try to fit it into a linear three-act or five-act script. Hence, they alienate the gamers who want to watch a cinematic version of what they’ve already played, and fail to entice non-gamers with anything that’s interesting about the game in question. Since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is somewhat of a hybrid between role-playing, fighting, and platform games, Wright and Bacall trim down the graphic series (which veers in various directions) into an eight-level structure, reducing the focus to just Scott Pilgrim, and then proceed to fit it into a three-act play.
The first act is technically made of one level, introducing us to Scott and the Sex Bob-ombs, Scott and Knives’s (Ellen Wong) relationship, Scott and Ramona’s relationship, and establising the rules of the game with Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha). The second act consists of three levels. It starts with Lucas Lee (Chris Evans), is elevated by Todd and Envy (Brie Larson), and we find our protagonist at his lowest after the fight with Roxy. The fight with the Katayanagi Twins, Gideon (Jason Schwartzman), and Nega Scott comprises the third act. What this essentially does is familiarise non-gamers to the storytelling format that video games usually follow, where you have to overcome hurdles to progress and redo a level if you fail. It smartly leans into some of the outlandish concepts such as extra lives, surprise weapons, and bonus secret rounds appearing out of nowhere after you’ve unlocked everything there is to unlock. In doing so, Wright manages to comfort viewers who find games to be too daunting to play and nudge them towards one of the genres featured in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or the Scott Pilgrim game itself, while tipping his hat to gamers who go through these motions every other day.
Video games are an artform whose success hasn’t really waned over the years. While, on the flipside, the video game adaptation is a sub-genre that struggles to achieve any kind of consistency in terms of quality and box-office returns. The reason always seems to be this half-baked attempt to move away from what makes video games special and present it to the audience in a format that they are more familiar with. That drives away both gamers and non-gamers alike. Instead, the process should be to invite the audience to the format that makes video games special and then help them get familiar with it, thereby making it an inviting atmosphere for both non-gamers and gamers. This is exactly what Scott Pilgrim vs the World does. It feels like an earnest ‘thank you’ to the world of games and a path towards the door that leads to several escapist universes which non-gamers are advertently or inadvertently searching for.
