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I Think I Hate Everyone.

I guess this will be rant-ish, but I really don't care. My babbling will be based on all current information I've read regarding the Uncharted movie. Maybe it won't come to fruition (I'd convert if God helped me out on this one), but as of right now, it seems like it's going to happen. I know that about 8,000,000 people already shat their pants over this shit, but, again, I don't care.

Oh, how I sometimes loathe this stupid world we live in. It's apparently a world where Mark Wahlberg plays Nathan Fillion's video game alter-ego; a world where the director of the movie doesn't even know who Nathan Fillion is. Excuse me? This fucking guy has to have had his head either buried in the sand or shoved up his own ass for the past few months to not know who Nathon Fillion is. I have to wonder if he knows what the internet is, or if he gives a shit about 2nd or 3rd party creative input. Someone, somewhere, must have told him at some point how shitty an idea this is. It's like Pluto's orbit around the sun - we've yet to experience a full rotation, but we know how long it takes. In other words, it's a mathematical certainty. It's also a mathematical certainty that the Uncharted movie is going to suck a long, hard one. Not only is Wahlberg playing Drake, but Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci are going to be in it as well? I think they must have gotten confused and mistakenly signed up for this instead of Goodfellas 2. I'm sure Ray Liotta's already cast and paid for. In fact, I'd pay to see that shit way before I'd ever pay to watch the filmic abortion that will be Uncharted.

What's my beef, you might ask. If the movie sucks, it sucks...no big deal, right? Well, it depends on how you look at it. One could simply chalk it up as another shitty video game adaptation, but at this point, it's a lot more than that. Assuming this thing gets made as it's being reported, I really think it stands a good chance of retarding the game industry, not forwarding it. Think about it: how would making this movie advance our medium? Uncharted is already as close to a film-like experience you're going to get on a console, but I guess that's not good enough. I guess we also have to have a premise that totally ignores everything in the games, and a cast that resembles a musical super group or that Lakers team that had everyone and their mother on it yet still managed to never win a championship. It's not about how many A-listers you can sign up for a project; it's more about setting up a winning situation. Hey, the producers forgot to cast Megan Fox as Chloe and Scarlett Johansson as Elena. Or maybe they didn't, who knows. I'd honestly rather watch Doom again. At least the game it's based on kind of sucks already.

To illustrate my point a little better, I have another question. Out of all the people (a considerable amount) who saw the Prince of Persia movie, how many of them do you think walked out of the theater saying, "Oh, wow! I simply must run out and buy every Prince of Persia game in existence. That movie was exquisite, and I think I shall now become a gamer and learn how the medium embodies interactivity." The answer is probably close to zero, in case you're seriously trying to come up with a number. The whole point of playing and experiencing the games is lost in translation. I don't care how close it looks to the game. I don't care how Chesty Jake looks while jumping from wall to wall with swirling sand around him. The fundamental experience of Prince of Persia is gone, and it's replaced by something that could have been siphoned from any number of stupid, big-budget CG fests. What's the point? If I had any respect for the games, I wouldn't be caught dead watching this bullshit. I haven't seen the Prince of Persia movie yet, but I'm going to give it a go on Netflix. Maybe I'll write up something on it after I watch it, but I doubt it. I'd just be reiterating a lot of what I'm saying now.

In any case, an Uncharted movie would suffer the same basic flaw, in that Uncharted is not a movie. It's a game, and a damn good one at that. The series prides itself on using a cinematic style to tell its story, and it does it just about as well as any game could ever hope to. If emulating a movie was Naughty Dog's goal, they definitely succeeded. So, again, why make a movie? It would literally be a translation of a video game that was already a translation of a movie to begin with. That's just fucking stupid. Let's make a Heavy Rain movie, while we're at it. At least the guy yelling "Jason!" would most likely be more convincing.

Bunch of dicks. Whatever.

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