Should we have been surprised to see the recent Act of Valor being marketed as if it were a video game? All its advertising—trailers, posters, television spots—essentially emulated the promotional materials of video games that shared its subject matter, like Call of Duty or Battlefield 3. Specifically Battlefield 3, in fact, for Act of Valor was even advertised alongside the successful game. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield have amassed a tremendous following, eclipsing the successes of many mainstream movies. It’s commonsensical to assume that Hollywood will soon glom onto such a lucrative gravy train, though to what extent studios will riff off such titles is unclear. Should we expect them to go the traditional licensed ‘video game movie’ route, or will games actually influence the direction of seemingly original works?
The result would likely be unfavorable given either outcome, though perhaps the latter is something for which we should actually express some concern. It would not be good if storytelling tropes from video games began seeping into films. Video games are very different from movies. This is an obvious and superficial statement, but I do feel the need to stress the noticeable distinctions between, say, an action flick and an action game, simply to illustrate the dramatic ways in which the two mediums are divergent, and to show why video game mechanics are completely incompatible with movies.
A game like Modern Warfare 3 is repetitive. It requires the player to complete the same cursory task for some six hours; in its case, slay a seemingly infinite and utterly immaterial number of enemy soldiers. Such a game is typically linear (it is a ‘ corridor shooter’); the player has no agency and is herded through the experience, doing what the game demands.
Die Hard contains none of those techniques. The action in Die Hard is limited with respect to the entire picture—there is significantly more talking than there is shooting. If one was to piece together a montage of all the fighting in Die Hard it would run for no more than fifteen minutes, and in its entirety Die Hard is a two-hour film. Its fifteen minutes of action are memorable because the four or five shootouts are the peaks on a satisfyingly erratic rollercoaster ride. The rest of the film is quiet, vacillating between dialogue and moments of complete silence and inactivity. (Famously, it takes twenty minutes to reach the first action scene.) Comparatively, the lowest points in Modern Warfare 3 are routine shootouts involving assault rifles and ten or twenty adversaries, and the high points are not too dissimilar from that. The video game rollercoaster is fairly uniform.
There are already a few instances where the noted video game mechanics have assimilated into film. The example that follows was highlighted by Shawn Elliott, once editor of the defunct Computer Gaming World/Games for Windows Magazine, now an employee of Irrational Games. Elliott related the impact video games had on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a picture he deemed “structurally and conceptually based on video games.” He cited the film’s monster closets and platforming sequences for support and placed emphasis on the film’s linearity.
Much like a corridor shooter, Crystal Skull only requires that its protagonists walk forward. They speed with abandon through a jungle, plunge off a cliff, navigate several waterfalls, and yet end up precisely where they need to be. Characters vanish only to reappear summarily in the right place (for instance, in the jungle chase sequence, Jones’ son gets separated, continues forward blindly, and is shortly reunited with his father). The film, per Elliott, lacks any sense of peril.
Lack of peril and the habituation of action—making action into something routine and mundane rather than scarce as in Die Hard—are both qualities present in video games. Since the demise of arcades and the Game Over screen, and with the now assured presence of the continue or restart from checkpoint option, death poses no significant hurdle in games, and the potential of actually being in danger seems lost. Death and peril is similarly trivial in Crystal Skull. The heroes escape from swarms of flesh eating ants, negotiate their way out of quicksand, reason with powerful, bulbous-headed extra-terrestrials, survive a number of chase sequences, and manage to defeat or eliminate hordes of Nazis, but never once do we really consider them in danger. We all know Jones will survive to see the credits roll, to hear the blasting horns in John Williams’ notorious theme. The riskless action in the film is so constant as to be numbing, and it certainly lacks the subtlety and the troughs and peaks of Die Hard’s rollercoaster. The Crystal Skull ride is plain and uniform—just like an action-focused game.
The result is something that isn’t filmic. And the same criticism applies to the recent The Adventures of Tintin, which critics charged had a surplus of action. The likes of the Michael Bay-helmed Transformers franchise also come to mind. What’s unclear is the way in which video game mechanics are fitting themselves into movies. Is Crystal Skull unconsciously (or perhaps deliberately) echoing video game mechanics, or is it simply a bad movie that stumbles in a way that echoes the tropes found in games?
In an effort to replicate the bombastic nature of the entertainment found in Call of Duty or Battlefield, action films have fattened up with special effects and action but have lost the muscle, the respectable narrative or at least the semblance of storytelling, that once made them legitimate marquee titles. Some pictures have employed this shift unapologetically. Battle: Los Angeles was clearly aimed at a gaming audience, an audience executives must picture as dullards seeking frenetic action. Even the film’s title—a three-word name literally composed of a synonym for ‘action’ and a location, as if we should await sequels named ‘Battle: New York’ or ‘Battle: Tokyo’ or ‘Battle: Helsinki’—epitomizes the ultimate in focus-grouped and board-roomed descriptive film naming.
It may be that the paths of the two distinct mediums converge noticeably when filmmakers attempt to make a product with the express goal of entertaining the audience. Fans of action films enjoy outlandish stunts, firefights, explosions. . . It’s easy to double down on what you perceive will make your film more popular. Rather than have 10% of the running time spent on action, why not double that figure? And then double that figure? So the logic runs. It is at that point that a film like Crystal Skull begins to physically resemble a game in its thirst for stunts. Most modern action games don’t even start quietly. Killzone 2 has its players land in the midst of a hot battlefield within five minutes of setting out, wasting no time on story or setting.
But the goal of a film should be different. It’s not possible to fill your movie to the brim with action while sustaining a real, meaningful story—to my mind no one has yet achieved that feat. The best genre pieces, be they action, thriller, or horror, generally feature little of what they are purported to be full of. At its core Die Hard is a picture about a shoeless man hiding in a skyscraper. And we can see the fruits of escalating that premise: Live Free or Die Hard has that same man, only much older, driving a truck on a freeway that is being shot out from under him by a Lockheed Martin fighter. The two are worlds apart in design, care, and most importantly, quality.
That kind of excessive reliance on action threatens to render the whole endeavor meaningless. To strip all meaning from the events on screen is to blunder irreconcilably. In trying to become ‘more entertaining,’ films like Crystal Skull and the fourth Die Hard are less engaging than the original films from which they derive. Crystal Skull is leagues less fun than Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Die Hard is in a class of its own, long distinguished from its sequels and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of action films. But you don’t blame video games for this recent trend. Rather, there appear to be individuals who miss what makes movies, those original action films, so popular. Nobody skips the first twenty minutes of exposition in Die Hard just to get to the bit where McClane jumps off the roof. That should mean something.
Whoa whoa whoa...really? You know that soldiers really do use the gear that sometimes gets shown (not accurately most of the time) in video games like BF3 and MW3, right? You point about Act of Valor is mostly biased and based on the fact that you only see it in those video games and then you immediately suspect its Act of Valor imitating the games when the games were imitating these soldiers and others the whole time.
Also, anyone who has read/watched an interview about Crystal Skull knows that it was not inspired by Uncharted but George Lucas' rampant lack of creativity. The other Indiana Jones movies would have been just as idiotic had Spielberg not reined him in, but he doesn't care anymore so we get Crystal Skull.
The Act of Valor portion really humored me though, especially the comment under the top picture.
Definitely a trend I've been noticing. Even a good movie, like Christopher Nolan'sInception has many of the elements of a video game. Shooting, platforming, even city building simulation, different levels (dreams within dreams), and there's no way you can watch the arctic base portion of the film and not think Call of Duty or the beginning of Goldeneye . Hell, even the bad guys who they shoot at in the movie are described as inconsequential entities who will continue to respawn until the "players" are dead. Don't get me started on 300 and Sucker Punch.
You can pretty much look at many action, sci-fi, fantasy, or adventure movie from the past decade and see them becoming more and more like video games.
@Sammo21: I think you're missing the point of his argument. He was simply commenting on the way the film was marketed and that the target audience they seemed to be chasing was the (stereotypical) crowd that buys Call of Duty every year.
You raise some good points, and the correlation between the higher amounts of action in film and the mainstream success of video games is an interesting one. I wonder if it's because studios are emulating video games or if they're focusing on the wrong parts of popular action films in the past and trying to emulate and overdo them. I mean, the parts of Die Hard that people talk about are the action scenes, but they're so great because of the movie that surrounds them, not in and of themselves, something that studio execs probably don't really get.
Did you read the article? You missed the point entirely. He's not saying that Indy 4 is directly inspired by Uncharted. He is saying that movies in general are starting to structurally follow video games by focusing more and more on action and set pieces and less on story. Whether or not thats directly influenced by video games or if its just a result of movies having to do more today than in the past should be the real question.
As for you blaming Indy 4 on Lucas, it doesn't really matter if Spielberg reeled him in or not. Movies today are just made differently. Theres a very good chance that the movie would have had the same structure that focused more on action and was more video game like. What worked in 1980 might not work so well today. Its just a sign of the times.
Just seeing the picture of Drake on the front page just reminded me how good that Naughty Dog tech is, wish more PS3 developers used their engine.
Those movies you are bringing up (except maybe Act... wich I haven't seen) is almost it's own category, they're adventure/action. Couldn't you say that's more old school than the thriller/action category? I'm thinking Ray Harryhausen and earlier (Errol Flynn maybe). Wasn't those movies just a series of dumb action set pieces without much substance?
I don't think this has anything to do with video games but the rebirth of these types of movies. The more grim ingredients of 80's and 90' action was just a fallout from the 70's artsy and bleak movies. I could be very wrong though.
District 9 or Inception seem far stronger examples of this than Act of Valor...
@Shaanyboi said:
Yeah, and there both better films.
Crystal Skull lacks peril just as the first three Indy films did. It's a(n american) serial convention: The good guys always win; they succeed by chance, luck and sometimes skill; the fight supervillains. The Indy films follow these conventions and their own inner logic which isn't based in reality. Or better: It hightens reality, which allows for religous superpowers (Raiders), voodoism (Temple), immortality (Crusade) and aliens (Skull). I don't get the backlash for Skulls. It's a worthy successor of the first trilogy.
Sorry to nerd out on ya, but shouldn't it be "media" in the headline?
This article just oozes pretentiousness.
There's a place for big, dumb action films. Some of them influenced by video games, some of them trying to evoke the big, dumb action films of the 70s and 80s. Either way, they are just simple, escapist films. There are good (in my own opinion) video game-esque films out there. The Crank films are crazy, over the top and seemingly ripped from a weird Japanese video game, but they're inventive and fun. Yes, I would like to see smarter action films that rely more on tension (like last year's Drive) rather than just explosions and special effects (like last year's Transformers: Dark of the Moon) but I don't mind taking in the spectacle of a big, dumb action film every once and a while. Though the Transformers films are terrible.
No they're just putting out more trash. The problem with video games is that there is no demand for anything more than games like Call of Duty or Mass Effect 3. It could be though that the demand is there but the talent isn't. Mass Effect 3 is a perfect example of the state of the industry. You go from a rich engrossing world with interesting characters and dynamics to a third person shooter with customization. Bioware ignored games like LA Noire and Uncharted and delivered bad animation and bad story. Yet gamers are eating it up and telling everyone who has legitimate complaints to stop being so "entitled". So until the demand and talent is there we'll continue to be amazed by narratives and characters given to us by developers like Bioware instead of demanding more from companies.
Also everyone should read this article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/10/we-should-be-making-games-more-like-movies-but-not-less-like-games/
I do love how you framed it in the headline and I agree that by and large, a lot of movies feel more like videogames because they're taking a razor thin premise and turning it into 2 hour explosions. Not to say there werent always dumb blockbusters, but the bar seems lower year by year. I don't think videogames are getting much smarter simply because I don't think anything Naughty Dog or Bondi and even David Cage do are penetrating the larger industry. Most of what they do continues to only be done in their games.
I always felt that most hollywood blockbusters since the 2000s are waaaay too much like videogames anyways.
(that's why all my favorite moviescome either from the 30s, the 50s, the 80s or the 90s)
I mean, from the over use of CGi everywhere over practical effects/stunts, the over-saturation of action instead of smart pacing... heck, even making movies longer and longer! (I miss the ol' 1hour30 films, with better rythm etc.. now all films are like 2 to 3 hours long!! and it drags the whole thing!)
Both Hollywood and the Games Industry have gotten noticeably worse, in the exact same ways, at telling stories post the new Millenium. Anyone who played any PC "Adventure", or console RPG, game from the late 90's must laugh their asses off when titles like Uncharted, Final Fantasy XIII or Call of Duty are called out for great storytelling these days.
And it's no wonder; the way writers are brought up nowadays, through art schools or whatnot, they're taught really, really simplistic and derivative techniques. Basically, "Here's Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey template. Go Mad Libs yourself a script". Much like how modern artists are taught not to do anything creative - only do things if it can be justified (which is why most "aliens" are all still bipedal creatures that resemble an amalgam of creatures already on Earth. Such as the pathetically designed Na'Vi from Avatar.). Going through this system results in dog shit. Which is why the indie markets for BOTH films and games is where you see all the original stuff.
@snake_runner said:
Well they totally wanted you to think James Bond there, actually. Also I would even go so far as to say that Inception is an example of positive gaming tropes done right. A collection of rules presented in a matter of fact and mostly unobtrusive way.
I feel this article is more about the escalation of action and the pushing aside of some of the mechanical things that keep a narrative working...like pacing...>_> transformers 3 <_<