I've been playing Far Cry for the past couple of days. I actually didn't think I'd like it that much because I tend to eschew games with a good guy/bad guy blow-em-up kind of theme (like Painkiller), and I'm easily bored by linear-path games. I really prefer a game that gives you a lot of options as to what to do/where to go, and that allows for stealth. Splinter Cell and Deus Ex come to mind as a couple of the best games I've played as far as what I like.
Far Cry actually has a lot of these features. It's still pretty heavily oriented toward massive firepower being the way to go, but there are some places that stealth is the way to go, whether or not it was actually intended. I had an intersting thing happen last night when my avatar dude swam underneath a floating bridge to get to an island compound, and it absolutely confounded the AI enemies who knew I was there, but couldn't find me-- and after a few minutes, they hunkered down warily to watch for me. This left me free to swim underwater to the backside of the island and catch them off guard, where I promptly blew the hell out of them.
I bring this up because Uwe Boll, my favorite film director to hate, is making a Far Cry movie. It's in preproduction, slated for a 2008 release. $25 million budget.
Bear in mind that he optioned the rights to the movie prior to the game being released. He really has no clue as to what the game is about. Of course, being Uwe Boll, this hardly matters.
Why does this man continue to get money to make movies? His last three movies (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne) have all sucked rancid goat balls.
(His current film, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, has a trailer that I watched in Cinema Rex at the convention. At the time, I didn't know it was Uwe Boll, and I was just amazed at the casting of Burt Reynolds as a fantasy-era king. And John Rhys-Davies, why hast thou stooped so low? And he's got Hunter: the Reckoning and Fear Effect on his plate as well as Postal and Hitman which he's also writing. And he is fully funded at least through the next three films.)
I'd be okay with Uncle Uwe making bad movies if he wasn't so bloody egotistical about the whole thing. Listening to his commentary is like a cheese grater on the soul.
Okay, so maybe it's the genre. Maybe it's impossible to make a good film out of a videogame.
Well, there is Resident Evil. And Resident Evil 2. Doom wasn't an award winner, but it was still a fun romp. And honestly, our own little Pray for Daylight is more watchable than Bloodrayne.
A videogame is a different experience than a movie, much like a book is a different experience. Look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy: even though it was a pretty fantastic set of films, there was still a chunk of outcry from the literati (Where's Tom Bombadil?). Even Hannibal fiddled with characters to compress the story into film length.
But that is the key: the films tell stories. Uwe seems to miss that. While he is right in that people in general don't want talky dialogue-ridden scenes, they do want story.
Fascinating interview with Uwe here.
By now, you know how much I love bad films. Uwe's films are the baddest. I will own them all.