Still No Great Video Game Movies - Protagonist Pitfalls - Extra Credits

okay despite the fact that time is seemingly meaningless it is 2021 and between fan-demanded author-driven passion projects cinematic universes and like a billion and a half streaming services so much has changed in the last few years when it comes to movie making however one thing has stayed the same there still aren't any really great video game movies but not to worry cinephiles because we may have stumbled onto a new reason why real quick up top please welcome today's guest writer and film aficionado matt from nando v movies oh that's right two mats no waiting thanks buddy well here we are five years after the last time this channel made a video about this topic and we've seen a new class of video game movies released in the last half decade and they've all been fine now of course some aren't awful and there's a few that are downright fun but still i wouldn't categorize any of them as great we still haven't seen the video

game movie equivalent of a dark knight or fury road and no john wicks or skyfall ask gaming base flicks that led us to a video game film renaissance but why is this after all it isn't like we're facing the exact same problems we were last time we discussed this many of today's video game movies being made seem to be coming from the minds of creatives who love and understand the medium of gaming and some of the games these films are based on even have cinema baked into their dna linear narratives well-developed characters loads of cinematic action set pieces so again why haven't we seen some of our favorite games elevated to the highest peaks of cinema yet well to explore this question i'd like to look at four recent video game movies that have different versions of the same issue assassin's creed rampage sonic the hedgehog and the newest mortal kombat again we are not saying that these movies are bad just not films most folks outside video game culture might gravitate toward and heck some of them have really fun moments in them like in sonic's case i mean really how can you dock any points for jim carrey chewing so much scenery

but i digress here are the descriptions of those four movies 2016's assassin's creed follows franchise newcomer colin lynch as he struggles to uncover the mystery behind the villainous abstergo foundation 2008's rampage follows franchise newcomer david okoye as he and his giant gorilla george team up to stop mutated monsters from destroying chicago 2020 sonic the hedgehog follows franchise newcomer tom wachowski as he and his new friend sonic race to retrieve a bag of magic rings before they're stolen by the evil doctor robotnik and 2021's mortal kombat follows franchise newcomer cole young as he discovers his destiny and trains to compete in the mortal kombat tournament noticing anything similar even though these movies couldn't be based off more different games intended for a variety of audiences they all feature as the protagonist some sort of brand new character now is this intrinsically a bad thing well not necessarily i mean it seemed to work fine for the resident evil film

franchise at least for a while it does however draw an interesting line to some of the larger issues with these adaptations these new characters all fill the role of the audience surrogate they're designed to be essentially blank slates written as broadly as humanly possible in fact their only real defining trait is that they're nice i guess decently agreeable handsome men who don't have any flaws and that the audience can project their own values onto designed to create an access point into a fantastical video game universe which to me in today's cinematic climate is just baffling i mean we now live in a world where movies starring bradley cooper as a talking raccoon are expected to gross half a billion dollars okay so why is it that the team behind the sonic movie seems to be afraid of a movie where sonic is the main character and for that matter why couldn't the outsider character in mortal kombat be one of the earth realmers like sonia or jax in the game well one possible explanation comes from mortal kombat producer todd gardner in an interview he did with comicbook.com he said we needed an access point for

everybody to come into the game but not to heck with any of the canons of the game not to mess with anybody's backstory so that in order to keep everybody pristine and keep the game true we needed a character to come in and meet all those characters and while i do understand why some folks might think like this the idea that the audience surrogate main character of a film shouldn't mess with canon seems like a wild choice especially considering if you know anything about the current mortal kombat universe's canon all they've done is mess with characters in lore in super fun ways i mean in mk11 which i love it features a set of time-traveling characters interacting with their younger selves signaling that the canon is probably pretty flexible so the issue appears now to be that instead of just ignoring fans like some video game movies have in the past the studios currently might be a bit scared of them worrying that they'll upset fans if any big changes are made to the canon but then of course the writers want to tell a new story and the studio wants an accessible on-ramp for a wider audience which results in the characters we know and love getting sidelined to focus on what usually ends up being a

bland new hero now at this point you might be asking has there been a recent video game film that's managed to zip past this motion picture pitfall actually there has i give you detective pikachu that film works as well as it does because it builds on the source material rather than adding new unneeded protagonists utilizing the main characters of tim and pikachu from the game but then modifying only their characterizations to make their relationship more dynamic on film tim is more pokephobic and pikachu is more you know ryan reynolds and those changes help to differentiate the partners like you would expect in any buddy comedy the writers knew that they could make one small change to existing characters that would positively affect the adaptation without adding the extra bloat of an entirely new character so will more video game movies in the future learn from this problem actually i'm pretty hopeful both the upcoming uncharted film and resident evil reboot feature casts composed of largely characters from the game borderlands is still being cagey on how their new character played by haley

bennett will be involved maybe a hint that they're seeing the writing on the wall plus all evidence points to the last of us hbo series focusing mainly on the relationship between ellie and joel and of course this in no way suggests that any of these will be grand slams but at least it seems like these adaptations might not stumble in the same way as their predecessors progress in the hands of filmmakers that love and understand the source material a video game movie doesn't need a brand new audience surrogate ham-fisted into the mix the die-hard fans won't like it because they'll want to see more of the characters they love on screen and the new folks they want to draw into the franchise won't like it because in order to fit that new character in they'll most likely be a bland blank slate and actually matt put this concept absolutely perfectly the main character of an iron man movie isn't iron man's new best friend derek it's iron man so here's hoping the next batch of video game movies focus more on the things that can make them great larger than life characters going on their own adventures in the worlds that we love

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