An Open Letter to Gore Verbinski (because he totally reads this blog).

There is an opportunity for something drastic to happen here soon, and nobody else can take this opportunity but you.

I’m going to rant for a bit: There is a lot of back and forth about the Watchmen.  I stopped listening after the second weekend of release because it was too frustrating (my thoughts on the matter are here).  Now it’s no longer playing at a lot of theaters that are still showing Taken, which was released weeks before.  Still, if there’s one thing you have to take away from that experience, it’s that goddamnit, Zack Snyder did it.  He did what nobody else could, he stayed as true to the source material as any adaptation I’ve ever seen in my life, comic or otherwise. In my opinion, it was a very cool movie experience.  This was a comic book movie.

With Bioshock, we’ve looking at a video game movie.  This has been done before, by the likes of ultra-talented people like Uwe Boll. Sorta similar to how comic movies had been done before and we get majestic pieces like the first Punisher flick (with Dolph Lundgren) or any of the awesome Fantastic Four movies.  Man, those were great, weren’t they?  That is to say, it’s been done before, but just badly. And by badly, I mean horrendously.

See, there is this really weird thing that happens in Hollywood. I don’t know what it is, but Mr. Someone comes along and decides they’re going to do a movie based on an existing franchise like…oh, let’s say the Transformers. Now at some point, Mr. Someone is saying, “there are tons of people who love the Transformers, we could make money doing this film!” and the film gets a green light and angels sing and blah blah.

And then another person – we’ll call him Mikey – comes along and decides he’s going to direct this movie. Now, going against all logic, against the entire premise of this franchise having an existing fanbase and being exciting to people, they decide they’re going to completely revamp the way all of these existing characters look and act, and instead of the film being about the robots, it’s about the LeBoof.

The most precious thing that ever came out of the whole Transformers debacle was the reasoning behind making Optimus Prime a completely different kind of truck. Why? Because Mikey couldn’t find a truck that looked like old school Prime’s vehicle form that was large enough to realistically transform into a robot as big as Optimus is in the flick. Because, y’know, when we’re dealing with giant alien robots fighting in the middle of a city, and the most evil, wicked, cruel, battle-hardened of all the Decepticons is defeated by a 17 year old virgin holding a cube, realism is a real high priority.

But I digress. If my point was lost, let me restate it so we’re all on the same page: people bastardize existing properties into mockeries of themselves. The usual reasoning is “we can’t make this film just to appeal to the fans, it has to be marketable.” To which I would counter, “if it’s not marketable as-is, then don’t bother in the first place. At least do us the courtesy of calling it something else.” Thanks to what Zack did with Watchmen, we know that property-to-film translations can work, so these excuses that we’re just whiny fanboys who want something nobody would go see are wearing thinner and thinner as time goes on.

And let me hammer home the point I’m not trying to fanboy this to death. I have NO beef with Spider-Man’s organic web shooters. I don’t care about the fucking squid. I *want* Punisher to be cheesy gunporn. Why do I not care about these things but I care about the Transformers? Because of the essence. The essence of Watchmen is still there. The essence of Spider-Man is still there. The essence of Transformers was gone. Just gone.

I know, I know, it took a long time and a lot of bitching to get to this point, but it’s important to establish some things. Remember Bioshock, like five paragraphs up? This is the video game flick with Watchmen potential. This is the movie with a director I actually put some faith in, a writer who has some pretty good cred, and above all, a property that just fucking begs you to play within its boundaries. Bioshock doesn’t need to have an outer space sequence, because someone just developed a cool new special effect. You don’t have to invent a new ‘power’ that doesn’t appear in the game because someone thinks it would generate a cheap laugh. Bioshock is, I would contend, the most atmospheric game to come out since Shadow of the Colossus, and it has story enough that you don’t have to deviate from it wildly.

I’m not calling for a Snyder-esque literal translation, scene by scene, but I’m begging for someone to trust the source material. Begging. Let it stand on its own. Emphasize where you will, embellish, create, I don’t care. Do what you have to do, but make it recognizable. Make it relate to the experience we already had in the game while deepening it with your own artistic vision. This is your duty when you’re doing an adaptation. You’re not rebooting the game; it’s a game. This is a movie. This is your vision, your feelings about what you saw, and we’re trusting you to do us proud.