THE GENRE LIVES ON IN AFTERLIFE
Since the early 1990s, Hollywood has been adapting videogames for the big screen, and, on paper at least, the two forms of media seem like a match made in heaven. A movie should just have to follow the story and characters already set up in the game, taking some liberties here and there for the sake of story or budget. But, as with many games based on movies, film adaptations of videogames have had mixed results and are often disastrous.
Casting Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft or having super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer behind Prince of Persia isn't enough to make a videogame adaptation work. For real success, you need a game that can actually translate to the big screen. Even if a game has a straightforward story, the player interaction is often what determines how much fun and how much enjoyment comes out of the game. A film doesn't offer the same kind of immersive experience as a videogame and has to stand on its own, while needing to appeal to both hardcore gamers and people who don't know a PlayStation from an Xbox. Apparently, doing so is quite a challenge: the number of great film versions of videogames is too small to count, and the average Metascore for all such films in Metacritic's database is a lowly
Over the past ten years, two filmmakers have made waves adapting videogames to the big screen, one for being successful and the other for being one of the worst filmmakers of all time. Starting in 2003 with House of the Dead and continuing with the upcoming BloodRayne 3: The Third Reich, Uwe Boll is well on his way to becoming the director who makes Ed Wood look like Orson Welles. Almost exclusively making films based on games, Boll has been nominated for 3 Razzie Awards and won the Razzie for Worst Career Achievement.
On the other side of the coin we have Paul W.S. Anderson, who's had a more successful run with the Resident Evil films. Anderson served as producer and writer on each of the films in the series, the latest of which is Resident Evil: Afterlife, which opens this Friday in 3D. While critically dismissed and not exactly precise adaptations of the Resident Evil games, Anderson's adaptations have found commercial success by giving the audience a lot of action, adventure, and Milla Jovovich.
How do films from these two directors compare to the other titles in the genre? Below we look at the single "best" videogame adaptation, and ten of the worst.
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