Mortal Kombat, Castlevania, and The Last of Us. Solving Video Game Adaptations.

A couple days ago I watched Mortal Kombat (1995) for the first time with my roommates. We’ve been watching a ton of movies during quarantine recently, as I’m sure many of you are as well.

It’s been fun. Honestly, one of the small pieces of silver lining from this whole pandemic, for me, is how pleasantly surprised I’ve been by almost everything I’ve watched lately. Even re-watching The Hobbit trilogy for the first time since theaters was more enjoyable than I expected.

Mortal Kombat still sucks though.

The story has so many plot-holes it might as well be a piece of Swiss Cheese handled by an overeager four-year-old with a power drill. You could find more compelling acting at a high school play in which the leads all came down with the flu the night before. And yet, it was never quite bad enough to be a so-bad-it’s-good kind of movie.

Super Mario Bros. (1993) is a worse film by almost every measure, but it’s far more enjoyable because there’s never a moment when you can hope for a better movie. It’s so bad your only option is to laugh at it. Mortal Kombat fails because it’s just good enough that all you do is come away disappointed at what it could have been.

But it got me thinking about video game adaptations. See, growing up, there were few things I can remember wanting as much or for as long a time as the Halo movie. My favorite game on a giant screen with all the money and violence that would imply. Fuck yes. Yet it never happened. A few years later I, and millions of other hopeful nerdy gamers, went through a similar letdown with the Gears of War movie that was supposed to happen and yet just hasn’t (although according to that article I linked it still has a ‘chance’).

There have been dozens of other examples of similar cycles of hope and failure in the long and occasionally woeful story of video game to screen adaptations. From the campy cash-ins of the 90s (looking at you, Street Fighter!), to the sexual awakening of thousands of boys aged 8-14 due to Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider (2001), to all the almost good movies of the Resident Evil series throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Video game adaptations have been a thing for a long time and yet the best they could seem to hope for was being okay (looking at you, Doom!)

Then, in the last few years, something happened. Something changed.

The first season of Castlevania was released on Netflix in July of 2017. It didn’t make a huge splash at the time. Netflix releases so much constant content, like an opposite-universe George RR Martin, that a four episode season of an anime-inspired adaptation of a Konami game that started in the 80s could easily get lost in the flood.

But then the second season came out, in October of 2018. People began to notice. The animation was beautiful. The action was fluid and inventive and some of the most intense stuff American animated TV has managed to put out. The voice cast had names you might know (Richard Armitage, of the better than expected Hobbit movies mentioned above, voices the main character, Trevor Belmont) and they perform with real emotion and intelligence. The writing straddles the line between modern and timeless so perfectly you wonder why other fantasy series you’ve watched can’t do better.

Somehow, Warren Ellis and his team managed to create a show that not only succeeded as a video-game-to-screen adaptation (a very low bar) but succeeded as an actual television show. And they did it while staying true to the plot and spirit of the series. They did it by taking their source material seriously, by knowing that the name of the original property wasn’t something to coast on but something to live up to, by respecting their audience and choosing to give them an intricate story in which good and evil are more complicated than they seem and characters are full of ambiguity.

A third season of the series came out March of this year and it is more than up to the task of living up to the second season. Check it out, with the knowledge that a fourth season is in the works. But by last month it was too late. The floodgates had already opened.

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu came out on May 10, 2019. Aside from giving the world what we didn’t know we needed in the form of Ryan Reynolds cry-singing the Pokemon theme song, it was more amazing in the simple fact that it was a good movie. It was funny. The CGI on all the furry Pokemon (some of whom, let’s be honest, did not need to be furry) was gorgeous and actually worked really well in the universe of the film. The filmmakers took the world of Pokemon seriously, enough so that you could see the thought put into the city and surrounding environment in the movie. It was everything you could have hoped for when you first played Red or Blue on your Gameboy when you were six years old.

Then Sonic the Hedgehog came out in February of this year. After the horror of the first trailer, somehow the studio managed to put out a movie that didn’t melt the faces off anyone who was forced to see it (that job was reserved for Cats). Somehow, against all odds, Sonic turned out to be a pretty good movie. Not perfect. Not up to the standards of Detective Pikachu and nowhere near the heights of Castlevania, but a kids movie that’s actually worth seeing. Jim Carrey has so much fun in his role that you will too. The CGI, and Sonic himself, actually turned out really well. And it’s weird to say this about Jean Ralphio, but Ben Schwartz actually does a fantastic job voice acting. Stupid product placement aside, the filmmakers actually understood the selling point of a game like Sonic. They made a fun movie for a fun game, while never condescending to their audience.

By the way, I’m not going into the massive success of The Witcher for two reasons. One, I haven’t seen it yet (I know). Two, from everything I’ve heard and read, it’s an adaptation of the book series and not the video games. Although you could make an argument that the video games are the reason the property is popular enough to adapt for American audiences at all.

It’s been a good run these last few years, movies like Tomb Raider (2018) notwithstanding. Good enough that now I have can actually feel hope when I hear certain announcements. Announcements like the fact that HBO is planning to adapt The Last of Us into a series.

See, The Last of Us is probably my favorite video game of all time. When it came out in 2013, I don’t know if there was any single narrative from anything I watched, read, or played that year that made as much of an impact on me. The incredibly smooth stealth-related gameplay, the gorgeous world you explore, the pacing that makes each enemy encounter something that could give you a heart attack and each moment of peace something to savor like your last gulp of air. The fact that you are made to care so much about Ellie that when enemies kidnap her you are visibly angry outside the game. It’s amazing. And it’s something that used it’s medium so well (the gameplay interactions between Joel and Ellie mean more to you than most of the cutscenes, you know this is true) I wouldn’t have thought it could ever work as anything but a video game.

So, up until a few years ago, I would have met HBO’s announcement with only trepidation. Up until a few years ago, video game adaptations were just cash-ins shoved in front of an unsuspecting audience. But now…I don’t know. There is reason to hope. Maybe studios and filmmakers have realized that you have to take a property seriously, even if it’s a video game. Maybe they know now to hire people that love what they’re working on. Maybe they know it’s about more than halfway decent special effects, but about character, writing, acting, directing. It’s about making a good movie first. A good television show. Just like any other kind of property.

Maybe we’ve finally figured out video game movies. One can hope.