When I say, “Name a video game movie”, what is the first movie that comes to your mind? Maybe you think of Silent Hill or Resident Evil. Something we can name about these two movies relating to their respective titles? They’re both bad. What makes these movies—and so many others—so bad when they’re related to some of the biggest franchises? Well, that’s what we’re attempting to answer today.
Movies Can’t Replicate Games Word for Word
The first point is straightforward; you can’t fit 60 hours of gameplay into a 2-hour-long movie. Even taking out sidequests, you still wouldn’t have enough time. So they simply shorten everything. Alternatively, In the case of the Silent Hill film, they completely flip the narrative and, instead of showing us the perspective of Harry Mason, we watch the story of Rose Da Silva. While some things do align—such as how the main character is searching for her daughter in Silent Hill and the existence of Alessa—some things just don’t quite make sense for the movies.
One such instance would be the appearance of Pyramid Head. Even unseasoned fans of the Silent Hill series would know that Pyramid Head is an absolute staple character of the series. Still, it doesn’t make sense that he’s in Rose’s version of Silent Hill since he’s supposed to be the ‘executioner’ of James in Silent Hill 2. He’s one of James’ monsters, not just a monster that appears in Silent Hill. The nurses also don’t make sense in their appearance. Alessa sees them as scary, anxiety-ridden figures, but they opt to use the Silent Hill 2 nurse design in the movie That design is far more sexualized, which doesn’t line up with Alessa’s ideology of what nurses should be.
In games with runtimes of 60+ hours, it isn’t viable to have the movie cover everything the game did. However, I wouldn’t be one to say that the Silent Hill movie wasn’t good on its own. As a standalone movie, I found it quite enjoyable. However, relating it to the video game it isn’t a great representation of it. That isn’t to say all video game movies are bad, though! There are plenty of movies that relate to the source material well.
Video Game Movies Can Be Good
As an avid Pokémon consumer, I found the Pokémon live-action movie very well done. They showed a great deal of effort in the Detective Pikachu movie and, overall, it was a success. Pokémon, however, doesn’t have a great deal of storyline to follow; every game usually has a bad guy that they have to defeat.
That aside, the way the Pokémon are animated and how well the CGI was done is impressive. Even with movies like the Sonic movie taken into consideration. There isn’t always a clear-cut story in every Sonic game but the CGI is well done and characters like Eggman were cast well. The Mario movie even put up the vague plot needing to defeat Bowser and was able to make a successful movie out of that.
More impressively, we can reference movies like the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie. The cast was done well and, even though a ton of lore had been pre-established, they were able to show off that lore as if it were never-before-seen. They were able to put in the effort and the information needed and didn’t shove everything into one movie. (spoiler) With Afton’s death at the end referencing how Springtrap was created, they were able to leave plenty of room for a sequel.
As a whole, not every video game movie is bad. We’ve seen a lot of successful movies made, and even some successful sequels for them on the horizon. Hopefully, we’re on the upswing of even more good video game movies to come.
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About the author
Abbey Hunter is a Senior at Miami University studying Games & Simulation with a minor in Studio Art. As an avid gamer growing up, they have extensive knowledge of plenty of video game series. They also know how to create video games due to their studies. Abbey likes to create worlds in their free time, dabbling in DMing or playing DND. They also like obscure TTRPGs and discovering new and weird things to play. When they’re not going to school, playing games, or writing, they’re usually creating new cosplays or going to conventions to meet plenty of other cosplayers! You can follow Abbey on Instagram @pastelprincesscosplays!