Paul W.S. Anderson Talks About Source Material in Films
Recently there have been a lot of films (if you could even call them that) that have been heavily based on the canon or aesthetic of a particular game franchise. Most of them have been terrible, almost unwatchable. Crispygamer recently did an intervew with Paul W.S. Anderson to get his take on how Hollywood’s doing with these conversions, and how Hollywood doesn’t take videogames or any other media they’re using as source material seriously.
Anderson wrote and directed/produced the Resident Evil film series, which recently had its fourth installment. Personally, I didn’t find the first two movies unbearable. They were a little camp, and the dialogue is bad, but we’re talking about the series that gave us Jill sandwich here. It couldn’t get much worse than a Jill Sandwich.
Apparently, Anderson and the production team (for the Resident Evil movies, specifically) “know the intellectual property that it’s based upon very, very well”, which I’m sure they do. They get most of the characters and their behaviors down, as well as the dark, eerie aesthetic of Resident Evil (save the third and fourth films, the third was in a desert and the fourth I haven’t seen). It’s obvious that Anderson is the only one doing it kind of right(by having a low budget), as most of the other films that are based on videogames tank at the box office, whereas the latest Resident Evil movie made approximately $278 million worldwide. He brings up the recent Prince of Persia movie in the interview:
It didn’t surprise me when Prince of Persia — I haven’t seen it yet, but people say it’s very disappointing — didn’t do the business they were hoping. The director (Mike Newell) was very vocal about the fact he never played the videogame. And for me, that’s like adapting a book without reading the book or adapting a stage play and never seeing the stage play. I think it’s disrespectful to the medium, and it’s disrespectful to the original source material, and ultimately, it doesn’t make the best movie.
Which I completely agree with. If you’re going to have the balls to take on someone else’s IP and tack your name onto it, you’d better make it acceptable to the fans (either by keeping it the same or making it something the fans would enjoy).
I really don’t even like the idea of crossover media to begin with. Unless they’re like Anderson’s movies and don’t exactly follow the games intentionally, I’m constantly trying to remember what happened in a book or whatever the film was based on and thinking “Ok, did they do this? Check. Did they do the thing where the person goes to the place and talks to that person and the thing happens? No? WOW WORST MOVIE EVER I’M WALKING OUT”. Anderson manages to pull it off though, with low budgets and alright films that don’t tread on the source material too much (like Resident Evil had anything left after five though, right?).
Dude’s basically right. Of course lots of people shit on the Resi films, but they do actually capture the feel of the Resi world very, very well and that’s mostly because everyone (or at least nearly everyone) who worked on them had played the games to death. A lot of people lament that George Romero’s script for a Resident Evil film was turned down, but if you read that it’s pretty clear that it would have been much worse than the Resi films that we actually got because Romero obviously wasn’t clued up on the Resident Evil world, his script was just another ‘[X] Of The Dead’ script. The Tekken, Dead Or Alive and Mario Bros. films were awful because clearly nobody involved was particularly familiar with the worlds or characters and just didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.
That said, I didn’t think the Prince Of Persia film was that bad. It got the style down, it had enough references to the games for me and it wasn’t poorly made or badly acted or anything. It was just a very typical summer adventure film aimed at family audiences.