Shadow of the Colossus Movie???

[Detomah]

It's the news some of you have been privately dreading. Hollywood, in its infinite collective wisdom, is lining up a movie conversion of Fumito Ueda's mystical adventure, Shadow of the Colossus. Widely considered to be one of the most beautiful and haunting games ever made, it has ben ear-marked for production later this year at Sony - apparently in collaboration with the games division.

Considering the horrendous mess made of recent tie-ins including Max Payne and Hitman, not to mention Uwe Boll's continuing cinematic offensive against the very concept of videogames, it's hardly surprising that the news, broken on Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz Blog, hasn't been greeted with spontaneous dancing on the streets. "Leave it alone you're going to ruin it," was the general tone of the story's comments section, though some responses were much more colourful and less grammatically sound.

Anticipating a wave of abuse and denigration from apoplectic gamers, the movie's script writer, Justin Marks, later gave an interview to the same site, insisting:

"I think many of the games haven't worked as movies because it's hard to find the right game. There are very few that lend themselves to movies [...] With a lot of games there are so many elements in the universe you spend your time tearing down and tearing down," he said. "What's nice about this game is that it's so sparse so you can start building right away."

Hmm, that's all reasonable enough... But wait, what was the writer's name again? It sounded strangely familiar...

Ah yes, that'll be because, last spring, Justin was voicing the same 'give game movies a chance' platitudes about his previous project, Street Fighter: the Legend of Chun Li. Here's what he had to say to Gamasutra:

"Street Fighter isn't your ordinary game adaptation. It's a gritty, realistic character piece (if I don't say so myself) that just happens to use characters taken from a video game. All hype aside, it's going to be a very different game-to-movie adaptation and I urge everyone to go see it when it comes out next year."

Fast-forward a year, then check out the Metacritic score for the Street Fighter flick. It's not pretty. It's 17 out of 100. "Even with the low expectations The Legend of Chun Li engenders, it still somehow manages to be a letdown," wrote the LA Times. So much for the gritty, realistic character piece.

Interestingly, in the Gamasutra piece, Marks even manages a bit of a dig at Colossus and its lack of a mainstream audience: "We all need to take a long look in the mirror and realize that there are very few mainstream game franchises that could stand next to the best comics of the 1980s, or the best movies ever. And yes, Shadow of the Colossus and Portal are hands-down better than most anything out there, but no one is playing those games". Yet now here he is scripting a mainstream movie adaptation and assuring us it's exactly the right sort of game for treatment. Go figure.

The movie does seem to have cast something of a spell of Hollywood's creative denizens. In an interview with Edge last year Pan's Labyrinth director, Guillermo del Toro, said, "There are only two games I consider masterpieces: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus".

And of course, Shadow plays a small but significant role in Reign Over Me providing an emotional crutch to Adam Sandler's grief stricken protagonist. Perhaps this was the best Hollywood fate for the game - as a symbolic moment within another fiction. In this way, the game can be appreciated for its own intrinsic qualities - there is no need for potentially disastrous re-interpretation.

With Prince of Persia and Bioshock set to make their big screen debuts next year, it's going to be an interesting - though probably awful - period for this most tricky of franchise re-packaging endeavours. The former production does at least have a strong cast and crew on board with British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Donnie Brasco, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) at the helm and the usually dependable Jake Gyllenhaal in the eponymous role. There's no guarantee this will make for a watchable film, but it's a leap in the right direction. Or at least a small step in a less worse one.

The sensible reaction, though, is to just ignore it. Becoming too precious or aggressive, just cements the divide between movies and games; it makes gamers seem strange and irrational. Mediocre movies are made out of everything from Pulitzer prize-winning novels to political interviews. In the end I suppose one could ask, why should games escape?

Shadow of the Colossus movie: this is going to hurt, isn't it? | Technology | guardian.co.uk