HOLLYWOOD RAIDER.Will Lara Croft break the video-game movie jinx jinx n. 1. A person or thing that is believed to bring bad luck. 2. A condition or period of bad luck that appears to have been caused by a specific person or thing. tr.v. ? Trying to translate a video game into a movie has virtually guaranteed "game over." Yet Tomb Raider is about to jump from the PlayStation to the multiplex See multiplexing. on June 15, where it will either bomb big, true to form, or score big. It's a risk after the recent wave of game-to-film disasters, from 1993's Super Mario Bros BROS Brothers BROS Benefits and Retirement Operations Section (King County, Washington) BROS Barnes and Richmond Operatic Society (London, UK) . to 1999's Wing Commander. "Hollywood needs to remember that if it's taking away the dynamic interactivity that's at the heart of any good video game, it needs to replace it with something that films can do better than games can," says Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy: Video Games See video game console. and the Future of Entertainment. "And that something should usually be an involving story, and a more human, emotive approach to the subject matter." A flat Mario didn't have it, but Tomb Raider's Lara Croft seems dazzlingly dimensional, at least in the hype leading up to the release. The $100 million film promises to further develop a heroine inspired by other movies--James Bond meets Indiana Jones meets, well, star Angelina Jolie. "The studio did not try to just replicate the game on-screen on·screen or on-screen adj. & adv. 1. As shown on a movie, television, or display screen. 2. Within public view; in public. , which is what all the other ones have done," says Sutton Trout, licensing director for the Tomb Raider video game. Jolie's Tomb Raider will have a video game rivalry with the Final Fantasy This article is about the Final Fantasy franchise. For the video game, see Final Fantasy (video game). For other uses, see Final Fantasy (disambiguation). Final Fantasy ( movie, out July 13. The interactivity of the F.F. series of games--stilted fights of hero and villain taking turns--can be pretty boring; the computer-animated vignettes between the fights are the attraction. But the movie plays like two hours of the best vignette Vignette A symbol or pictorial representation of the corporation on a stock certificate. Usually a complicated and artistic design, it is meant to make the counterfeiting of stock certificates as difficult as possible. yet, with new heroine Aki saving 2065 Earth from alien soul suckers. Balanced with the gimmick of photo-realistic digital humans is a spiritual love story that, in an early screening, looked moving. If Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy connect with audiences, movie versions of best-sellers Perfect Dark and Resident Evil could be coming soon. But if they don't, it's back to basing movies on books, history, and yes, real life. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion