John Woo-errific
There’s been loads of talk in the past about the ‘convergence’ of movies and games…. And there’s been several frankly appalling attempts at producing films based on games. In fact, the only good film using a game as inspiration has to be the CGI Final Fantasy. Silent Hill was ok, Resident Evil is just about watchable and everything else is completely crap… I mean, really, Doom as a film? There’s no plot in Doom other than the ‘back of a fag packet’ quick storyline to give the gamer some direction but they stretched that out into 100 minutes of screen time!But let’s not forget that it works the other way too and for far longer than games have become movies, games were copying movies. With very patchy results. The standard seems to be to tart up a standard platform game with the film’s characters and environments and rush it out in time for the film’s launch. That’s certainly what they’ve done with Ratatouille, as Steven’s review shows. Then again, we do have the Dark Forces and Jedi Knight games from Lucas Arts which are bloody superb… so, as you can see, movie tie-ins are patchy…
So what about a game by a movie bloke? Surely, seeing as you control every about a game world you can let your imagination run wild? You can use camera angles that’d be impossible in real life and basically just go to town on effects, action sequences and immersion in a game where you combine your movie skills with a medium that knows absolutely no limits.
Not that I want to talk up John Woo’s Stranglehold or anything, but isn’t that what you’d expect?