Video games to movies: the smart way

Video games to movies: the smart way

Dec 02

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you would have heard about a little video game title called Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. You know, one of those little plastic boxes that young men get inordinately excited about and causes them to spend hours yelling into their wireless headsets and smacking things with their cute little plastic controllers.

This game made 310 million US dollars–overnight. That’s more than The Dark Knight made in its first week. More than Harry Potter 7 sold in its first week of publication. And it smashes the fastest-selling musical release (some N*Sync album or something) out of the ball park. The CEO of Activision Blizzard, the publisher who launched the game, sold his years-old stocks for something like 1000% profit, and is laughing all the way to the bank. The COD franchise has been releasing games for over half a decade, and has hauled in $3 BILLION since it first began–that’s comparable to the hauls of big-franchise flicks like Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Those who’ve played MW2 will attest that the single-player campaign (‘directed’ by Keith Arem) is balls-to-the-wall intense, a breathless rush of adrenaline and testosterone that is addictive and exhausting. I personally found it more ‘cinematic’ than cinema itself, by putting you (the player) in the boots of a hapless soldier straight out of a movie like Black Hawk Down or that brutal third act of The Kingdom or even from Aliens, where the xenomorphs are instead all Russian soldiers armed to the teeth with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and attack dogs and sniper rifles and whatnot.

So I read today via Slash that Keith Arem, the man orchestrating the intense and hypnotically violent single-player campaign from MW2, is set to direct a feature film. Seeing how MW2 relied a lot on heavily-scripted scenes in which you are funnelled from point A to point B, it makes sense for Arem to adapt this manipulative style to a more subtle medium.

The film itself (dully titled FROST ROAD) seems to borrow its plot from another ’09 video game, Prototype, (which was by contrast an absolute train-wreck of a game) which sees the player in control of a character who is strangely immune to a biochemical weapon affecting the rest of his home town. But unlike Alex Mercer in Prototype, the protag in Frost Road appears to want to save the infected, and stop the disease from spreading to the rest of the world. What this ‘invisible contagion’ is or does is to the local populace is unknown, but my bet is ZOMBIES.

So rather than follow in the footsteps of a series of godawful video game-to-film adaptations (Wing Commander, Resident Evil, Doom, that Mario Bros. movie–and that’s before I bring in Uwe Boll’s filmography), we have a games designer jumping ship to apply his talents to a different craft. The voice talent and performance quality involved in MW2–Keith David, Barry Pepper, Lance Henrikson, and Kevin McKidd (let’s forget about that Fifty Cent debacle)–suggests that this Arem fellow might actually have some knack for this whole ‘directing’ thing. And Arem is no stranger to controversy–the No Russian mission of the MW2 campaign (in which, as an undercover CIA agent infiltrating a Russian terrorist cell, you must open fire on unarmed civilians in an airport–in order to maintain your cover) was brutal, wrenching, and manipulative, and got the attention of dozens (probably hundreds) of mainstream media outlets.

So will Keith Arem apply this boundary-smashing, envelope-pushing innovation to his new art medium? Or would he have been better off staying with Activision Blizzard to direct Modern Warfare 3? I think Frost Road sounds particularly boring, but if Arem manages to pour half the intensity into the film as he did his game, it’ll be a rollercoaster of an experience. Let’s just say I’m interested to see where this goes.

Head over to slashfilm to read the full press release, plus snippets of interviews with Arem himself and the writers involved in Frost Road.