With the recent confirmation that there will be a Last Of Us movie, which will be produced by The Evil Dead director Sam Raimi, I decided to take a look back at past film adaptations of popular video games. Trudging through the good, the bad and the painstakingly awful I have narrowed it down to my personal top five video game to film adaptations.
5. Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
In all fairness, the video game to movie genre has never really been all that successful in creating a spot-on adaptation, so it was hard to even settle on this listing. Prince of Persia, altogether, is not that great of a movie. It’s fun to watch, but that doesn’t make it great in any way. The story takes place in ancient Persia (if the title didn’t give that away) and follows the adventures of Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) as they are tasked with the unfortunate journey of stopping the films “good-guy turned evil villain” Nizam (Ben Kingsley) who is determined to destroy the entire world with the Dagger of Time and the only way to stop this all from happening is by taking the dagger to a super secret temple (no joke, Princess Tamina literally says “The only way to stop this Armageddon is for us to take the dagger to the Secret Guardian Temple.”) Phew, okay, so that was a mouthful. Despite the plot seeming like something straight out of a Bond movie, the scripting and charm are nowhere near comparable. Although Gyllenhaal had the looks to play the part, he was lacking a sort of character commitment that really could have made a worlds of difference. The most redeeming factor of the film was seeing Alfred Molina play the ostrich race running con man Sheik Amar.
4. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
Despite being cheesy (sometimes very) I actually really enjoyed this movie. Just this one though, not the other ones. It had a fairly decent balance of action, adventure, comedy and sometimes odd drama. Each role was cast pretty well and the actors seemed to take to their parts. The film pits Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) against the organization known as the Illuminati which is represented by Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) in their attempt to retrieve an ancient relic, known as “the triangle of light” (very original) that has the ability to control time. Lara’s quest for the relic stems from the desire to resume her late fathers work in locating it whereas the Illuminati want it because, well, they’re the antagonists. The actual scripting was fairly bad and added to the overall cheesiness of the film with its attempt at making memorable one-liners. The movie opened up for a sequel that hit theaters in 2003 but failed to see the same success that its predecessor did.
3. Resident Evil (2002)
The Resident Evil games are a popular horror fiction series that spawned a large number of titles, and in 2002 saw its first film adaptation. Released under the same name as the games, Resident Evil follows the story of the Umbrella Corporation, which is considered one of the largest companies in the world. Unknown to public knowledge, Umbrella does work in a secret underground lab, known as the Hive, creating viral chemicals for biological warfare. Very early into the movie, a would be scientist working with said viral chemicals ultimately decides that he was being TOO careful and very casually and psychotically tosses a vial to the other side of the room. Whoops. The vial breaks, the virus gets out and snakes its way through the conveniently place air ducts which sets off the emergency alarm to which everyone believes is just a drill (I always knew those fire drills in school were a bad idea.) But of course, the severity of the situation makes itself present and the whole lab is thrown into panic mode, opening up for the whole premise of the movie. The main character of the film is Alice (Milla Jovovich) who is first shown waking up in the shower (good start) and apparently suffering from a helping of amnesia. She’s quickly introduced to the SWAT team assigned to secure the Hive and together they head off into the unknown. In the Hive they encounter many obstacles like some state-of-the-art supercomputer known as the Red Queen (Michaela Dicker) and a large amount of newly infected humans. Oh and rabid dogs whom Alice delivers a nice roundhouse to the head. The movie all around is definitely a sold piece of cinema that stemmed a handful of sequels.
2. Silent Hill (2006)
I’ve always had a big kick playing horror games. I really can’t say why, nor can I say I’m actually good at them (I usually end up in the corner sobbing with my knees pressed against my chest). The Silent Hill games, along with the Resident Evil series, have been a staple in the horror game genre, and like Resident Evil have spawned some silver screen adaptations that are good. The film takes place in the town called Silent Hill, where the lead character Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) takes her young daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) who has been suffering from episodes of sleep walking. After an attempt to outrun a police officer on the drive to Silent Hill leads them to crash the vehicle, Rose awakes to find her daughter missing and sets off on foot into the eerie town to find her. The film is an onslaught of suspenseful scenes one after the other that keeps the viewers on their toes, well at least it does if you’re anything like me whose scream can mock that of a dog call. This movie was actually really well done, not to mention the main male lead is played by Sean Bean and would have been an easy number one on the list if it weren’t for my childhood crush on this next movie.
1. Mortal Kombat (1995)
Now, I realize how cheesy this movie is, but as a kid this movie quickly became an all time favorite and after recently re watching it I can say that it still holds up. In my opinion, it’s actually one of the closest movies to stick to the story from the video games ever. But again, with the games whole story being “beat up as many people as you can in this climb to the top tournament,” it really isn’t that hard, but the movie did stick to that concept. It literally was one fight scene after another and the fights were awesome. For being a 1995 film, the choreography was really well done and the fighters actually used their in game moves. On the down side, the dialogue was fairly painstaking, but the soundtrack easily made up for that. The movie focused around Liu Kang (Robin Shou), Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby) and Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras) who were tasked with the mission of making it so at least one of them won the tournament. The man who sends them to their almost seemingly demise is none other than Lord Rayden who is played by Christopher Lambert. This movie still holds the crown as one of my all time favorites, and what other movie actually has a roll-call in the trailer? If you haven’t seen it, I recommend checking it out.