Is it just me or do the majority of movies based on video games, and video games based on movies, suck?  Why is this?  Honestly I don’t have a good answer other than sheer laziness.  The “milking it” factor.  The “it doesn’t matter as long as the previews look good to boost sales” motto – disgusting.  Max Payne, the movie based on the video game, was horrible (in my opinion), and made a ton of money off of the sheer idea that it’s Max Payne in movie form.  Now we’ve seen sci-fi type, action packed, adventure movies actually work in the past – The Dark Knight, 300, The Matrix (only the original; here is another example of laziness, but that’s not my quarrel now) – but I have yet to see a video game conquer the big screen with any dignity.  And the biggest issue I have with this is that there are plenty of great video games than can be made into great movies.

Not only have I yet to see a decent attempt from video game to movie, I have also yet to encounter movie to video game.  Are there possibilities? Absolutely.  Have there been attempts?  If “attempt” is even the proper definition of what they were; I’m not saying there has yet to be decent video games based on movies, but there has yet to be a solid smash hit Game of the Year nomination.  Look at games like Iron Man, Star Wars:  The Force Unleashed, even The Bourne Conspiracy.  Iron Man was completely rushed in order to make the date of the movie’s release.   The story line was flat and repetitive, and the controls and graphics were awful.  Star Wars was another title I thought, “finally a good Star Wars game.”  Until, however, I played a little bit of it.  Another boring and half-hearted attempt at what could have been a great game.  The Bourne Conspiracy is a very close and decent attempt of this crossover.  Realize though, I’m not saying that these games were the worst games ever released, or that I wouldn’t buy or play them.  However, when the movie the video game is based on is revered as highly as these movies were, it is completely unacceptable, in my opinion, to not release a game that cannot fight against the great games like Halo, Call of Duty, Fallout and all the other games that in the past have been revered as perfect.

To continue on my last point, it is also completely unacceptable for a movie based on a great, or even decent, video game to not be great, or at least decent; I think it’s even more of a decent movie rather than a great movie – I have honestly yet to see one; the game to movie crossover is exponentially worse then movie to game.  Some of these video game based movies have qualities like entertainment and the “wow” factor, but they have absolutely no shelf life.  They don’t leave you with that “I have to see that again” feeling, or the “I have to buy that” sense.  They are unable to survive against the majority of other movies in their respective genres.  Maybe it’s because the story has already been laid out and decided from the video game; but then why do some movies based on books succeed so well?  And if this is the case then video games should stop being made into movies.  It’s almost becoming a classic bias towards this crossover; I personally will not go to a movie based on a video game, nor do I really get excited when I hear a movie is to be based on a video game.  However, maybe there haven’t been enough attempts.  There are hundreds if not thousands of movies based on book, so maybe the percentage of great movies based on books is so low that video game crossovers aren’t too far behind.  No, because for how much money these great video games can make, there is no reason a company cannot take their time and make an amazing movie.  They are lazy and greedy and I’m sick of it.

Now before you go all crazy out there, there are exceptions to any rule, and the exception upcoming is really a very spare exception; the Bond crossover.  I say it’s a “spare” exception because they have been hit or miss throughout their career in both movies and video games.  Some of them have been horrible, some have been decent, but I don’t believe, other than the original Goldeneye for N64, that a Bond game has truly made an amazing mark on the gaming community, nor has any recent Bond movie left an amazing impression.  This has been the closest crossover to what I’m calling for, but they still haven’t really quite made it.

It is out of pure and utter greed that these spectacular movies and video games become monsters at the beckoning call of Hollywood and [location unavailable]—(there is no Hollywood of video games—though there should be).  We have seen what happens in both fields—movies and games—when a company takes its time and takes a breath; we get games like Call of Duty, Halo, World of Warcraft, and movies like Bourne, Batman, and 300.  I, really and truly, would love to see a great video game become a great movie, and vice versa; not because it’s a way for the company’s to make more money, but because it’s a great way to entertain and keep us enthralled in the world that has been created for us to keep ourselves from going crazy.