As recent efforts – Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed, Warcraft – continue to show, video games rarely make great movies. If ever. Dwayne Johnson’s new epic Rampage might change all this, just as giant, genetically modified wolves might fly, but the source material was hardly that compelling to start with, partly because it was already a mish-mash of movie tropes. In the original Rampage arcade game, you could be King Kong, Godzilla or a werewolf and you basically had to re-enact a city-trashing scene out of a monster movie. Now, see the movie of the game of the movie!
To turn it around, however, games already have taken over the movies. Look at Johnson’s last mega-hit, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. It wasn’t based on an existing game(nor was it a feature-length Guns N’ Roses song, which was a disappointment to some), but Jumanji did involve characters being sucked into a video game world, for all manner of entertaining body-swap action-adventure. One of the reasons Jumanji worked so well was because it was structured like a game. The set-up was crystal-clear: to get back home, the characters had to go through various levels, collect clues and Get the Thing (in this case, the “Jaguar’s eye”). Furthermore, the characters had their avatar’s skills and three lives each. As a movie targeted at younger viewers, it worked a treat. You knew who the characters were, where they were going and what they had to do to “win”. So many family movies forget this – A Wrinkle in Time, for instance.
When you look more closely, a lot of movies are essentially gamified stories like Jumanji. Spielberg’s Ready Player One, for example, is also a video game quest: win the challenges, get the three keys, follow the clues, Get the Thing, win the game. Even when you consider the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War, the plot is basically a video game prologue: supervillain Thanos is trying to collect six infinity stones to activate his all-powerful Infinity Gauntlet – can you stop him? Choose your character!
Let’s not forget that using games, tournaments and competitions as narrative devices goes all the way back to that ancient Greek action role-player The 12 Levels of Hercules. Even the most serious and high-minded of film-makers have not been above a little game action, most memorably Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where Max von Sydow defers his big “game over” by challenging Death to a chess match. Admittedly, Bill and Ted’s parody deflated the seriousness somewhat: they realised that if you need to beat Death, the game to choose is Twister. But all these movies seemed to recognise what the makers of Rampage and co didn’t: if you want to make a decent game movie, start with the movie not the game.
Rampage is in UK cinemas from 12 April
