Enough already, Hollywood! Deus Ex film in the works
Simon Williams November 16, 2012 - 1:01 pmNews: Having glutted itself on the back catalogues of Marvel and DC, video games are now very much under the baleful glare of Hollywood’s rapacious eye for source material, with Deus Ex the latest gaming IP to get butchered adapted for the big screen.
It seems that Hollywood filmmakers have exhausted the rich seam that was adapting every comic book franchise known to man, and now next in line for the treatment are video games, as, following hot on the heels of news of an Assassin’s Creed movie and the casting of Tom Hardy as Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher, it’s been revealed that a Deus Ex film is in the works.
CBS Films have announced that they will be adapting Square Enix’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the big screen, with Scott Derrickson, director of Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose, signed up to helm the project. He’ll be working again with Sinister’s screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, who’ll be on scripting duties.
“Deus Ex is a phenomenal cyberpunk game with soul and intelligence,” Derrickson opined. “By combining amazing action and tension with big, philosophical ideas, Deus Ex is smart, ballsy, and will make one hell of a movie. Cargill and I can’t wait to bring it to the big screen.”
Having never seen Mr. Derrickson’s cinematic ouevre, I’m in no place to judge whether he’s a good/bad/idiotic choice for the project, though the very phrase “smart, ballsy, and will make one hell of a movie” is testing out my gag reflex even as I type. But considering the entire USP of the Deus Ex series is the fact that every level and encounter can be approached in a myriad variety of ways would appear to make it exactly the sort of game that would least benefit from being adapted into a fixed and probably “action-packed” narrative. Maybe there will be dozens of different director cuts on the Blu-ray to reflect the numerous ways each scene could have played out if the protagonist went for stealth, sabotage, sniping and so on.
It’s not as if Deus Ex’s cyberpunk universe is particularly original or clever, at least not in the context of the genre across other media. It’s hard not to empathise with Alan Moore – someone who knows a thing or two about Hollywood mutilating creative works from other mediums – that cinematic corporations continue to labour under the mistaken belief that just because a story is told in another visual medium – be it comic books or video games – it can be effortlessly translated across to the big screen without losing exactly the qualities of expression in its original medium that made it work in the first place.
So please Hollywood, enough of this laziness. Go out and find talented screenwriters and directors that can create original stories designed to take advantage of the unique qualities of cinema itself. Leave video games to be what they’re best at – interactive entertainment.
Comments (5)
Why don’t we just publish a playthrough as a film? It would be better.
People do already do that actually. One Youtube uploader is fairly famous for doing that really well with all of the Uncharted games.
I think that’s awesome. I saw one for god of war, too. I watch my husband play videogames all the time. I’d totally go to a theater and watch a playthrough. ..Heavy Rain would make a great movie.
Possible responses to this:
I didn’t ask for this (film to be made).
What a shame (they’re not using a more well established director)
A (box-office) bomb!
There’s a reason most movie adaptations of games suck. Games are interactive, last longer and you have more of a connection to a character that you’re playing as or talking to in a game than what you get on the screen. Some of the elements of the Deus Ex games could make for a decent movie, if you had something to set it apart from the rest of the pack. Whether you follow something from the three games, include some plot elements from them or go in a different direction, you’re not going to please everyone. The fans of the game(s) are going to pick it apart. Hell, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within wasn’t all that bad as a sci-fi movie with graphics well ahead of its time (some of which could probably still compare to what we see today in movies). But having the Final Fantasy name attached to it didn’t help, but without it people may not have paid much attention at all.
Mortal Kombat fared well enough (except for the craptacular ending) and somehow Resident Evil’s managed to release 5 feature films, all of which aren’t all too well received by critics, but fans have been a bit more friendly – and each has turned a profit. Deus Ex could do well in a movie setting. I just don’t have high hopes for it.