[Weekly Update] Video Game Movies: High Effort & Bad

Last day of April! Hope your year is going well!

CHANNEL UPDATE

I'm stunned by how well received our last video on Porco Rosso is, and how much attention it is getting. For one thing, it's one of the lesser loved Ghibli film among a mainstream audience. But also, I wrote that video while deep in depression and struggling with brain fog. The whole video was written without a solid train of thought, that's why there's no connective tissue between chapters.

Still, I can't complain about the love you are providing. Thank you so much for the support!

Up next, we'll be doing something a bit more lighthearted and fun:

We have Dangle, a wrestling movie from India that blew up in popularity in China, due to its feminist theme resonating with a Chinese audience. We'll be talking about an interesting sub culture in China, when parents raised their daughters like sons.

We have Switch, the last of the Chinese bad movie unholy trinity. Long time viewers probably remember me talking about Pure Hearts and The Autobots. And Switch is often considered to be on the same level as those films. It's only right for me to complete the collection. It took me this long to finally get to it, partly because I don't want to get called a self-loathing Chinese hater, but mostly just because I don't want to watch it...

We have Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a 2007 live action adaptation of the PS2 game. Yakuza has since become a massive international franchise. But this movie was made before the game was even popular in Japan. Kiryu didn't even look like how we remember him today. It'll be a study on fame and prolific director Takashi Miike and his unique "whiplashing" of plots. The video idea is currently snowballing, so expect it to become a two parter series on the director instead.

Finally, and the one with the highest priority: The Lost Empire (2001), also known as The Monkey King. It's an American-Canadian coproduced mini-series, a modern isekai sequel to Journey to the West. It is as awful as it sounds. But it is so silly I actually kinda love it. We'll talk about how injecting Western fantasy tropes into Eastern stories can, in fact, work. You just have to do it earnestly.

So that's a lot of plans! It's gonna be a busy few weeks up ahead!

MEDIA TALK

With Super Mario Bros. smashing box office record, and The Last of Us being extremely well received, it seems a new age of video game adaptation will be among us soon. With such optimism, it's easy to look back into the past, and think that all video game adaptations before this is lazy and uninspired, which isn't true.

Sure, video game movies are practically all bad, and many of the later Paul W.S. Anderson movies are lazy garbage. Not to mention Uwe Boll.

But I'm, in fact, old enough to just remember a lot of early video game movies were made with a lot of effort. They still suck, mostly because people don't know what to do with the source materials. But proper effort was put into them.

If you watched Corridor Crew, you know that the first ever video game movie, the OG Super Mario Bros. live action movie, is responsible for a lot of ground breaking VFX technology. I won't go into that right now, just give that video a watch. But even outside of the tech used, the film is fantastic looking. Production Designer David Snyder was the Art Director for Blade Runner. And in this film, he took his original concept even further, and made this dystopian set much more vertical, way bigger than any sound stage can contain. Should he do it? Probably not. But he did it, because it's cool.

Another movie that I remember had surprising amount of effort put into it was Double Dragon. This movie is boring, but those scenery of flooded Los Angeles is super memorable. It captures the social zeitgeist of the time, back when people saw pre-911 LA as a chaotic cultural centre that is one step removed from an apocalypse, marred by crime and natural disasters. This perception was also reflected in Terminator 2.

By the way, you can find people selling the matte painting used in the film on Ebay.

I already made a bonus video on both the Mortal Kombat movie and the Street Fighter movie. The former is a legit satisfying kung fu movie with impressive looking location shots. The latter, while not as good, still has merit. Just the diverse casting alone make that film work.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within more or less represents everything I dislike regarding Square Enix games. But the technology it used was indeed impressive for its time. I remember the reviews saying that you can see the pores on the characters' skin. That was a big deal at the time.

It all just goes to show that video game movies wasn't always the cash-in a lot of people thought they were. They were, in fact, no more but no less of a money opportunity than any other movies. They were bad, simply because the filmmakers have no idea what to do, since gaming was still a new hobby at the time.

But now, gamers grew up and are filmmakers. They have the knowledge and the passion for the medium, and can finally do it justice. In the future, people will probably barely remember the whole "video game movies are bad" trend. I wonder if some film critic will have to do research to dig up that factoid.

But that is the update for this week. No video this week, so I'll see you in our next update!