Besides the usual bevy of characters and new features, this game also comes with the 1995 movie Mortal Kombat in digital format. Which got me thinking about video games which have been made into movies.
I'll say right now that the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie is probably the best game movie there has ever been.
Despite the miscasting of Christopher Lambert as Raiden and the cheesiness of the ninja character costumes, the movie hits all the right notes. It's got action, violence, fan service moments (Johnny Cage's friendship, anyone?) and, maybe most importantly, some pretty well choreographed fight sequences. The guy who plays Shang Tsung (don't know his name) does a pretty admirable job acting menacing. Robin Shou is a pretty awesome Liu Kang, to boot. Mortal Kombat still might prove as fertile ground for producers, especially given the response the Mortal Kombat legacy video received. If you haven't seen it, prepare yourself.
The honest truth about game movies is that they're almost all complete garbage. You can count the decent ones literally on one hand: Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil 1 and 2 (sort of, if you ignore parts of them), and Silent Hill. The actually watchable game movies are a hybrid of fan service, loyalty to the original game material, and a willingness to contradict the game's lore.
What made Mortal Kombat good? Good fighting, fan service, and the movie's willingness to poke fun at itself. Movies like Final Fantasy and Super Mario Bros. took themselves way too seriously (to be fair, there were lots of other problems with those movies besides that). Super Mario Bros. went more than a little over the top with camp. Plus the setting and tenor of that movie are way off: someone, at some point thought Mario should visit the apocalyptic urban setting of Blade Runner and that that would make for good film. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is preachy, boring, uninteresting romp through weird faces and bad vocal performances (Alec Baldwin being the worst offender).
I'm not sure why Silent Hill has such a bad rep (it has a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is wholly unjustified).
Sure, the performances aren't great, and the movie more or less collapses into the third act. Still, there are some genuinely creepy moments. The movie never descends into emotional schmaltz either. Seriously, what is with the sub-genre of "Mother loses child" horror films? They're almost uniformly unbearable with the teary embraces and declarations of undying maternal love. I guess they're making a Silent Hill 2 (starring everyone's favorite, Sean Bean). Not sure how to feel about that, but I'm willing to give it a chance. Which, you know, the critics won't.
What does all this tell us about future game movies? It seems increasingly dubious that they'll ever make a Halo movie. Which, I think, is a good thing. Halo might make for a serviceable movie if they set out to make a stand-alone film based on the original game. Because face it, the actual plot of Halo disintegrates after the first game. You know, come to think, ODST or Reach might make for decent movies. Or maybe they should start with Reach and then make Halo. The problem with a Halo movie is that the director will probably be loath to mess with the gobs of canonical lore heaped onto the games (the novels, etc.) So, maybe a Halo movie wouldn't be so bad.
I have hope for the new wave of game movies. Dead Space and Assassin's Creed seem like fertile ground for films (provided that Dead Space takes inspiration from The Thing and from Alien and that Assassin's Creed doesn't delve into the herp derp aliens shit). Just because they're game movies, they have to be twice as good to receive half the credit. Oddly enough, the biggest obstacle for these movies might be the game fans themselves. Fans need to recognize that loyal adherence to the plot of the game does not a good movie make.
K
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