Strangely enough the director of the movie Rampage had never heard about the issues with transitioning video games to movies before. There is a very real thing called the ‘video game curse’ that has been in evidence since the first video game movies started coming out. It’s essentially the idea that no matter how great the game is, no matter how many devoted fans it has, once the movie comes out it’s just simply horrible. It happened this way with Super Mario Bros., Mortal Kombat and it’s sequel, Assassin’s Creed, and many more. The transition from the game to the big screen has never been an easy one and unfortunately it’s that way due to the same reason that a movie based on a novel or a comic book will never be seen as being just as good as the original source. There’s just too much information and too many plot points to put into a single movie, and therefore things are taken out and left on the cutting room floor that are seen as crucial to the movie.
It’s strange however that this would happen with video game movies since unlike novels and comic books they are much simpler in their plot most times and don’t carry as many possible details. This means at times that things need to be stretched and made to accommodate an hour and a half to two hours worth of film, and that can make the effect of the game start to break down and become rather cheesy. According to the director of Rampage: “I didn’t know about this quote-unquote ‘video game curse’ until about two weeks after I finished the movie. A lot of times, [studios] attempt to adapt games that have massive followings. … When you attempt to adapt something that has an incredibly deep plotline or character or something along those lines, you’re beholden to delivering something. And it’s really a difficult challenge because as a gamer, I know, I play as the hero. That’s an immersive medium, and so, it’s really hard to go up against something that pre-exists.”
The biggest issue with Rampage is that it really didn’t have much of a plot save that giant monsters were destroying the city. There were various cities across the nation that were used in the game but the plot was pretty much the same. In the movie however they’ve had to give a definitive reason why the monsters have grown so big and have added in human characters that are more developed than anything in the original game. Plus in the game the monsters are the selected players, and their goal is to smash the cities, not save them. It’s basically just the way the title sounds, your objective is to go around destroying things and survive through each new city until you reach the end. That’s a far cry from what’s being done in the movie. If they’d opted to go beyond one city in terms of destruction it would have seriously stretched the bounds of good sense.
Let’s hope though that this one can break the curse.
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