Okay, so this entry is way, way overdue. But in my defense I spent most of last week out of town at my grandmother’s funeral, and this week's just been crazy, so my schedule has seriously been thrown off of late. Since my last entry I think I’ve seen SEVEN movies, so I’ve definitely got a lot of catching up to do. So without further ado, let me jump right into it.
So after all the hype, I just couldn’t resist. Yep, I had to do it – I just had to go see Snakes on a Plane! And you know what, it actually wasn’t half bad. Now admittedly, it is very much a B-movie, and if you’re expecting more than that, you’re going to be disappointed (more to the point, if you’re expecting more than that, you seriously need to get your head examined). Which is not to say that it’s necessarily a dumb, cheesy movie. On the contrary, the director obviously made an effort to make the movie scary and intense, and if you’re afraid of snakes this movie is NOT for you. Hell, I actually like snakes and parts of this movie creeped me out (however, I actually recognized a number of the snakes in the film, and knew just how deadly venomous they really were, so seeing them crawl around people’s feet certainly made my skin crawl just BECAUSE I knew how deadly they were). Of course, there were a few over-the-top scenes that made me shake my head (like the scene where the guy’s taking a leak and the snake comes out of the toilet and bites the end of penis – he then starts thrashing around trying to pull the snake off. Needless to say I wouldn’t exactly call it a scary scene), but sadly you have to expect at least a little of that sort of thing in this kind of movie.
Overall, the movie actually made me think of 70s cinema, as it is a solid combination of killer animal horror movie and airplane disaster movie (both of which are movie sub-genres that haven’t really been popular since the 70s, when you could find all manner of movies in both categories). Many of the common clichés of both types of movies are present (although I don’t want to say more than that, as I don’t want to give away any plot points of the movie). As I’m a fan of both genres of film (especially disaster movies – not necessarily airplane disaster movies specifically, mind you, but I’ve always really enjoyed a good disaster picture), putting them together in a way that worked made for a movie right up my alley. Yes, the idea of releasing deadly snakes on an airplane as a way to kill someone is incredibly hokey and hard-to-believe, I know, but if you look at some of the old 70s animal horror films, it’s far, far from the dumbest idea anyone’s ever come up with. And to be honest, the filmmakers actually did a surprising job of giving you a halfway believable explanation for the whole thing.
There is one thing that I was pretty disappointed with. As I’m sure anyone who’s heard anything about the movie knows, there was a bunch of Internet hype about this movie from the minute the title was announced. The bloggers and Internet movie geeks had enough of an impact on the studio that they even got them to add additional language and nudity in order to make the movie R-rated (although to be honest, I think even without that the movie was violent enough they’d have been pushing the limits of PG-13 regardless). One of the reasons for this change was to get Samuel L. Jackson to show a little more attitude, and to introduce the one-liner that became famous before the movie was ever released – “I’m sick of these mother-f*$^@ing snakes on this mother-f*$^@ing plane!” Now I have to admit this is a great Samuel L. Jackson line, and I can see it becoming a classic because it so has his attitude and his personality in it. But here’s where my disappointment comes in. In the scene in which he utters the line, it feels completely forced and out of place. It was so sadly obvious that this line was inserted after the fact that it almost ruins it. After you watch him say it, you almost wish they’d left it out.
It goes without saying that this movie’s not going to win any awards (okay, I’m sure it’s likely to win something at the MTV Movie Awards, but does anyone REALLY count those?), but if you keep in mind what you’re getting into when you go see it, it’s a pretty enjoyable movie. Sadly it didn’t do the numbers at the box office that the studios were hoping for, but I hate it say it – the only people actually surprised by this are the studios. Let’s face it, all the Internet buzz in the world isn’t going to give you a $30-$40 million opening weekend. It just isn’t. The sad truth of the matter is that people chatting online about movies make up a very small percentage of the movie-going public, and if they’re the only ones that go see a movie, it’s not going to have a very big opening (and sad to day, Snakes on a Plane probably didn’t have all that many people interested in seeing it outside of the movie bloggers who rushed to see it opening weekend. Hell, I certainly didn’t rush out to see it right away).
This brings me to a related topic I’ve been wanting to discuss for awhile (I may have mentioned it in a past entry, I’m not sure. If I did, well, you’ll just have to listen to me rant about it again). And that is selling a movie to a too-narrow audience, then being surprised when it fails to meet expectations. Now sometimes, such as with fan-driven movies like Snakes on a Plane, there’s not much you can do about this but put it out there and hope you can sell it to a broader audience than the core fans. A perfect example of this (and one very close to my heart) is Joss Whedon’s Serenity. Here’s a movie that was completely fan-motivated. After the series was cancelled by those morons over at Fox (a subject I know I’ve covered in the past, so we’ll leave it alone), fans got online and made all kinds of noise about wanting the show back. Well, Fox was impressed enough that when they released the DVD box set, it wasn’t some plain Jane, no frills, here’s your show box set. No, it had all the bells and whistles – behind-the-scenes featurettes, audio commentary, all the un-aired episodes (and the episodes were actually in the correct order, shock of shocks). And the fans responded. The DVD box sets sold like crazy. There was enough success with the DVD sales that Universal bought the movie rights from Fox and greenlit the movie. So now comes our dilemma – if only the people who watched the show and/or bought the DVD set go to see the movie, that’s hardly enough of an audience to make for box office success. But what do you do? Joss made the best movie he could, one that appealed to fans of the show but at the same time was accessible to people who’d never watched an episode. And then he released it and hoped for the best. Sadly, not that many people other than the core fans bothered to go see it (which is why there’s not likely to be a sequel).
Now, as I stated above, with movies like Snakes on a Plane or Serenity, you know that by default you’re going to have a narrow core audience, so you just have to hope for the best. However, there are other movies that have the potential for a much broader audience, and lose it because the filmmakers foolishly are focused only on their small core audience, and it’s these movies that I want to talk about here. The most common category that falls into this trap is the video game movie. I’m sure you’ve all seen them – movie flops such as Double Dragon, Street Fighter, and Super Mario Bros. For every solid, top notch video game movie like Mortal Kombat or Resident Evil, there are a dozen horrible B-movies that give video game movies their bad reputation. And naturally the worse the genre’s reputation gets, the harder it is to get people to take these movies seriously. And by and large I blame this problem on the narrow-minded focus of the creators of the movies.
I see two things that cause this problem. The first is a simple problem with math and economics. A movie studio sees that a video game has just hit $100 million in sales (or however much popular video games tend to make these days – I’ll admit that I don’t really keep track) and they suddenly think, “Hell, that’s a lot of money. If we can get all those game geeks to go see a movie version of that hit game, we’re talking box office gold!” Now I don’t imagine they expect the movie to make $100 million by any means, but they’re still expecting to make huge numbers based on that $100 million. Here’s the problem, though: a brand new, just hit the shelves video game costs $50. So you divide that $100 million by $50 (we’re going to assume for the sake of simplicity that everyone paid full initial price for the game, and not deal with people who bought it down the road once the price had dropped), you’ve got 2 million people who bought the game. Now some of those people probably aren’t going to really like the game, regardless of how popular it is. And quite a few of them are not movie people (why go see a movie of the game when they can just sit at home PLAYING the game), so not all 2 million of them are going to automatically go see the movie. But even if they do, a movie ticket only costs $5-$10 (depending on where you live and whether or not you’re going to a matinee). For the sake of argument, lets use $7 as our median movie ticket price. Even if all 2 million of those game buyers go to see the movie, that’s still only $14 million, which isn’t that bad for a low budget movie (but hardly great), but it's not what you'd call a huge success, and absolutely not what you want to see if you spent any real money making the movie.
So what’s the lesson of all this math? Well, firstly, just because the video game made hundreds of millions of dollars, does NOT mean that a movie version of the game will do the same. Secondly, and more importantly, if you do decide to go ahead and make the movie, you’re GOT to expand your audience beyond that core group of gamers, because they alone will not make your movie successful. And here’s where we run into our second and much bigger problem. And that’s with the directors of these movies. In way too many cases they fall into one of two categories: either they’re way too focused on making the movies specifically for the fans of the game (a mistake, as we’ve already established that there’s not enough of them to make the movie a success), or they’ve decided that since the movie they’re stuck making is ONLY a video game movie, they don’t take it seriously or put any real effort into trying to make a good movie, which is how we get garbage like Street Fighter, which was a complete joke of a movie. It was pretty obvious from beginning to end that the filmmakers didn't take the story they were telling seriously at all. This is why Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (which I recently picked up and watched on DVD – it so rocks!!) is a great, kick ass movie, whereas the live action version is crap. The creators of the animated version obviously took the story and the characters seriously, and wanted to make a serious movie that was true to the story behind the game. The idiots who made the live action version obviously decided there was no reason to make a serious, dramatic movie that was based on a kung fu video game, and well, the results speak for themselves.
Of course, some video games just weren’t meant to be made into movies. I’m sorry, but while the various incarnations of the Mario Bros games have all been a lot of fun to play (and very popular as well), there’s just not enough story there to make a movie out of. I don’t care how popular the games are; whoever thought it was a good concept for a movie was kidding themselves. A children’s Saturday morning cartoon, maybe, but it’s just not major motion picture material. But there are a number of video games out there (yes, even your simple fighting games) that do have the back story to make a great movie, even if the back story isn’t really a big part of the actual game. And luckily as games become more involved and have a more complex story, it becomes much easier to develop a decent movie script based on them, so hopefully we'll start to see better video game movies in the future. But that doesn’t change the fact that as a filmmaker you have to take the material seriously and look at it as more than just a “video game” movie, and you have to be able to look past your core game geek audience and find a way to develop the movie with a broader appeal.
If you look at the movies that were very successful films that were based on video games, the big thing they have in common is that the filmmakers were able to find a genre within the story beyond just “based on a video game” and use that to target a broader audience for the movie. Mortal Kombat was a great fantasy martial arts movie, and Resident Evil is a wonderful example of the zombie horror genre. And because they fit these broader genres, and were marketed accordingly, they were able to draw people who were fans of this type of movie, whether they’d ever played the video games or not (I, for example, have never played any of the Resident Evil games, and am generally not much of a fan of that sort of game, but I generally enjoy zombie movies, and I loved Resident Evil as a zombie movie, and not as a movie version of a video game). This is what the filmmakers need to keep in mind when they make these movies.
There’s one more video game movie that I’d like to rant about a bit before I end this discussion, and that’s the mediocre Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and it’s abysmal sequel. Yes, I realize these movies were actually both pretty successful and I know a number of people who really enjoyed them. But I was highly disappointed in both movies for the very reasons I’ve been discussing above – the writer/director was so obviously aiming strictly for the adolescent male fans of the video game that he completely lost sight of the movie's broader potential as an action/adventure movie. Hence Angelina Jolie’s big, bouncing fake boobs. I’m sorry, while I enjoy women’s breasts just as much as the next heterosexual male, the scene at the end of Tomb Raider where we see Lara Croft running through the ice cave, her big boobs bouncing wildly up and down as she goes was just stupid and inane and sad. The worst of it, from my perspective, is that this is a movie with a lot of potential, and Angelina Jolie was the PERFECT actress for the role. Not only did she have the looks for the part, but she had the accent down pat, and so brought absolutely the right attitude for this character.
This movie character should have been the female equivalent of Indiana Jones, and the movie should have been what National Treasure was. But it wasn’t. Not even close. And all because the director was too focused on sticking to the video game, and those elements of the game that stood out in the minds of the gamers (namely the character’s over-developed bust). I never really played the games, but I’m a serious comic book geek, and there was a comic book series based on the game that I loved that ran for quite a while that was everything that movie should have been, but wasn’t. The comic took the character seriously, it got away from the game’s Junior High schoolboy fantasy elements and presented a kick ass heroine who was smart and daring and beautiful and was involved in numerous exciting adventures. I think if the movies would have taken this route, if the filmmakers would have focused on a broader audience, and had not been so concerned about keeping the teenage game geeks happy, that they could have easily had a 3 or 4 movie (or more) franchise of great movies, as opposed to the two mediocre films that they cranked out. But hey, that’s just my opinion; what do I know?
So there ends my long, meandering rant for the day. In summation, here’s what we learned today. One, video game movies can be wonderful, enjoyable movies to watch, if only the filmmakers take the source material seriously and try to develop a movie that goes beyond the game and the gamers when looking for its audience. And two, Hollywood needs to do a better job of finding an audience outside of core fans when developing a movie adaptation (whether it be an adaptation of a video game, a comic book, a book, a TV show, whatever). And that's my two cents for today.
Wow, that ran longer than I’d expected it to. I was going to add a quick review of the comedy I saw the weekend before I saw Snakes on a Plane (which I actually watched on a Wednesday, when I took a mental health day during the middle of the week). But since this entry has run on, and since the weekend AFTER I watched Snakes on the Plane I saw another comedy, I figure I'll do them both together in my next entry (which will also give me an excuse to do an entry about comedies in general and my feelings on them, so look forward to potentially another long, rambling entry). So, until then, this is Evil Ryan, signing off.
